On a global scale, the economic and health impacts of air pollution are staggering. According to the World Health Organization, the cost in Europe alone comes to almost 10 percent of the combined European Union economy, $1.6 trillion:
Over 90% of citizens in the Region are exposed to annual levels of outdoor fine particulate matter that are above WHO’s air-quality guidelines. This accounted for 482,000 premature deaths in 2012 from heart and respiratory diseases, blood vessel conditions and strokes, and lung cancer. In the same year, indoor air pollution resulted in an additional 117,200 premature deaths, five times more in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries.39
It’s important to bear in mind that Europe is often held up as a model of environmental probity. Yet in 2016, some areas of London exceeded their annual limit for nitrogen dioxide levels within the first week of January. Despite the much-touted imposition of congestion charges and early adoption of bike-sharing programs, as well as air pollution controls dating back to the 1950s, London exhibits levels of nitrogen oxides on a par with Beijing and Shanghai.40
The World Health Organization has conducted pollution research in over 2,000 cities across the world. María Neira, head of public health at WHO, comments on the results:
We have a public health emergency in many countries from pollution. It’s dramatic, one of the biggest problems we are facing globally, with horrible future costs to society…. Air pollution leads to chronic diseases which require hospital space. Before we knew that pollution was responsible for diseases like pneumonia and asthma. Now we know that it leads to bloodstream, heart and cardiovascular diseases, too—even dementia. We are storing up problems. These are chronic diseases that require hospital beds. The cost will be enormous.41
Health impacts in less developed countries with little or no pollution controls, such as India and China, are even worse. In China alone, 4,000 people die every day from the health impacts of breathing polluted air—close to 1.5 million per year. Worldwide, an estimated 6.5 million people die prematurely each year because of air pollution, “making this the world’s fourth-largest threat to human health, behind high blood pressure, dietary risks and smoking.”42
The number of cars in the world is set to double in fourteen years to over two billion, the vast majority run on fossil fuels. The effect of this increase will completely wipe out any potential gains in fuel efficiency. As a result, climate change and the effects on humans and all other life forms of air pollution, already severe, can only worsen.43
William Blake’s famous poem “Jerusalem” speaks of “dark Satanic Mills,” evoking a time in England of child labor, sixteen-hour days, and rampant, unchecked pollution. But this is no bygone era: the ever-growing capitalist economy that by its nature ignores environmental effects has taken Blake’s dark vision global. “This is the first generation in human experience exposed to such high levels of pollution,” says María Neira. “In the 19th century pollution was bad, but it was concentrated in just a few places. Now there are huge numbers of people living with high levels of pollution. Nearly 70 percent of people in cities are exposed to pollution above recommended levels.”44
According to a study in the journal Nature, premature deaths from outdoor pollution in Asia amount to 3.3 million people per year, which is more than the combined death toll from malaria and HIV/AIDS.45 The majority of this pollution is from cooking and home heating using coal, kerosene, and biomass such as wood and animal dung as energy sources. A simple and entirely possible switch to clean, renewable energy sources would have immediate and immensely positive health impacts for humans and other species. Eliminating or vastly reducing the use of fossil fuel–based private transportation—cars and trucks—through the reorganization of cities and the provision of powered public transportation, could further reduce these impacts.
Race, Class, and the Environment
Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel. It is responsible for giant quantities of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide production in addition to highly toxic heavy metals such as mercury. Studies have shown that the extent of exposure to those pollutants varies with income and race. For example the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People documents this disparity in its report “Coal Blooded”: the average per capita income for people living within three miles of a coal plant is $18,400, significantly less than the national average of $21,587; and those who live near these coal plants are disproportionately people of color.46 People of color and the poor are much more likely to live next to toxic waste sites than white or middle-class populations, in numbers out of all proportion to their percentage in the local population.47 A study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that in the United States people of color typically breathe air that is 38 percent more polluted than the air breathed by whites. The study’s lead researcher, Julian Marshall commented:
We were quite surprised to find such a large disparity between whites and nonwhites related to air pollution…. Especially the fact that this difference is throughout the U.S., even in cities and states in the Midwest…. The health impacts from the difference in levels between whites and nonwhites found in the study are substantial…. For example, researchers estimate that if nonwhites breathed the lower NO2 levels experienced by whites, it would prevent 7,000 deaths from heart disease alone among nonwhites each year.48
This disparity is not particular to the U.S.; it is a global phenomenon. Since colonial times European countries have outsourced their own pollution, devastating the environments of their colonies. As a result, richer countries make only limited efforts to clean up their local environments of the most egregious and obvious pollutants. Not only do richer countries relocate the most polluting industries to countries in the Global South, they export waste materials to poorer countries and extract large quantities of resources, frequently leaving ecologically devastated zones in their wake. Such practices, along with promotion of changes in land use to provide the wealthy countries with products like palm oil, are forms of ecological imperialism.49
About 3.9 million square miles (10 million square kilometers) of forests have been cut down since the last ice age—half since 1945. Yet in this period Europe and the United States have gained forest cover, indicating that virtually all of the deforestation in the last seventy years—an area more than twenty times the size of Great Britain—represents deforestation in the Global South, mostly to serve markets for industry and agriculture in the North. Soil chemist Justus Liebig made exactly this point as long ago as 1840, when the leading global colonial power was Great Britain, which “seizes from other countries their conditions of their own fertility…. Vampire-like, it clings to the throat of Europe, one could even say the whole world, sucking its best blood.”50
Over 90 percent of those dying or displaced due to climate-related disasters are people from the Global South. When climate disasters hit a wealthy country, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas, it is the poor and people of color who suffer most.
In 2015 it was revealed that the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was contaminated with lead. The citizens of Flint were being systematically poisoned because state-appointed officials changed to an unsafe water source to save money in 2014. When President Obama boasted of laying enough pipeline for oil and gas production to encircle the Earth yet none is laid along the sixty miles that would get get clean water to Flint, the priorities of our current social system are brought into stark relief.
The Social Crisis
The effect of air pollution and lead contamination of water are only part of the huge environmental impacts on people. A wide variety of chemicals cause millions of deaths worldwide from life-threatening and chronic diseases; they also disrupt hormone activity, leading to an array of mental and physical disorders.
Aside
