The guardian
There is another pandemic under our noses and it dies 8.7 million people a year
While Covid plagued the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we have faced the climate change of Coronavirus, in everyday political consciousness, because it appears on a scale too large in time and space to see with the naked eye and because it has imperceptible phenomena such as atmospheric composition. Photo: Jeff Zehnder / Alamy It is undeniably appalling that more than 2.8 million people have died from Covid-19 in the past 15 months. In about the same period, however, more than three times as many people died from air pollution. This should bother us for two reasons. One is, according to the recent study, the large number of deaths from air pollution – 8.7 million a year – and another is how invisible the deaths are, how acceptable, how indisputable. The coronavirus was a frightening and new threat, which resulted in the dangers that a large part of the world had gathered to try to limit. This was unacceptable – although by shades and degrees many places accepted it, they decided to let the poor and marginalized take the heaviest of sickness and death and displacement and have medical workers crushed by the workload. We have learned to ignore other forms of death and destruction, by which I mean we have normalized it as a kind of moral background noise. It is as much as anything the obstacle to addressing chronic problems, from gender-based violence to climate change. What if we treated the annual deaths of 8.7 million due to air pollution as an emergency and a crisis – and realized that the respiratory impact of particles is only a small part of the devastating impact of burning fossil fuels? For the pandemic, we have succeeded in immobilizing large populations, radically reducing air traffic and changing the way of life of many of us, as well as releasing large sums of money to help people who have been financially devastated by the crisis. We can do this for climate change, and we must – but the first obstacle is the lack of a sense of urgency, and the second that makes people understand that things can be different. For the past 15 years, I have devoted much of my writing to trying to bring to the fore two normalized phenomena, violence against women and climate change. For all of us who want to draw attention to these crises, a big part of the problem is keeping people busy with something that is part of the status quo. We are designed to respond with concern to something that has just happened, that violates norms, but not to things that have been going on for decades or centuries. The first task of most human rights and environmental movements is to make the invisible visible and to make what has long been accepted unacceptable. This has, of course, been done to some extent with coal-fired power plants and with hydrofracking in some places, but not with the overall causes of climate chaos. The first obstacle is the lack of a sense of urgency, and the second time people understand that things can be different. Climate change is invisible in everyday political consciousness, because it occurs on a scale too large in time and space to see with the naked eye and because it concerns imperceptible phenomena such as atmospheric composition. We can only see the consequences – if cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan, peaked earlier this year than ever before since records began in 812 AD, and even there the beauty of flowers is beautifully visible while disturbing seasonal patterns dry is data that can be easily missed. Other effects are often overlooked or denied – there have been wildfires in California before climate change, but they are bigger, stronger, faster, in a longer fire season, and they also need to pay attention to data. Some of the notable phenomena in the early weeks of the pandemic were air quality and bird song. In the silence when human activities ceased, many people reported hearing birds sing, and air pollution levels dropped dramatically around the world. In some places in India, the Himalayas were visible again, as they had not been for decades, meaning that one of the subtle losses to pollution was prospects. According to CNBC, at the start of the pandemic, “New Delhi recorded a 60% drop in PM2.5 from 2019 levels, Seoul recorded a drop of 54%, while the drop in China’s Wuhan dropped to 44% came. ” Returning to normal means drowning the birds and fading the mountains, assuming 8.7 million deaths from air pollution annually. Those deaths were normalized; they need to be denormalized. One way to do this is by drawing attention to the cumulative effect and the quantifiable results. Another way is to map out how things can be different – in the case of climate change, it means reminding people that there is no status quo, but that a world is being dramatically transformed, and that only daring action will limit the extremes of this change. The energy landscape is also undergoing dramatic change: the coal industry has collapsed in many parts of the world, the oil and gas industry is deteriorating. Renewable energy is increasing because it is gradually becoming more efficient, more efficient and cheaper than the power generated by fossil fuels. Much attention has been paid to actions that would cause Covid-19 to pass from animals to humans, but the actions that extract fossil fuels from the ground to produce the pollution that kills 8.7 million people annually, along with acidifying oceans and climates chaos, should be considered a much more outrageous an offense against public health and safety. My hope for a post-pandemic world is that the old excuses for doing nothing about climate change – that it is impossible to change the status quo and too expensive to do so – have been removed. In response to the pandemic, we in the US have spent trillions of dollars changing the way we live and work. We need the will to do the same for the climate crisis. The Biden government has taken encouraging steps, but more is needed, both here and internationally. With a utilization of carbon emissions and a shift to cleaner power, we can have a world with more bird song and mountain views and fewer deaths due to pollution. But first we need to recognize the problem as well as the possibilities. Rebecca Solnit is an American columnist for the Guardian. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence