Every 20 Seconds

02/02/2008

Every 20 seconds someone dies from interior air pollution. An estimated 1.6 million people die every year from this, mostly women and children. The cause is primarily the burning of solid fuels, wood, coal, animal dung for warmth and cooking needs without proper ventilation. The deaths are not pretty most die after extended periods of deteriorating health brought on by respiratory diseases such as chronic bronchitis, pneumonia, and according to the World Health Organization

“The evidence for a link with lung cancer from exposure to biomass smoke, and for a link with asthma, cataracts and tuberculosis was considered moderate. On the basis of the limited available studies, there is tentative evidence for an association between indoor air pollution and adverse pregnancy outcomes, in particular low birth weight, or ischaemic heart disease and nasopharyngeal and laryngeal cancers.”


Obviously this puts tremendous strains on already inadequate health systems in developing countries, not to mention the spiritual and psychological impacts it has on the impoverished people who must endure such living conditions. The affect of this form of pollution on human health and mortality worldwide is five times greater than outdoor air pollution. More than half the world’s population uses this form of fuel as their primary energy source and deaths attributable to indoor pollution is only expected to rise.

Indoor pollution affects the poorest of the poor globally, which brings me to a point I wish to make. There are degrees of poverty that we in the western world can scarcely imagine. As a point of fact, 98.2% of all U.S. households have a television. Which not only shows the difference between a U.S. citizen in poverty versus most impoverished people in the world, it also needless to say means that at least that many households have electricity. The problem of indoor pollution from burning solid fuels in the U.S. and most of the developed world, for all intense and purposes, does not exist.

What does this have to do with global warming? Quite a bit actually

In order to reduce CO2 emissions globally to stop the so called catastrophic affects of global warming, how do you solve the problem of indoor pollution? Obviously the solution to this killer is electricity and other forms of clean energy. It is all well and good to blame the industrial revolution for this theory of man made global warming, but only two countries in the world actually produce the equally distributed per person output of co2 necessary to stem the supposed Apocalypse, Hati and Somolia. As Roger Pelkie Jr. said

“If everyone in the world lived as they do in these two countries, we'd have the emissions challenge licked.”

Ask yourself this, if you asked the impoverished in these countries or any impoverished person anywhere , “would you rather live like the Americans do, or would you rather have them live like you do presently?” How do you think they would respond? Of course they would rather have their standard of living raised to our level than having ours brought down to theirs.

The whole global warming hysteria besides distorting science is diverting attention from truly pressing and undeniable environmental issues. Or as one pundit put it “ Global Warming is the big elephant in the china shop. It demands all the attention and sucks all the oxygen out of the room.”

Here is comment from the World Health Organizations paper on the interior air pollution problem.

"According to the 2004 assessment of the International Energy Agency, the number of people relying on biomass fuels such as wood, dung and agricultural residues, for cooking and heating will continue to rise. In sub-Saharan Africa, the reliance on biomass fuels appears to be growing as a result of population growth and the unavailability of, or increases in the price of, alternatives such as kerosene and liquid petroleum gas. Despite the magnitude of this growing problem, the health impacts of exposure to indoor air pollution have yet to become a central focus of research, development aid and policy-making."

This is just the tip of an iceberg of true environmental and world health problems that are being sacrificed on the alter for this new religion of Global Warming. Literally billions of dollars are being spent to study and mitigate a problem that has not been proven to exist. The real shame is that even if man made global warming is real, the solutions put forward will do very little to solve the perceived problem, while known and rectifiable problems are ignored and under funded.

In later blogs, I’ll post other items on how this hysteria is affecting our world. Feel free to do so also. Meanwhile every minute three people, 2 children under the age of five, die from pollution in their own home..

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