Air pollution is killing 3.3 million people a year
worldwide, according to a new study published recently in the journal Nature.
The study also projects that if trends don’t change, the yearly death total
will double by 2050. The author of the study claims that about three quarters
of these deaths occur due to strokes and heart attacks. I would think blaming
air pollution for stroke and heart attack deaths would be problematic at best,
given the many other potential factors involved, including genetics, diet and
exercise, or exposure to studies published in the journal Nature.
And
what about smoking? How does one accurately determine whether someone died from
“ambient air pollution” (that the study says is responsible for 6 percent of
all global deaths annually) or smoking cigarettes? Or, in the interests of
political correctness, do smoker’s deaths get counted twice?
Jos
Lelieveld of Germany’s Max (Walk the) Planck Institute for Chemistry, the
study’s author, avers that air pollution kills more people than HIV and malaria
combined. China experiences the most yearly air pollution fatalities (duh!),
nearly 1.4 million, followed by India with 645,000 and Pakistan with 110,000. The United States, vast exploiter of the
Earth’s resources and energy hog that she is, came in a distant seventh.(“We’ll
get ‘em next year!”).
The
most surprising finding of the study was that farming plays a huge role in these air pollution fatalities.
Apparently, ammonia from fertilizer and animal waste combines with sulfates and
nitrates from power plants and automobile exhaust to form soot particles that
are the real killers. In “fact,” the study claims that in the U.S. northeast,
and all of Europe, Russia, Japan and
South Korea, agriculture is the number 1 cause of air pollution deaths, and is
the number 2 cause globally.
There
you have it: city or country, we’re equally screwed.
But
look on the bright side. If we just stop producing energy- and food- we’ve got
a chance!
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