-John Christy
Every 20 seconds someone dies from interior air pollution. An estimated 1.6 million people die every year from this hideous and very preventable global tragedy, 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. In other words, in order to eat and stay warm the poor of the world are literally poisoning themselves and their children.
This is not an isolated or diminishing threat, 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. For example 98.2% of all U.S. households have a television. This not only shows the difference between a U.S. citizen in poverty versus most truly impoverished people in the world, it also 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 carbon dioxide emissions globally to avoid the imagined catastrophic affects of global warming, certain choices will have to be made, mostly about energy. How do you solve the problem of indoor pollution? Obviously the solution to this killer is electricity and other forms of clean energy and of course electricity must be generated by power plants. Now consider how difficult the developed world is making it on itself to produce electricity by ever expanding regulations and road blocks against any plants run by virtually any fuel, coal, natural gas, nuclear and even hydro-electric. How can we even begin to help the poor of the world overcome their energy problems when we will not even logically take care of our own energy needs? How are we to expand our economies which will only give us the means to help the poor, when we cripple the engine that drives it?
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 mythical Apocalypse of Global Warming- Hati and Somolia. As Roger Pelkie Jr. points out:
“If everyone in the world lived as they do in these two countries, we'd have the emissions challenge licked.”
It will take decades under the best of circumstances for the world to convert from a fossil fueled based energy and economy. Even longer with all the restrictions being put on readily available alternatives such as nuclear power.
If we continue down this insane road of self inflicted energy deprivation we will be ill equipped to help ourselves less alone help the poor to solve their energy problems. Thus confining them to even more suffering. John Christy in his Congressional testimony about the Kyoto Treaty in 2003 explained it from first hand experience.
"I often mention that early in my career I served as a missionary in Africa. I lived upcountry with people who did not have access to useful energy. Put simply, access to energy means life, it means a longer and better life.
"I watched as women walked in the early morning to the forest edge, often several miles away, to chop wet green wood for fuel. They became beasts of burden as they carried the wood on their backs on the return trip home. Wood and dung are terrible sources of energy, with low useful output while creating high pollution levels.
Burning wood and dung inside the homes for cooking and heat created a dangerously polluted indoor atmosphere for the family. I always thought that if each home could be fitted with an electric light bulb and a microwave oven electrified by a coal-fired power plant, several good things would happen. The women would be freed to work on other more productive pursuits, the indoor air would be much cleaner so health would improve, food could be prepared more safely, there would be light for reading and advancement, information through television or radio would be received, and the forest with its beautiful ecosystem could be saved. Access to inexpensive, efficient energy would enhance the lives of the Africans while at the same time enhance the environment."
If you were to ask 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 have ours brought down to theirs.
Yet that seems to be path we are being drawn towards by people who claim to be compassionate, who claim to have the worlds peoples best interest at heart. These same people ignore the reality of history, as if the remarkable advances of the nineteenth and twentieth century which have accounted for unprecedented prosperity and a reduction in human need are something to be ashamed of by mankind.
They speak of lofty goals and green technologies that will revolutionize the world yet would confine the poorest of the poor to more decades of famine, despair and hacking childhood deaths. This in order to preserve some misguided, unsubstantiated and unproven theory.
Wolves in sheep's clothing most of whom have no idea that their good intentions are paving a path not to the green utopia they envision but to a living hell for a large segment of the Earth’s population. But it is hard to see the real world from Ivory Towers behind computer screens, programming a make believe world to the accolades of your peers and the funding of you powerful political patrons.
The whole global warming hysteria besides distorting science is diverting attention from truly pressing and undeniable environmental issues. Their means are defeating their ends, 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.”
Global prosperity which history has proven is ultimately necessary for human health and a cleaner environment in a more populous world is being sacrificed on the word of computer geeks whose models don’t even compute.
The modelers will get their millions even billions, to play their computer games, to save their imaginary world and scare the uninformed while the poor of the world are given cow dung to cook their children's meals.
The World Health Organization's paper on the interior air pollution problem predicts.
"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 to this new religion of Global Warming. Literally billions of dollars are being spent to study and mitigate a problem that has not yet been proven to exist. The real crime is that even if man made global warming were real, the solutions put forward would do very little to solve the perceived problem, while known and rectifiable problems are ignored and under funded. Economies are sacrificed to a crisis that does not exist.
We are told that carbon dioxide, an element necessary for life is a toxic pollution while every minute three people, 2 of them children under the age of five, die from real pollution in their own home.
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