Polluted air is a major contributor to the global burden of ill-health. A comprehensive WHO study (Global Burden of Disease) attributes nearly 6 million deaths to it in 2010, second only to overall diet and high blood pressure. It kills more people than smoking, alcohol or drugs. So, when we see headlines such as UK air pollution ‘linked to 40,000 early deaths a year’, it is not something we should dismiss lightly.
This headline comes from a report about a new study - Every breath we take: the lifelong impact of air pollution - recently published jointly by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. These are highly respected professional bodies, but they base their findings on published literature and the figures quoted could themselves be subjected to bias.
The figure reported is for deaths attributed to outdoor pollution in the form of particulates and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). But the study also deals with indoor pollution, saying “There is now good awareness of the risks from badly maintained gas appliances, radioactive radon gas and second-hand tobacco smoke, but indoors we can also be exposed to NO2 from gas cooking and solvents that slowly seep from plastics, paints and furnishings. The lemon-and-pine scents that we use to make our homes smell fresh can react chemically to generate air pollutants, and ozone-based air fresheners can also cause indoor air pollution.”
Radon is a very specific problem, which affects certain parts of the country because of the rock on which houses are built; the greatest problems are in the far South West. Being a radioactive gas, radon can cause cancer when breathed in over a period of time, and is believed to result in about 1,100 lung cancer deaths each year. Second-hand smoke has been a much greater problem, and was still estimated to cause 2,800 deaths annually in 2010. However, these two indoor pollutants - the only ones for which mortality figures are quoted - appear to cause only about 10% of the number of deaths as outdoor air pollution.
To look at the figures in a different way, if we take the current world population to be about 7.4 billion and that of the UK roughly 64 million, we can estimate an annual death rate of around 60,000 in the UK on a pro rata basis. But this assumes that the risk from air pollution is the same in a prosperous western European country as the average for the entire world, the great majority of whose people live in considerably worse conditions than ours. Even so, the 40,000 headline figure seems to suggest that this island is still a pretty polluted place in global terms.
This seems surprising, given the end of coal fires brought about by the Clean Air Act, for example. During the lifetimes of many of us, we have seen London and other major cities reveal their true colours once the layer of black soot had been removed. Also, despite the justified bad publicity about diesel engine emissions recently, both petrol and diesel engines have become much cleaner and more efficient and the removal of lead from petrol has removed a major source of one very serious pollutant.
The other anomaly is that the problems from outdoor air pollution appear to be much greater than for indoor pollution in the UK, in contrast to the global situation.
To go back to the report, “A WHO global burden of disease analysis identified household air pollution as an extremely important risk factor accounting for an estimated 4.3 million deaths worldwide in 2012, mostly in low- and middle-income countries and including some 99,000 in Europe. Around 60% of these deaths are due to stroke (34%) and ischaemic heart disease (26%), with the remainder accounted for by COPD (22%), acute lower respiratory disease (12%) and lung cancer (6%)”.
That’s about 70% (4.3 million out of a total of 6 million) due to indoor air pollution. If we consider simply the deaths due to outdoor pollution - estimated at 1.7 million globally - the UK’s pro rata share would be less than 15,000. Knowing that urbanisation in developing countries is proceeding rapidly and that Beijing and Delhi, to name but two, suffer from horrendous pollution at present, it seems highly likely that the UK figure would be well below that. So, what is the reality? How much of a problem is external air pollution in a rich modern society?
Given these contradictory figures, we really can’t say, but there are two main possible answers: either that there are many more deaths globally from air pollution than is recognised or that the risks in Western Europe are overstated. There again, another possible explanation is that life expectancy in developing countries is significantly lower, so that many people die from other causes before the heart or lung diseases brought on or exacerbated by pollution (and that typically kill older people) can take their toll.
Whatever the reason, we can see the need to take a broader view and put the findings in perspective. The report from the Royal Colleges reports, for example, the total estimated deaths due to PM2.5 (very fine particulates) as 28,861, or 75 per 100,000 people over 30. But to put it another way, the number of days of life lost is, on average, 194 for women and 182 for men. Would people be less worried about dying six months earlier than statistics would suggest towards the end of a long life than about the headline figure of total deaths?
These discrepancies also point towards a real problem with epidemiological studies: attribution of death or disease to a single cause when there may be a number of contributory factors. In our safe, prosperous European countries we worry increasingly about risks which we once took for granted. That doesn’t mean that we should ignore urban air quality, neither should we stop opening windows to get fresh air into houses, but the real problems globally are in the developing world: indoor cooking fires and highly polluted cities.
Finally, the report inevitably includes a reference to the modeled impacts of climate change on health: “If we act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to target levels by 2050, we can have a real impact. An analysis for the European Commission suggests that, each year in the UK, this would prevent the following impacts related to local and regional air pollutant exposure: 5,700 deaths, 1,600 hospital admissions for lung and heart problems and 2,400 new cases of bronchitis.”
Reliance on the output of models which have failed to predict the pattern of global temperatures over the past twenty years doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Modeling of all sorts should be seen as giving a picture of what might happen given a particular set of circumstances, and should not be confused with evidence.
The recent Supreme Court decision stopping the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan and war on coal in its tracks, at least for the duration of the president’s term, is very much in the news. So is his attempt to impose a $10.25 (35-40%) tax on every barrel of crude oil produced in or entering the United States.
My article this week ties all of this together - and offers a few lessons in free enterprise capitalism for the more economically challenged among us.
Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
Tax oil to subsidize wind?
Obama wants to punish oil industry to advance climate agenda. So do Hillary, Bernie and Mike
Paul Driessen
If you want more of something, mandate it, subsidize it and exempt it from regulations. If you want less of something, punish it with taxes and regulations. Put more bluntly, the power to tax and regulate is the power to destroy. This is the First Rule of Government.
No presidency has ever come close to the Obama Administration in employing the rule to advance its ideologies and agendas. No industry has been so favored as renewable energy over the past seven years. No sector has been so thoroughly vilified and subjugated as fossil fuels during that period.
Thankfully, Congress refused to impose a cap-tax-and-trade regime on carbon-based energy and U.S. jobs, families, economic growth and living standards. However, EPA and other Obama agencies simply replaced unsuccessful legislative initiatives with regulations, often employing highly innovative statutory interpretations to justify its actions - and courts too often bowed to this “agency discretion.”
Nowhere was this more heavy-handed and destructive than in the coal and climate change arena, where a regulatory tidal wave inundated mines, power plants, companies, families, communities and entire states. Other EPA and Interior Department rules blocked leasing, drilling, fracking and other energy activities on millions of acres of government-administered lands, onshore and off, and even on state and private land.
Thanks to determined efforts by state attorneys general and other parties, however, a number of these regulations were stymied in courts of law. Nowhere was this more important than this week’s Supreme Court decision to block implementation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan while lower courts consider some 30 lawsuits over its legality, state sovereignty, the scope of agency discretion in interpreting and rewriting federal laws, and the plan’s effects on energy, jobs, health and welfare.
That means this noxious regulation will be “vacated” for the remainder of Obama’s presidency.
The president, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and their allies are not happy. They promise to charge ahead with their “fundamental transformation” of the United States, via other tactics and edicts.
The oil patch is one of the few industries that kept the Obama economy (and presidency) afloat - primarily because of fracking, which slipped in under the EPA/environmentalist radar but is now under constant attack by Interior and Big Green. It created millions of jobs, channeled billions of dollars to local, state and federal treasuries, brought gasoline prices below $2 per gallon, and saved American families billions: every penny not spent on gasoline puts $1 billion a year back into our pockets.
So how does Obama intend to repay the industry, now that it has fallen on hard times? Amid a sluggish global economy and record oil and gas production, oil prices have plunged below $30 a barrel - forcing the oil patch to lay people off, many companies to retrench or ponder bankruptcy, and many communities to confront reduced employment, consumer spending, real estate values, and revenues.
But as part of his last-gasp, $4.1-trillion, $503-billion-deficit 2017 federal budget, the president wants Congress to slap a $10.25 tax on every barrel of domestically produced or imported oil. He says this will raise some $400 billion over the next ten years.
This will allow him to increase EPA’s budget to $8.3 billion, pour $1.7 billion a year into the “climate fund,” and channel hundreds of billions into high speed rail, wind, solar, biofuel, “eco-friendly” cars and other “green” energy schemes. It thus means more opportunities for unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to pick winners and losers, expand their fiefdoms, and pad their bonuses and pensions.
Thankfully, the proposal is “dead on arrival” in Congress. Enough members understand (even if the president does not) that this tax will not be “paid for by the oil companies.” It will only be collected by oil companie and then passed along to every American family and business, in the form of higher gasoline prices and higher costs for everything produced or transported using petroleum: food, clothing, plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, housing, healthcare, and countless other products and services. Even ethanol and other biofuels require petroleum, as do organic food and electric cars.
Mr. Obama, however, sees additional advantages to a 35% oil tax. It lets him stigmatize Big Oil yet again.
It advances his goal of ending our “addiction” to fossil fuels that still provide 82% of US and 87% of global energy ‘ because they are the most abundant, reliable, affordable energy sources available today; because they sustain modern economies and living standards, and help lift billions out of poverty and disease. Would Obama also have us end our “addiction” to food, shelter and human companionship?
An oil tax would also help him promote the climate treaty he signed in Paris. The Supreme Court’s slap-down of EPA’s plans to regulate fossil fuels into oblivion means the United States is far less likely to implement the president’s unilateral commitment to the accord’s emission reduction demands (and massive wealth transfers, via climate “adaptation and reparation” payments) even assuming the Senate ultimately approves the treaty, under its “advice and consent” authority. That in turn means developed and developing nations alike are even less likely to slash their CO2 emissions, carbon-based energy use, economic growth and living standards, for no progress in controlling nature-driven climate change.
Finally, all that devoutly wished for tax revenue would enable Mr. Obama to repay his debts to crony corporatist friends like Elon Musk. His Tesla Motors company continues to hemorrhage investor money despite massive infusions of taxpayer cash in the form of CO2 rules, subsidies, loans, $7,500 tax credits per car purchased, and free charging stations, so that the wealthiest 1.0 or 0.1 percent will buy the pricey cars. In 2015 alone, Tesla lost another $889 million, on revenues of $4.05 billion.
We’ve come to expect this from President Obama. Equally depressing, we also expect it from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, former DemoRepublican candidate-in-waiting Michael Bloomberg, most of today’s Democratic politicians, too many Republican pols, most government “public servants,” and certainly those who are “feeling the Bern” or think “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women” by voting for a certain candidate. (Hint: Ms. Albright didn’t mean Carly or Sarah.)
Indeed, Mrs. Clinton wants to have a half billion more solar panels deployed during her first four years in office, “enough clean energy to power every home” in America, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $200 billion a year. Plus free education, free universal healthcare, and more. Senator Sanders doubtless agrees.
It is a sad, painful assessment of their economic literacy and of our high schools, colleges, business communities and politicians’ ability to empower students and voters through economic literacy, a grasp of socialism’s abject failures and horrid excesses, and an appreciation of free enterprise capitalism’s incomparable record of improving the health, living standards and prospects of billions.
It’s also a sad commentary on liberal-progressive “climate justice” and “compassion” for coal mine, power plant and oil patch workers and families who have been pummeled by their policies - and for poor, minority and blue collar families that would be hit hardest by the Obama oil tax. Those families pay a far larger share of their incomes on energy, food, clothing and other necessities than do Barack, Hillary and Michael’s upper-crust friends, Bernie’s Wall Street benefactors, or even middle class families:
Families making less than $30,000 a year spend 26% of their after-tax income on energy, while families that make over $50,000 a year spend only 8% and those in upper 1% spend only a fraction of 1 percent.
Were President Obama to succeed on his oil tax, “stop climate change” and “leave all fossil fuels in the ground” agenda, his “legacy” would be making tens of millions more Americans jobless, energy deprived and impoverished and keeping billions beyond our borders mired in abject poverty, disease, malnutrition and despair. It’s up to informed citizen-voters to ensure this does not happen.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
Climate Science Is Settled, Except When It’s Not
Date: 11/02/16 Tim Blair, The Daily Telegraph
During the past decade, researchers at the CSIRO - along with global warming alarmists everywhere - have been telling us that the “science is settled” when it comes to climate change. In other words, they’ve delivered their verdict. Bad move.
CSIRO chief Larry Marshall has recently been examining his organiszation for areas where he might achieve some $110 million in budget cuts. Inevitably, his gaze fell upon the climate change crowd - the guys who, by their own admission, have already finished their jobs. Last week Marshall sent this memo to CSIRO staff:
“CSIRO pioneered climate research, the same way we saved the cotton and wool industries for our nation. But we cannot rest on our laurels as that is the path to mediocrity. Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change. That question has been answered.”
Reasonably enough, with that question answered, Marshall is now taking steps to throw most of the CSIRO’s climate researchers out on the street like common circus midgets. More than 300 climate scientists are set to be dismissed over the next couple of years. “Climate will be all gone, basically,” one senior scientist told Fairfax as news of the cuts emerged.
Naturally, this caused an immediate reversal of opinion among Australia’s cashed-up climate change community. Suddenly the science wasn’t settled at all. In fact, the science was almost completely unknown! Author and climate change sceptic Jo Nova rounded up some of the more hilarious reactions at her excellent website.
“Climate science is not solved,” declared Todd Lane, president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. “Most of the uncertainty in climate projections is due to uncertainty about the ways to represent physical processes in climate models. Cutting funding in this area now doesn’t make any sense.”
“This is deeply disturbing news,” wailed distressed Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor at ANU and a Climate Councillor at the Climate Council of Australia. “The impacts of climate change are already being felt around Australia at an increasing rate, and there is more to come. We absolutely need to know more about the basic operation of the climate system - how it is changing and how best can we respond to the climate change challenge.”
“The latest round of job cuts from CSIRO is nothing short of appalling,” announced Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, Research Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre UNSW. “While we know that the climate is changing because of human activity, we have not simply ‘answered’ that question after the Paris agreement - many more questions remain.”
Perkins-Kirkpatrick continued: “Research in any field does not, and cannot stop after an apparent question has been answered.” Actually, in most fields research does stop once the central question is answered. Otherwise video referees at NRL matches would never go home; they’d remain in their reviewing suites forever, endlessly examining the same disputed try.
“I worry about [Marshall’s] statement that there is no further need post-COP 21 to understand climate change,” fretted UNSW’s Professor Steven Sherwood. Hey, prof, the science is settled. Time to move on.
“There is need for climate science,” said John Church, a CSIRO climate researcher since 1978 who anticipates losing his job. “There is a clear need for ongoing sustained and enhanced observations. The science community is actually struggling to address these issues.”
Note that word: “struggling”. So much for the absolute certainty - the alleged “consensus” - we’ve previously heard about from our climate chancey friends. The only consensus among scientists now is that taxpayer funding is really cool and climate researchers want a whole lot of it, forever. Well, those days are gone.
Economic and political priorities have shifted, in Australia and around the world. Climate change has been declining as an issue of public concern since peak panic in 2006, when Al Gore’s dishonest documentary An Inconvenient Truth succeeded in spooking so many gullible saps.
Speaking of Gore, his net worth is around double the level of the CSIRO’s budget cuts. Let’s see him put his money where his global warming gob is and fund local climate change types. The science demands it.
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CSIRO boss defends shake-up, says politics of climate ‘more like religion than science’
The CSIRO’s chief has told the ABC the backlash from his decision to restructure the organisation has made him feel like an “early climate scientist in the ‘70s fighting against the oil lobby” and that there is so much emotion in the debate it almost “sounds more like religion than science”.
Key points:
CSIRO chief says he will not back down on restructure
Thousands of climate scientists sign protest letter
Chief says change is about using resources effectively
Dr Larry Marshall said he would not be backing down on his controversial shake-up of the organisation’s climate divisions, telling the ABC he was yet to be persuaded.
The redirection of climate science priorities at the CSIRO has drawn international condemnation, with thousands of climate scientists signing an open letter protesting against the changes.
The Oceans and Atmosphere division is expected to be one of the hardest hit, with 60 positions to go through a mix of redeployment and redundancies.
All up, 350 jobs will “change” - a plan that’s drawn the ire of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change co-chair and even the World Meteorological Organisation which has made an unprecedented statement condemning the decision.
But Dr Marshall said he had not been persuaded to reconsider the changes.
The politics of climate I think there’s a lot of emotion in this debate. In fact it almost sounds more like religion than science to me.
Dr Larry Marshall said: “For that to happen, someone’s going to have to convince me that measuring and modelling is far more important than mitigation - and at this point you know, none of my leadership believe that”.
Since the changes were announced last Thursday, Dr Marshall has spent much of the week trying to clarify the restructure, stressing that there will not be a net loss of jobs.
“I feel like the early climate scientists in the ‘70s fighting against the oil lobby,” he said. I guess I had the realisation that the climate lobby is perhaps more powerful than the energy lobby was back in the ‘70s - and the politics of climate I think there’s a lot of emotion in this debate.
“In fact it almost sounds more like religion than science to me.”
“I’ve been told by some extreme elements that they’ve put me at the top of the climate deniers list and what perplexes me is how saying that we’re going to shift more resources to mitigation - i.e. doing something to address climate change versus just measuring and modelling it - I don’t see how that makes me a climate denier.
“It just seems to me the whole purpose of measurement and modelling the whole purpose of trying to understand climate change is then to figure out what to do about it - that’s where we’re trying to move to.”
Dr Marshall said it was about using resources in the most effective way.
“I know we have to continue measurements, I know we have to continue modelling and it’s not a binary thing - we’re not stopping,” he said.
“But we do have to scale back in order to redirect resources to mitigation.”
It is a redirection that will be closely scrutinised at a Senate Estimates hearing in Canberra today.
There are some very profound and very distinguished scientists that are globally recognised that have signed up to this and sent emails to folks involved in putting this together.
Former CSIRO oceanographer Paul Durack, on an open letter about the changes
Dr Marshall will attend amid criticism stretching from as far as the World Meteorological Organisation’s Climate Research Program.
“Normally as a UN agency we would never intervene or interfere like this, but this is just so startling and so devastating that we have to take this stand,” director Dr Dave Carlson said.
Climate is the most complex human challenge that we face.
Creativity, intellectually, engineering wise to try and actually understand the combined biological, ecological, chemical, physical climate system and then to build models to be able to predict what the impact is of what we’re doing is one of the premier human intellectual challenges and achievements.
“So this idea that it’s something simple and something you turn it on and off and something that’s done it does leave us speechless - we’re just in awe of how much of a serious misunderstanding that is.”
CSIRO wipes out climate division - 350 scientists to go - since it’s “beyond debate” who needs em?
Joanne Nova
BREAKING BUN FEST: Hysterical. The contradictions in the propaganda are biting back viciously. Isn’t karma a bitch?