Author: Neville

Pollution from car emissions killing millions in China and India

Study published by Lancet says surge in car use in south and east Asia killed 2.1m people prematurely in 2010
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John Vidal

guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 December 2012 16.04 GMT

The India Gate monument in New Delhi, enveloped by a blanket of smog. Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP

An explosion of car use has made fast-growing Asian cities the epicentre of global air pollution and become, along with obesity, the world’s fastest growing cause of death according to a major study of global diseases.

In 2010, more than 2.1m people in Asia died prematurely from air pollution, mostly from the minute particles of diesel soot and gasses emitted from cars and lorries. Other causes of air pollution include construction and industry. Of these deaths, says the study published in The Lancet, 1.2 million were in east Asia and China, and 712,000 in south Asia, including India.

Worldwide, a record 3.2m people a year died from air pollution in 2010, compared with 800,000 in 2000. It now ranks for the first time in the world’s top 10 list of killer diseases, says the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study.

The unexpected figure has shocked scientists and public health groups. David Pettit, director of the southern California air programme with the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), said: “That’s a terribly high number – and much more people than previously thought. Earlier studies were limited to data that was available at the time on coarse particles in urban areas only.”

Anumita Roychowdhury, head of air pollution at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based environmental group, said: “There is hard evidence now to act urgently to reduce the public health risks to all, particularly children, elderly and the poor. No-one can escape toxic air.”

The full effects of air pollution on health in Asian cities may not be seen for years, she said. “Toxic effects like cancer surface after a long latency period. Therefore, exposure to air pollution will have to be reduced today to reduce the burden of disease,” she said.

According to the report, by a consortium of universities working in conjunction with the UN, 65% of all air pollution deaths are now in Asia, which lost 52m years of healthy life from fine particle air pollution in 2010. Air pollution also contributes to higher rates of cognitive decline, strokes and heart attacks.

If the figures for outdoor air pollution are combined with those of indoor air pollution, caused largely by people cooking indoors with wood, dirty air would now rank as the second highest killer in the world, behind only blood pressure.

Household air pollution from burning solid fuels such as coal or wood for cooking fell noticeably, but not having clean cooking and heating fuels remains the leading risk in south Asia.

Fine particle air pollution in India is far above the legal limits of 100 microgramme per cubic metre. This can rise to nearly 1,000 microgrammes during festivals like Diwali.

Improvements in car and fuel technology have been made since 2000 but these are nullified by the sheer increase in car numbers. Nearly 18m are expected to be sold this year alone. In Delhi, there are now around 200 cars per 1,000 people compared with 70-100 per 1,000 population in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and director-general of the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, this week suggested the need to “demand restraint measures” in Delhi, to put a check on the growing number of cars so that there was a check on pollution.

Monbiot.com

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‘Bug-Splats’

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 11:44 AM PST

Some dead children are mourned; others are dehumanised.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17th December 2012

“Mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts … These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.”(1) Every parent can connect with what Barack Obama said about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. There can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people of that town.

It must follow that what applies to the children murdered there by a deranged young man also applies to the children murdered in Pakistan by a sombre American president. These children are just as important, just as real, just as deserving of the world’s concern. Yet there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them; no pictures on the front pages of the world’s newspapers; no interviews with grieving relatives; no minute analysis of what happened and why.

If the victims of Mr Obama’s drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms which suggest that they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats”, “since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.”(2) Or they are reduced to vegetation: justifying the drone war, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.”(3)

Like Bush’s government in Iraq, Barack Obama’s administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA’s drone strikes in north-west Pakistan. But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom 64 were children(4). These are figures extracted from credible reports: there may be more which have not been fully documented.

The wider effects on the children of the region have been devastating. Many have been withdrawn from school because of fears that large gatherings of any kind are being targeted. There have been several strikes on schools since George W Bush launched the drone programme that Obama has expanded so enthusiastically: one of Bush’s blunders killed 69 children(5).

The study reports that children scream in terror when they hear the sound of a drone. A local psychologist says that their fear and the horrors they witness is causing permanent mental scarring. Children wounded in drone attacks told the researchers that they are too traumatised to go back to school and have abandoned hopes of the careers they might have had: their dreams as well as their bodies have been broken(6).

Obama does not kill children deliberately. But their deaths are an inevitable outcome of the way his drones are deployed. We don’t know what emotional effect these deaths might have on him, as neither he nor his officials will discuss the matter: almost everything to do with the CIA’s extrajudicial killings in Pakistan is kept secret. But you get the impression that no one in the administration is losing much sleep over it.

Two days before the murders in Newtown, Obama’s press secretary was asked about women and children being killed by drones in Yemen and Pakistan. He refused to answer, on the grounds that such matters are “classified”(7). Instead, he directed the journalist to a speech by John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism assistant. Brennan insists that “al-Qaida’s killing of innocents, mostly Muslim men, women and children, has badly tarnished its appeal and image in the eyes of Muslims”(8). He appears unable to see that the drone war has done the same for the United States. To Brennan the people of north-west Pakistan are neither insects nor grass: his targets are a “cancerous tumour”, the rest of society “the tissue around it”. Beware of anyone who describes a human being as something other than a human being.

Yes, he conceded, there is occasionally a little “collateral damage”, but the US takes “extraordinary care [to] ensure precision and avoid the loss of innocent life.” It will act only if there’s “an actual ongoing threat” to American lives(9). This is cock and bull with bells on.

The “signature strike” doctrine developed under Obama, which has no discernable basis in law, merely looks for patterns(10). A pattern could consist of a party of unknown men carrying guns (which scarcely distinguishes them from the rest of the male population of north-west Pakistan), or a group of unknown people who look as if they might be plotting something. This is how wedding and funeral parties get wiped out; this is why 40 elders discussing royalties from a chromite mine were blown up in March last year(11). It is one of the reasons why children continue to be killed.

Obama has scarcely mentioned the drone programme and has said nothing about its killing of children. The only statement I can find is a brief and vague response during a videoconference last January(12). The killings have been left to others to justify. In October the Democratic cheerleader Joe Klein claimed on MSNBC that “the bottom line in the end is whose 4 year-old get killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that 4 year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.”(13) As the estimable Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, killing 4 year-olds is what terrorists do(14). It doesn’t prevent retaliatory murders; it encourages them, as grief and revenge are often accomplices.

Most of the world’s media, which has rightly commemorated the children of Newtown, either ignores Obama’s murders or accepts the official version that all those killed are “militants”. The children of north-west Pakistan, it seems, are not like our children. They have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and flowers and teddy bears. They belong to the other: to the non-human world of bugs and grass and tissue.

“Are we,” Obama asked on Sunday, “prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”(15) It’s a valid question. He should apply it to the violence he is visiting on the children of Pakistan.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/17/obama-speech-newtown-school-shooting

2. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-rise-of-the-killer-drones-how-america-goes-to-war-in-secret-20120416

3. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-10-23/world/35500278_1_drone-campaign-obama-administration-matrix

4. International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School Of Law, September 2012. Living Under
Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan.

http://livingunderdrones.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Stanford-NYU-LIVING-UNDER-DRONES.pdf

5. eg http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=4043&Cat=13&dt=11/5/2006

6. International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School Of Law, September 2012, as above.

7. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/12/12/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney-12122012

8. John Brennan, 30th April 2012. The Ethics and Efficacy of the President’s Counterterrorism Strategy. http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/the-efficacy-and-ethics-us-counterterrorism-strategy

9. John Brennan, as above.

10. International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School Of Law, September 2012, as above.

11. http://dawn.com/2011/03/18/rare-condemnation-by-pm-army-chief-40-killed-in-drone-attack/

12. http://dawn.com/2011/03/18/rare-condemnation-by-pm-army-chief-40-killed-in-drone-attack/

13. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/klein-drones-morning-joe

14. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/klein-drones-morning-joe

15. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/17/obama-speech-newtown-school-shooting

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Obama tightens air pollution limits

EPA to cut release of soot from power plants and diesel engines, following link to higher rates of heart attacks and lung diseases
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Suzanne Goldenberg US environment correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 December 2012 11.11 GMT

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Los Angeles in California, which has some of the worst air quality in the US. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

The Obama administration has set new limits on a deadly form of air pollution – and risked a backlash from industry early in a second term – by tightening restrictions on soot from smoke stacks and diesel engines.

The new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will reduce the amount of soot released from power plants, diesel engines, refineries, and other industries.

The microscopic particles are linked to early death and higher rates of heart attacks, strokes and lung diseases, such as asthma.

The EPA administration in announcing the new standards on Friday promised sweeping public health benefits. “Families from around the country will benefit from the simple fact of being able to breathe cleaner air,” said Jackson, adding that her two sons suffered from asthma.

The rules, finalised in response to a court-ordered deadline, were strenuously opposed by industry groups and by some members of Congress, setting up the stage for heightened confrontation during Obama’s second term.

The administration is expected to roll out other pollution controls, which were put on hold in an election year.

The main oil lobby group, the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement: “There is no compelling scientific evidence for the policy decision to develop more stringent standards. The existing standards are working and will continue improving air quality.”

James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is the Senate’s biggest doubter of climate change, said the new rules were the first wave of “an onslaught of post-election rulemakings that will place considerable burdens on our struggling economy and eventually push us over the ‘regulatory cliff’”.

Clean air advocates praised the decision as long overdue. The air quality standards were raised only after environmental group Earth Justice sued the EPA to enforce standards recommended by its own scientific advisers.

The American Lung Association, which had supported the suit, said in a statement that the new standard would save lives.

“We know clearly that particle pollution is harmful at levels well below those previously deemed to be safe,” the statement said. “By setting a more protective standard, the EPA is stating that we as a nation must protect the health of the public by cleaning up even more of this lethal pollutant.”

The new standards will limit annual average soot emissions to 12 micrograms per cubic metre of air by the end of the decade. The level, significantly more stringent than the standard of 15 micrograms set in 1997, was in the middle of a range of 11 to 13 micrograms recommended by EPA scientists.

Microscopic particles lodge in lungs and in the bloodstream and are especially dangerous to children and older people. They have been linked to severe asthma attacks.

Jackson said the new standards would result in health savings of between $4bn and $9bn. They will cost up to $350m to implement.

About 66 counties in the country now exceed the current standards, but the EPA estimates that by 2020 only seven counties – all in California – will have trouble meeting the new air quality standards.

The agency will rely on air quality monitors across the country to check on soot levels – especially along busy roads in urban areas. People living on busy roads are at a higher risk of exposure to soot particles.

Erosion sees beach houses on the brink

By Tanya Westthorp
Gold Coast Bulletin
December 17, 201212:34PM

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•Big seas eating away at land
•Luxury homes under threat from erosion
•Residents told not to expect help from council

Erosion eats away the edge of a Nobby Beach property. Picture: Brendan Radke. Source: Gold Coast Bulletin

GOLD Coast beachfront residents have been told not to expect help from the city council to combat erosion, even if their properties are about to fall into the sea.

City councillor Greg Betts has little sympathy for residents of luxury homes along Albatross Avenue at Nobby Beach, who yesterday watched helplessly as big seas ate away the last remaining centimetres of land between them and the ocean.

“Council does work to protect public land, but it’s up to the owners to protect their own land,” he said.

“We’ve had 20 years of really good conditions where there hasn’t been erosion, and people have had plenty of time to fix up their rock walls. You really have to question why they didn’t, and now they are complaining.”

The seas, driven by huge swells combined with a 1.8m king tide, left several multimillion-dollar properties perilously close to falling into the ocean.

One home next to Nobby Beach Surf Club has only a few centimetres of sand remaining before its expensive glass-panel back fence is swallowed by the ocean.

Nobby Beach resident Leonie Conn said she had watched metres of beachfront dunes disappear in the past three years, with waves continuing to edge closer, stripping sand around her rock wall, leaving huge scarps and a sheer drop to the water.

“I’m not looking out at the waves today,” she said.

“I keep thinking, please don’t come up.”

Read more on this story at the Gold Coast Bulletin.

Thousands more households could be in fuel poverty by Christmas

Up to 300,000 have fallen into difficulties over winter, while scheme to cut energy costs could take 30 years to succeed
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Hilary Osborne

The Guardian, Monday 17 December 2012

Rising energy prices have added about 7% to annual fuel bills in recent weeks. Photograph: Alamy

About 300,000 more households could be in fuel poverty by Christmas, according to reports published on Monday, which warn that a government scheme to improve the energy efficiency of homes could take 30 years to succeed and add to energy prices in the meantime.

The reports are being published as the energy secretary, Ed Davey, attends a summit with electricity and gas company bosses, regulators and consumer groups to discuss rising energy prices and how the industry serves its customers. At the Fair Energy Summit, organised by Policy Review Intelligence, Davey will meet the heads of British Gas, E.ON and Co-operative Energy.

Spiralling energy prices have added about 7% to average annual fuel bills recently. More pain is due in the new year, when price increases announced by E.ON take effect.

Estimates suggest that for every 1% increase in energy prices, about 40,000 households are pushed into fuel poverty – defined as when consumers spend more than 10% of their income on heating.

The Fuel Poverty Advisory Group (FPAG) said 300,000 more homes had fallen into difficulty this winter and millions could follow without urgent government action. Its annual report said government moves to reduce the impact of environmental costs on industrial energy users were unfair to domestic customers, who are facing rising costs associated with green measures.

It claims that over the next 15 years about £63bn will be added to consumer energy bills through the carbon floor price and EU emissions trading system, on top of other price increases.

Derek Lickorish, the FPAG chairman, said: “A toxic cocktail of rising wholesale prices, the high cost of energy reforms and cuts in incomes for many households, means fuel poverty levels are set to sky-rocket without radical action.

“Time is running out for the government to fuel poverty proof the homes of those on the lowest incomes.”

A report by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) said measures to help fuel poor households could backfire.

The Energy Company Obligation (ECO), designed to cut bills of poor households by forcing suppliers to fit solid wall insulation, offer energy efficient boilers and other energy-saving measures, could add up to £116 to the average bill and push families that did not receive support further into fuel poverty. It said that while there were 2.7m fuel poor households in England alone, it expected the measure to help between 125,000 and 250,000 households out of fuel poverty by 2023.

The ECO will run alongside the Green Deal, which is designed to encourage homeowners to make their properties more energy efficient by allowing them to spread the cost of installing measures such as loft insulation and draught-proofing.

Will Straw, associate director at IPPR, said: “The government’s ambition with the new Energy Company Obligation is the right one. Improving the energy efficiency of Britain’s housing stock is the most cost-effective way to tackle fuel poverty and bring down carbon emissions.

“Nonetheless, ECO, working alongside the Green Deal, will barely scratch the surface of Britain’s fuel poverty problem and may not deliver what is needed for emissions reductions.”

Timetable troubles ease with bus tracker

Date December 17, 2012 87 reading now
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Jacob Saulwick

Transport Reporter

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Progress … bus passengers will soon be able to use apps on their mobile phones to find out how far away their next bus is. Photo: Ryan Osland

Sydney bus passengers will soon be able to access mobile phone apps that let them know how far away their next bus is.

The three apps should be available from this week, pending approval from app stores, and will provide real-time tracking of bus movements across Sydney.

The release of the apps follows a government effort to make public transport data more widely available to developers. The apps were built following a workshop last month with developers and Transport for NSW officials.

”Having real-time information is a game-changer when it comes to public transport,” the Transport Minister, Gladys Berejiklian, said.

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”With these apps, customers will be able to plan ahead not just by looking at the timetable, but see where buses are on their routes.”

Initially, the apps will only provide real-time tracking of government-owned State Transit buses in the CBD, the eastern suburbs, inner west, southern suburbs, north west, northern beaches and lower north shore.

The government hopes to make real-time information available for Sydney’s private buses, but a long-delayed program of fitting them with GPS that will also help give them priority at traffic lights is not due to be finished until mid-2013.

The three apps are called TripView, Arrivo Sydney and TripGo. Arrivo is available only on Android phones, while TripView and TripGo are available on iPhones and Android. TripGo is free, while TripView and Arrivo cost about $3 for a full version, but do have lite versions.

”Some of the apps will alert customers to the next bus arriving at the most convenient stop, give an estimated walk time, guide them directly to the street location, provide real-time alerts, live maps and comparisons of similar transport options by cost, convenience and emissions,” Ms Berejiklian said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/timetable-troubles-ease-with-bus-tracker-20121216-2bhkv.html#ixzz2FG30GYpX