New Report : Net Zero is good for your health

“Smoking causes cancer.” Remember the stages of denial and obfuscation we faced in that battle? It seems long-ago and quaint now, like Planning Objections to Hadrian’s Wall. Stage 1 Refusal to listen at all. Stage 2: try to trash the evidence: Very few smokers we knew had any qualifications in science or medicine, but they seemed to know a lot about those subjects, suddenly. Stage 3:Towards the end came an angry insistence on individual freedom, as if their liberty included the right to kill the rest of us by breathing out vast clouds of noxious poisons in pubs. There may be some uncomfortable contemporary parallels.

The forces of ignorance have not gone away. Instead they have lighted on objections to all things that might advance the slow progress towards Net Zero, a fairly anodyne policy which will do for our lungs much the same job as banning smoking did. We need hardly remind readers as intelligent as ours of the links between particulates , Nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, ozone and all the other horrible things that cars push out, and the list of cardiac, pulmonary and neurological ailments that these entail. Because this report from the WHO will do it for you. [1] How ironic if a policy like Net Zero, conceived as a global answer to problems like rising sea levels, titanic storms and mass migration, could also end up as a remedy for public health. Yet it might, according to this article by Gary Fuller of the Guardian [2] Get this quote:

…….. policies for US net zero by 2050 could result in rapid health gains. By 2035, early deaths from air pollution could be reduced by between 4,000 and 15,000 a year, with even greater benefits thereafter……The $65bn to $128bn financial gains from fewer people dying early from air pollution exposure are at least as big as the financial benefits from avoiding direct damage from a changed climate.

Remember this the next time you hear someone inveighing against efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions: they are directly harming your children, as well as their own.

[1]https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/how-air-pollution-is-destroying-our-health

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/29/climate-policies-reduce-air-pollution-saving-lives-money

#net zero #pollution #transport #public health #cardiac disease #pulmonary disease #life expectancy