The deadliest environmental threat (it’s not global warming)


Many think the biggest global environment problem is global warming. After all, the issue gets the lion’s share of headlines and accounts for much of the hell-in-a-hand-basket environmental news we come across. But by any reasonable measure, this is entirely wrong. The most important is in fact indoor air pollution.

One-third of the world’s people — 2.9 billion — cook and keep warm burning twigs and dung, which give off deadly fumes. This leads to strokes, heart disease and cancer, and disproportionately affects women and children. The World Health Organization estimates that it killed 4.3 million people in 2012. Add the smaller death count from outdoor pollution, and air pollution causes one in eight deaths worldwide.

Compare these numbers to global warming. As the new report from the UN Climate Panel concludes, “At present the worldwide burden of human ill-health from climate change is relatively small compared with effects of other stressors.” Air pollution doesn’t garner the headlines afforded to global warming because it’s not nearly as sexy. It’s old-fashioned, boring, and doesn’t raise anywhere near as much money as climate change.

Global warming is a real problem, but its threat is much, much lower. Estimates from the World Health Organization and others show that between 50 and 250 times more people die from the effects of air pollution.

That is why we can confidently say that the environment is doing much better now than before. Measured on the by-far-most important environmental indicator, air pollution, the risk of death has dropped dramatically and consistently, both in the developed and developing world.

With outdoor air pollution rampant in Beijing that may seem surprising, but we forget that indoor air pollution has always been much, much more important. In 1900 almost all pollution deaths in developing countries came from indoor air pollution — and the individual risk of dying from all air pollution was more than five-fold higher than it is today.

Even today, as outdoor air pollution has increased death risks both because of a higher urban population and more emissions, the death risks from indoor air pollution still outweigh outdoor 2-to-1, and indoor risks have been dropping much faster.

This is essentially because of ever more people coming out of poverty, and being able to afford not to cook with dung.

In the rich world, most other environmental indicators have improved dramatically. All developed countries have slashed their outdoor air pollution and handled much of their water pollution, while even strongly regulating small risks like pesticides and other chemical fears. In the developed world, rivers just don’t catch fire as the Cuyahoga River did just before the first Earth Day.

In the developing world, the overall environment has also gotten better because of the dramatic drop in indoor air pollution. Outdoor air pollution has risen — but this only confirms a long-standing finding that some environmental indicators tend to first get worse, then better, with economic development.

Essentially, poor countries are trading off economic development for outdoor air pollution. This prosperity buys food, education and vaccines for their kids, while electricity eradicates indoor air pollution. And as they get richer, they can also afford to protect more nature and cut pollution. In some of the richest developing countries, such as Chile and Mexico, outdoor air pollution is now declining.

But we still don’t tackle global warming. That is why many Earth Day messages will ignore the pervasive evidence for progress and emphasize deterioration and collapse. The assumption seems to be that a little extra doom and gloom will help mobilize more attention to improve the environment.

Yet shrill messaging simply reinforces panic, which impedes our ability to make smart choices. To tackle the world’s biggest environmental problem, indoor air pollution, we need to help the world’s 1.2 billion stuck in abject poverty.

In just three decades, China has lifted 680 million people out of poverty. It did so not with solar panels or wind turbines, but through a dramatic rise in access to modern energy, mostly powered by coal.

Panic only brings expensive, inefficient global-warming policies, like solar and wind. These cost $60 billion in subsidies but provide less than 1 percent of global energy. At best, they’ll provide just 3.5 percent in a generation’s time.

Instead we should invest much more resources in research to innovate the next generations of green energy. If we can eventually make green technologies cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone will switch. This means dramatically lower carbon emissions while providing power for development to billions of poor.

This Earth Day, we should celebrate our success so far: Overall, we’ve solved more problems than we’ve created. Rather than give in to panic, let’s get our priorities right.

Bjorn Lomborg directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, ranking the smartest solutions to the world’s biggest problems. He is the author of “How To Spend $75 Billion To Make the World a Better Place.”