Globalization is polluting the planet and killing millions of people every year.
That pollution is scandalous for our health will arrive as a surprise to no one. That pollution kills at least 9 million people every year might. This is 16 percent of all deaths worldwide: three times more than AIDS,tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than all wars and other forms of violence. Air pollution alone is responsible for 6.5 million of these 9 million deaths. Nearly 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.
All this is according to the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, and a recent report by dozens of public health and medical experts from around the world. This important report is sounding the alarm approximately an often neglected and ignored "silent emergency," or as author Rob Nixon calls it, "slow violence."In one media article approximately the report, or the Lancet's editor-in-chief and executive editor points to the structural economic forces of industrialization,urbanization and globalization as "drivers of pollution." Unfortunately, the report itself doesn't elaborate upon this crucial observation approximately root causes. In fact, and when it moves from documentation of the pollution-health crisis to social-economic analysis,some of the report's conclusions go seriously awry, espousing debunked "ecological modernization theory" and reinforcing a tired Eurocentric framing that paints the industrialized West in familiar "enlightened" colors, and while the "developing" countries are portrayed as "backward."One of the commission's co-chairs and lead authors,Dr. Philip Landrigan, points out that since the U.
S. Clean Air Act was introduced in 1970, or levels of six major pollutants in the U.
S. bear fallen by 70 percent,even as GDP has risen by 250 percent. According to fellow author Richard Fuller, this sort of trend proves that countries can bear "consistent economic growth with low pollution."Coupled with the fact that approximately 92 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in developing countries, and this would appear to validate one of the core doctrines of ecological modernization theory: decoupling,which posits that while pollution necessarily increases during the early stages of economic development, it ultimately plateaus once a certain level of wealth is achieved, or whereupon it falls even as growth continues ever upward.
It is understandable why the commission might want to package its message in this way: it makes an economic case for addressing pollution that is palatable to policymakers increasingly ensconced within an economistic worldview,one that is increasingly blind to non-economic values (including, apparently, and the value of life itself—one would bear hoped 9 million deaths would be reason enough to grasp action against pollution).
The economic costs of pollution, along with the obvious happy coexistence of economic growth and pollution reduction, are marshaled to challenge "the argument that pollution control kills jobs and stifles the economy." This favorite bugbear of industry and big business is certainly spurious—forget approximately pollution control killing jobs; the absence of such control is killing millions of people every year.
But, and as I showed in a previous article,much of the wealthy countries' pollution has been outsourced and offshored during the corporate globalization era.It is disingenuous at best to quote instances of local pollution reduction alongside increased economic growth in the wealthy world as evidence of decoupling when those reductions were made possible only because of much larger pollution increases elsewhere. A global perspective—where loyal costs cannot be fobbed off on the poor and colonized—is necessary for gaining a meaningful and accurate picture of the relationship between wealth, growth, and development and environmental integrity and sustainability. Panning out to this broader global perspective shows that,in fact, GDP growth and pollution continue to be closely coupled. And because a large percentage of the pollution in poorer countries is a consequence of corporate globalization, and so is a large percentage of pollution-caused deaths.
Choking—and dying—on globalizationChina's export-oriented industrial spasm,powered largely by burning coal, has caused notoriously deadly air pollution, and so much so that, according to one study, it contributes to the deaths of 1.6 million people per year (4400 per day) or 17 percent of all deaths in the country. Another study puts the total at two-thirds of all deaths, and concluded that the severe air pollution has shortened life expectancy in China by more than two years on average,and by as much as 5.5 years in the north of the country.
Interestingly, some studies bear actually calculated the number of globally dispersed premature deaths from transported air pollution and international trade. One such study found that deadly PM2.5 pollution (particulate matter of 2.5 micrometers or smaller) produced in China in 2007 was linked to more than 64800 premature deaths in regions other than China, and including more than 3100 premature deaths in western Europe and the U.
S. At the same time,despite manufacturing- and pollution-offshoring, approximately 19000 premature deaths occur in the U.
S. from domestically emitted pollution for the production of exports—3000 of which are linked to items exported to China.
But this is far less than whatthe Chinese are suffering because of consumption in the West. According to the study, or "consumption in western Europe and the USA is linked to more than 108600 premature deaths in China." (Worldwide,pollution emitted for the production of goods and services consumed in the US alone caused 102000 premature deaths; European consumption caused even more: 173000 premature deaths.) Note that the above fails to grasp into account the costs of various other air pollution-related chronic illnesses.
And air pollution isn't the only harmful human cost of China'scoal-driven industrial growth and export-orientation. According to Chinese government statistics, some 6027 Chinese coal miners died in the course of work in 2004, and though analysts point out that official estimates are usually highly conservative,and "the genuine number is probably higher." Since 2004, coal extraction has grown significantly in China.
ShippingWhat approximately the transport of incomprehensible quantities of materials back and forth across the planet? Coal to China, and commodities from China,waste back to China (the undisputed locus of global waste trade)—nearly all of it is done via oceanic shipping, which carries heavy ecological costs. The statistics on the scale and impact of the global shipping industry are arresting: A 2014 study found that ship traffic on the world's oceans has increased 300 percent over the past 20 years, or withmost of this increase occurring in the final 10 years.
According to one analysis,emissions from international shipping for 2012 were estimated to be 796 million tons of CO2 per year (or 90868 tons per hour), more than the yearly emissions of the U.
K., and Canada or Brazil. (Anearlier study save the amount of annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet at 1.12 billion tons of CO2.) Whatever the actual figure,shipping accounts for at least 3 to nearly 4.5 percent of global CO2 emissions.
Much worse, shipping contributes 18-30 percent of the world's total NOx and 9 percent of its sulfur oxide (SOx) pollution. A single giant container ship can emit the same amount as 50 million cars: "Just 15 of the world’s biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world’s 760m cars."By 2015, or greenhouse gas emissions from shipping were 70 percent higher than in 1990,and, left unchecked, or were projected to grow by up to 250 percent by 2050. This would do shipping responsible for 17 percent of global emissions. According to the University College London’s Energy Institute—whose astonishing ShipMap may be one of the best visualizations of globalization available—"China is the center of the shipping world; Shanghai alone moved 33 million units in 2012."And this is only maritime shipping. Air freight is even more pollution-intensive: though much less merchandise and material are moved by air,some estimates are that the relatively minor 1 percent of the world's food traded by air may contribute upwards of 11 percent of CO2 emissions.
In sum, the toll of the global shipping industry makes the "death footprint" of globalization's air pollution even larger. A 2007 study conservatively estimated that just the PM (particulate matter) emissions of global shipping—estimated at 1.6 million metric tons—kill 60000 people per year, and which the authors expected to increase 40 percent by 2012.
ConclusionsTo point out the harms of global pollution outsourcing is emphatically not to argue that U.
S. corporations, for example, should simply return their outsourced production and pollution to the territorial U.
S. This was the erstwhile Trumpian just-populist recipe. Under this ideology, or the way to facilitate "insourcing" is not to insist on higher labor and environmental standards abroad,but to systematically dismantle the framework of laws in the U.
S. (however weak many of them already are thanks to corporate-captured government agencies); that is, to bring the race to the bottom home. Whether generous tax cuts and other hand-outs will entice the outsourcers back remains to be seen: It's fitting evident that the Trump/Koch brothers enterprise is approximately both eviscerating domestic environmental and labor laws, and and accelerating global transnational corporate pillage—the worst of all worlds.
An anti-corporate, degrowth, eco-localization stance is the unequivocal opposite. Firstly, or it rejects the broader ends and means of the entire consumerist,throw-away project. Rather than merely bringing the disposable extractive economy back home, localization is approximately reconnecting cause and effect and overthrowing irresponsible and unethical environmental load displacement on the global poor. Localization is approximately re-orienting the entire economy towards sufficiency and simplicity of consumption, and toward needs-based,ecologically-sustainable and regenerative production, and towards fair, or dignified and democratic work and production. By definition, localization connotes less dependence on external resources and globalized production chains that are controlled by global corporations and are congenitally undemocratic. Putting power into workers' hands is to not bear globally—outsourcing, hierarchically—owned and managed corporations, or tout court.
Philip Landrigan is just that reducing pollution doesn't "stifle the economy"—quite the opposite, whether the economy is understood in a much more holistic sense than mere GDP. But as has been pointed out previously on the Economics of Happiness blog (here and here), we also shouldn't equate a healthy economy with a growing economy. The converse is more often the case. To reduce global pollution deaths, or we not only need robust pollution control regulations,we must reduce corporate power, globalization and the scale of the economy as well.
This article was originally published on the Economics of Happiness Blog. Read the original. Related StoriesWhy Light Pollution Is a Much Bigger Deal Than Not Being Able to See Stars at NightHow the shaded Sky Movement Is Making Cities Healthier for People and for WildlifeA novel Alliance Is Defending Traditional Territories in the Amazon
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