This morning, I asked Michael Liebreich - a green-tinged businessman and potential candidate for London mayor - about his views on aid for fossil fuel projects in Africa. He supported them.
It's generally a ban on coal projects, except in exceptional circumstances. Yes, I'm comfortable with that.
And when I suggested that his support was despite the death toll from indoor air pollution, he said this:
And all because I don't want our taxes spent on solutions that are neither cheap nor quick nor healthy. OK.
This prompted our old chum Bob Ward to go on one of his charm offensives:
so much better for poor people to die from air pollution from coal and diesel, eh? How humane!
This prompted me to get the figures for air pollution in the developing world versus those in the first world. According to this report:
PM10 refers to particulate matter with a diameter of less than or equal to 10µm; these particles are widely believed to pose the greatest health problems. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standard for an acceptable annual 24-hour average of PM10 is 150μg/m3, and they state that this level should not be exceeded more than once per year. In fact, 50μg/m3 is the accepted norm for PM10 (EPA, 2006). In contrast, Smith (2000) reports that mean 24-hour PM10 concentration in solid-fuel-using households in India sometimes exceeds 2000μg/m3. Dasgupta et al. (2004) find an average of 600μg/m3 in Bangladesh, far outside the EPA guidelines. Similarly, a study of about 400 households in the provinces of Shaanxi, Hubei, and Zhejiang, China, were monitored for PM4, and it was found that most households exceed China’s Indoor Air Quality Standards (Zhang and Smith, 2007).
Meanwhile, in Scotland, where the PM10 standard is 18μg/m3, Friends of the Earth are getting their knickers in a twist about PM10 levels of just 35μg/m3 in the pollution hellhole of Aberdeen. Reducing Bangladeshi levels down to UK norms would represent a 30-fold reduction. But according to Ward, it's not worth it. How...humane.