Newsroom's Marc Daalder published an important piece over the weekend about air pollution, the invisible killer. It kills 3300 people a year, three times as many people as Covid, and ten times more than the road toll. The social cost of this is $15.6 billion a year. Most of Aotearoa violates WHO safe guidelines for air quality. Basicly, we live in a toxic sewer, and it is killing us.
And yet the government has consistently dragged its feet on doing anything. In 2011, then-environment minister Nick Smith delayed tougher air quality standards for councils until 2020, murdering 685 people in the process - and that was when we thought the death toll was only 1100 a year! In 2021, the WHO responded to evidence of increased harm from air pollution by tightening standards. Last year, a new study tripled the annual death toll, to 3300. And still the government did nothing. Officials "have no timeframe" for introducing a new National Environmental Standard on air quality. Its "too hard", and they're too busy on other things, and the deaths are invisible, so its easier and cheaper just to let people die.
Except its not too hard. The particulates and gases which kill us are caused by burning things, particularly fossil fuels. So acting on climate change, particularly by decarbonising transport, will massively reduce the death toll - by up to 2200 people a year for transport alone. We can actually do this, and the benefits - $10 billion a year for transport alone - are significant. But Treasury doesn't include those benefits in its calculations. And so 3300 people die every year, because our lives don't count on the government's spreadsheets.
This is fundamentally immoral. It is also a fundamental breach of duty by the government. This is a known environmental killer. It is the government's job to protect us from it. If they do not, it is murder. It is that simple.
