There are ten. Previously: Celsius, Conflagrations, Contagions, and Creating Alternative Natures. This week, another two:
In itself, carbon is necessary. It’s a requisite element of life. But when in unnaturally overwhelming volume (or “load”) in the air and atmosphere, it blankets the earth, traps heat, and curtails heat escape into space.
Life-wise, carbon (designated C in the Periodic Table of Elements) is good news. But it could also be bad, big time. It is used as fuel (like coal and petrol), and as lubricant to quiet those pesky squeaks in your doorways, bicycles, and household fixtures, and to produce many of the things that we use. It is used in electronics as electrodes, and as pencil tips. These are good.
And when the Good Book says that from dust you came and to dust you shall become, it was referring to your body being made of C which, in God’s sight, must be good as well. Slash-and-burn farmers turbocharge the fertility of the soil where they intend to plant crops by, yes, burning the trees so that their C settles to the ground, and add to the essential elements in the soil. It’s good for plants because plants breathe in C. This is the reason why some say that excessive C emissions is not bad at all, and that C-caused climate change is a not true.
But humans and most animals breathe in oxygen (O2), not C, and so in abnormally excessive loads in the air and atmosphere, C and its particulate and gas forms like CO, CO2, and methane (CH4) could be nasty air pollutants.
Most air pollution in the world is caused by excessive C being emitted by coal-fired power plants, vehicles and airplanes using hydrocarbon fuels like diesel, gasoline, and kerosene, wood-burning fires in kitchens and fireplaces, and from burning trash.
(There are other sources of air pollution like dust, pollen, photochemical smog, and spores, but C is the one that’s dominating the stage in the form of carbon-based particulate and chemical pollutants.)
Particulate C air pollution is blackening the lungs of the earth, and ours. More so in poor countries. Emissions of greenhouse gasses (mostly C-based) are associated with global warming.
In 2016, C-based indoor and outdoor air pollution caused an estimated seven million deaths (one in nine deaths) annually (https://www.who.int/gho/phe/outdoor_air_pollution/en/). These are likely to keep rising for as long as our way of life is heavily dependent on C-based products and materials.
We use so much C-based materials for many good reasons, like as components of medical equipment and gadgets, and for a vast array of industrial applications. But these things are eventually discarded, and are slow-decaying polymers (like plastics and rubber) that they are ending up now plaguing our earth. They’re choking our landfills and our oceans.
Congestion. Simply put, this is about many people being tightly packed in small spaces. And space is a psychosocial and health asset. When lost, people begin to be more anxious, stressed, and prone to rage. Mobility gets impaired when too many would be competing for available transport systems, roads, sea lanes, and air spaces. The opportunity costs of pursuing livelihoods and social amenities go up. Ambience gets lost. Tensions are high. It creates shorter and multiple pathways for contaminations, threatening health. Infectious diseases get more rapidly transmitted among people (like, yes, CoViD-19).
Dense living spaces are fertile grounds for pandemics. That’s why “social distancing” (or physical distancing entailing a significant loss of time and quality of face-to-face social interactions) is a widespread prescription to check the spread of CoViD-19. As more dense places form in the future, the quality of human life could drop, precipitously.
When thinking of tightly-packed places and horrendous traffic, we may readily think of Kolkata, Manila, Jakarta, Dhaka, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Bogota, and Bangkok. These are where traffic is bumper-to-bumper, and there are so many people living in tight pockets of poverty and squalor.
But congestion happens in all kinds of places, albeit in less squalid circumstances: Moscow, Istanbul, London, Boston, St. Petersburg, Rome, Sydney, Singapore, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne, Washington DC, Toronto. Traffic in these places could be also terrible, and they could cost much in terms of foregone productive activities (https://www.businessinsider.com/cities-with-worst-traffic-in-the-world-2019-2).
To whatever extent it occurs, congestion dehumanizes people. It robs them of opportunities to live in dignity. It gives them less spaces for greater aesthetic experiences.
Two catastrophes. Again, the good news is: people are doing something about them. Trying their best to reduce our risks and vulnerabilities to them. With faith on them, and on God, we look forward to their successes. (These would be discussed in a series of columns following this series on catastrophes we face.)
Week after next, another two….
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