Air pollution caused 160,000 deaths in big cities last year: NGO

KUALA LUMPUR - Serious pollution caused around 160,000 premature deaths in the world's five most populous cities last year, even as air quality improved in some places due to coronavirus lockdowns, an environmental group said Thursday.

The worst-affected was New Delhi, the most polluted capital on Earth, where around 54,000 deaths are estimated to have occurred due to hazardous PM2.5 airborne particles, according to a report from Greenpeace Southeast Asia.

In Tokyo, the figure was 40,000 with the rest spread across Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Mexico City, according to the report, which looked at the impact of microscopic PM2.5 matter produced by burning fossil fuels.

"When governments choose coal, oil and gas over clean energy, it's our health that pays the price," said Avinash Chanchal, climate campaigner at Greenpeace India.

PM2.5 particles are considered the most harmful for health. They damage the heart and lungs, and increase the chances of severe asthma attacks.

Some studies have linked PM2.5 exposure to a higher risk of dying from Covid-19.

The report used an online tool that estimates the impacts of PM 2.5 by taking air quality data from monitoring site IQAir and combining it with scientific risk models, as well as population and health data.

The tool is a collaboration between Greenpeace, IQAir, and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Despite the high numbers of deaths, coronavirus lockdowns imposed across the world -- that took traffic off the streets and shut down polluting industries -- did temporarily clear the skies above big cities.

Delhi, for instance, underwent a dramatic transformation for a period last year when curbs were imposed, with residents reveling in azure skies and clean air.

Scientists say that massive drops in some pollutants due to lockdowns are bound to have prevented deaths.

Nevertheless, Greenpeace urged governments to put investment in renewable energy at the heart of plans to recover from the pandemic-triggered economic downturn.

"To really clean up our air, governments must stop building new coal plants, retire existing coal plants, and invest in clean energy generation, such as wind and solar," said the group's air pollution scientist Aidan Farrow.

Agence France-Presse

Global warming to blame for hottest day in Argentine Antarctica

Global warming is to blame for Argentine Antarctica recording its hottest day since readings began, Greenpeace said on Friday.

Temperatures climbed to 18.3 degrees Celsius (64.9 degrees Fahrenheit) at midday Thursday at the research station Esperanza base, the highest temperature on record since 1961, according to the National Meteorological Service.

The previous record stood at 17.5 degrees on March 24, 2015.

The new record is "of course shocking but unfortunately not surprising because Antarctica is warming up with the rest of the planet," said Frida Bengtsson, marine environment specialist for Greenpeace, in a statement.

At Marambio, another Argentine base in Antarctica, temperatures reached 14.1 degrees Celsius on Thursday, the hottest temperature for a day in February since 1971.

The news comes after a decade of record temperatures on the planet and a 2019 that was the second hottest year since registers have been kept.

And the new decade has begun along the same tendency, with last month the hottest January on record.

The effects of global warming have already seen ocean levels rise due to melting ice caps.

The two largest ice caps on the planet, in Antarctica and Greenland, have already lost an average of a combined 430 billion tons a year since 2006.

According to UN climate experts, the oceans rose 15 centimeters during the 20th century.

It's a threat to coastal towns and small islands the world over.

One of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is the Thwaites glacier, which is the size of Britain.

Scientists say that if it melted it would raise sea levels by 65 centimeters.

"Over the last 30 years, the amount of ice melting off Thwaites and adjacent glaciers has nearly doubled," said the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration group of scientists in a statement.

Argentina has had a presence in Antarctica for the past 114 years, including several scientific research bases, and is also a signatory of the Antarctic Treaty, which came into force in June 1961 and prohibits any militarization of the continent.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Paul McCartney, Penelope Cruz join 'Arctic sanctuary' drive

RIO DE JANEIRO - Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, actress Penelope Cruz and director Robert Redford have joined a campaign for a "global sanctuary" around the North Pole, Greenpeace announced Thursday.

They are among the first 100 names on a planned million-signature scroll that the green group wants to place on the seabed beneath Earth's northernmost point.

The spot will be marked with a "Flag for the Future" designed by children in a global competition organized by the movie star-Girl Guide movement.

Its goal is to counter nationalist claims on the North Pole and preserve the heart of the Arctic Ocean from a carve-up for resources.

Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo said the aim would be to push for a UN resolution demanding a global sanctuary around and under the Pole.

"The Arctic is coming under assault and needs people from around the world to stand up and demand action to protect it," he said at the launch of the campaign at the UN sustainable development summit, or Rio+20.

"A ban on offshore oil drilling and unsustainable fishing would be a huge victory against the forces ranged against this precious region and the four million people who live there.

"And a sanctuary in the uninhabited area around the pole would in a stroke stop the polluters colonizing the top of the world without infringing on the rights of indigenous communities."

British tycoon Richard Branson and "Warrior Princess" actress Lucy Lawless, who took part in an occupation of a Shell Arctic oil rig, added a celebrity sprinkle to the launch.

Branson described his trip to the Arctic on a dog sleigh, calling the region "one of the most spectacularly beautiful parts of the world" and gravely at risk.

The first 100 signatories include "Slumdog Millionaire" star Dev Patel, actors Hugh Grant and Emily Blunt as well as musicians Bryan Adams, Peter Gabriel, Thom Yorke, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, boy band One Direction and China's Xiao Wei.

The shrinkage of Arctic ice through global warming has led to jostling over sea routes and access to the sea bed, which is believed to be rich in hydrocarbons and minerals.

Countries that border the Arctic are Russia, Canada and the United States, as well as Norway and Denmark, through Greenland.

In 2007, Russian explorer Artur Chilingarov planted a Russian flag on the seabed under the North Pole, saying he claimed it for Russia.

The claim was orchestrated by the Kremlin and has no legal validity, according to critics.

source: interaksyon.com

Earth Hour dilemma: When the 'Like' button harms the planet

PARIS -- Green groups around the world are turning to social networking to drive their campaign for Earth Hour on Saturday, when lights are turned off for an hour to signal concern about global warming.

But here's the irony.

With every email, every tweet, every appeal watched on YouTube or "liked" on Facebook, environmentalists are stoking the very problem they want to resolve.

Each time we network, we emit carbon dioxide through the fossil fuels that are burned to power our computers and the servers and databanks that store or relay our message.

That poses a small dilemma for the Australian-led campaign for Saturday's switch-off.

In 130 countries around the world, people are being urged to turn off the lights for one hour at 8:30 p.m. local time as a show of concern about climate change.

In emails alone, the typical office worker is responsible for 13.6 tons of CO2 or its equivalent per year, a French government agency for energy efficiency, ADEME, calculated last year.

That figure is based on a French company of 100 people who work 220 days a year and each receive 58 mails a day and send 33 per day, with an average mail size of one megabyte.

By comparison, 13.6 tons is more than twice the annual CO2 emissions per capita in France and almost two-thirds of the average annual emissions per capita in the US.

The more people you cc and the bigger the mail, the greater the carbon emissions, ADEME said.

"Just a 10-percent reduction in the number of mails that are sent which include the boss and one of his colleagues leads to a gain of one ton, the equivalent of a round-trip flight from Paris to New York," it said.

Facebook and Twitter say they are striving to keep their carbon footprint as small as possible.

Facebook, which claims 800 million users worldwide, is building a massive data center -- its third globally and first in Europe -- in the Swedish town of Luleaa, near the Arctic Circle.

The local chill helps cool servers, rather than using air conditioning to do so, and the town gets clean energy from hydro.

Greenpeace had mustered a 700,000-signature demand for a "greener" Facebook under its so-called Unfriend Coal campaign.

At a talk last year that he posted on the Internet, Raffi Krikorian, a director for infrastructure at Twitter, said the company contributed around 0.02 grams of CO2 to the atmosphere with each 140-character tweet.

"But at 50 million tweets, that's one metric ton of CO2 a day," he observed. "We can do better. We are making our stuff a lot more efficient, and that will get (our carbon emissions) a lot further down."

Just how damaging to the climate is the Internet?

By comparison with other sectors, not very -- and it can be argued that the Internet saves carbon which would otherwise be emitted in snail mail, phone calls or travel to face-to-face meetings.

A 2007 estimate by Gartner Inc., an international consulting firm, found the information and communications technology industry was sharply increasing its CO2 emissions in absolute terms but still accounted for only around two percent of the global total.

This is less than a sixth of emissions from either transport, industry or agriculture.

Andy Ridley, Earth Hour's executive director, said his organization invested in offsets -- projects that mitigate carbon emissions -- to compensate for its own fossil-fuel pollution.

It was also using an intranet social platform called Yammer to cut down on internal emails.

"It has revolutionized how we communicate and very significantly cut the amount of electronic traffic," Ridley told AFP.

"Overall, we think that our ability to build a campaign digitally, and to engage with people across the planet in a way that minimizes travel, is one of the great advantages of technology."

source: interaksyon.com

'Xena' star Lucy Lawless arrested in New Zealand Greenpeace protest

WELLINGTON -- "Xena: Warrior Princess" actress Lucy Lawless was arrested in New Zealand Monday after occupying an oil-drilling ship for three days to protest plans to search for oil off Alaska, Greenpeace said.

Police climbed a 53-meter (175-foot) drilling derrick on the ship Noble Discoverer in the North Island port of Taranaki and arrested Lawless, along with five other Greenpeace activists, the environmental group said.

The actress boarded the vessel early Friday in a bid to prevent it sailing to the Arctic, where it has been contracted by Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell to conduct exploratory drilling.

"This chapter has ended, but the story of the battle to save the Arctic has just begun," said Lawless in a statement.

The New Zealander, who starred as the title character in the fantasy television series "Xena: Warrior Princess" from 1995-2001, is a long-time environmental activist who was named as a Greenpeace ambassador in 2009.

Greenpeace said she and her fellow protesters were expected to be formally charged later Friday. Police were not immediately available for comment.

Lawless told AFP on Friday that she was not concerned at the prospect of being arrested over the demonstration.

"That's the least of my concerns," she said. "I'm a true believer. We need to start switching over to renewable energy now, we don't have to go to the ends of the earth to suck out every last drop of oil."

The US Interior Department granted Shell conditional provisional approval to begin drilling exploration wells in the Arctic Ocean last August, in a move slammed by conservationists as "inexcusable."

US officials had pledged to closely monitor Shell's plans for four shallow water exploration wells in Alaska's Beaufort Sea to ensure operations are conducted in a "safe and environmentally responsible manner."

But green groups say it puts wildlife and native communities in the remote region at risk, citing the vastly complicated task of drilling in the harsh Arctic environment and effectively cleaning up any spills in such conditions.

They also point to the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 after Shell's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded as an example of the risks inherent in drilling for oil.

source: interaksyon.com