I live in one of the most beautiful places on the surface of the earth, namely the south Cape coast of Africa. I have also traveled to some of the most difficult places in the world – like New Delhi, India where one million people died in 2017 from air pollution. How is it that India – the home of the most sacred and sublime philosophy of life and consciousness awakening – can have 15 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world?
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The population explosion and crowding of Indian cities may have something to do with it. Delhi is the most polluted city in India and one of the worst in the world. A direct correlation between air pollution and the increasing death rate in India does indeed exist, so there is no mystery here as to why a third of all lung cancer in India is due to air pollution, or why Indians are dying of lung cancer at the age of 27.

It should be easy to solve the problem since the problem is so obvious. Besides that, illness negatively affects the productivity on a nation, and thus its GDP, so this is an economic issue as well as a health one. Apparently 8% of potential GDP is lost due to pollution in India. By cutting air pollution to zero India would hugely improve its economy. So you solve two problems at once by addressing air pollution – health and economic.

Fortunately the government is pushing for electric vehicles and clean energy in a five year programme, but there is no accountability mechanism in place and not enough push or political will on the ground to ensure the job is done. As a result 700 million people are still exposed to the air pollution from city traffic and industry. By 2050 half the population will be exposed to below standard air quality. Something unheard of in my beautiful idyllic seaside town in South Africa.

China – another mega nation with exploding urban population - dealt with the issue through their national planning as an economic problem, not just a health problem, in their typical fashion. And this is ultimately a global concern, where air quality is declining in emerging economies as they urbanize as well as developed economies as they rely more and more on toxic carbon-based fossil fuels. Even in my pristine environment of South Africa we have massive reliance on our cheap and abundant coal to power our electricity. And we almost accepted a massive nuclear plant recently, which is another foolish attempt to power a nation on toxic products, which Germany are already phasing out altogether, due to its toxic and dangerous implications. 

For some reason big industry and the economy is allowed to impose dangerous and toxic methods without the necessary oversight or regulation. The auto industry could easily revert to carbon-free, non-toxic vehicles. The technology has been around for a century, if only it was allowed to be implemented. Unfortunately the deaths of millions are not only due to government ineptitude but also to modern western greed by a few unscrupulous people in the oil industry. Those oil barons are the exploiters of the combustion engines that pollute our planet. Or at least they certainly fuel it in their greed for profit over people. 

So our poor quality of life and health is not just a political problem but primarily a capitalist economic one. It is also a moral problem because we are allowing ourselves to be governed by a few elites who have too little concern for the human population of the world. The elites at the top are the ones making the decisions regarding what products are to be exploited and mined and engineered to fuel the economy and our lives. By choosing to continue with oil extraction and the combustion engine, they are saying that people come second, while their profit comes first. 

We could easily shift our economies from dirty fuels to clean energy overnight if their was enough moral and ethical conscience in the minds of the leaders. And theoretically it is us who elect those leaders. However, the democratic system has also been hijacked, just like the economic system, so it no longer works to serve the best interests of the people for whom it is designed to serve. Corruption and greed have taken over, and the political and economic systems on our planet are the very things that are destroying what could be a clean planet with healthy people. It all relies on clean air and clean water.

And it’s worsening with the introduction in recent years of fracking. This is another fossil fuel sector that pollutes the ground water on entire towns while extracting more dirty oil to run air polluting engines. I have come to realize that humans are mostly stupid. And ignorant. We cannot see the bigger picture as a human race, so we create problems in the guise of solving them. We also hide solutions by stifling them to profit ourselves above others, while actually killing others with our toxic products so that we can live long and prosper. 

The problem is that with this short-sighted mentality, we create problems that are passed down to our own descendants. The air is being polluted for everyone on the planet, including your own grandchildren, when you deal in fossil fuels like oil. So we are stealing quality of life and a clean planet from our future generations so that we can enjoy it now in the short term. This is a clear case of ignorance or illusion if ever there was one. Millions of people are being negatively affected, in cities like New Delhi, and yet we carry on, watching them drop like flies into an early grave without enough ability to stop the trend. 

However, there are solutions and with enough political will and implementation we can easily clean up our air and our planet overnight. For example Norway made a lot of money from oil and gas and has the biggest sovereign wealth fund as a result, but due to environmental concerns Norway has decided to consciously leave the rest of their oil under the ground untouched. Without this kind of moral and ethical awareness and respect for life it will get worse. Sales in nebulisers and face masks to cover the mouth and nose are booming, yet only the very rich can afford air purifiers at hundreds of dollars a piece.

Bottled air anyone?