10 million. TEN FUCKING MILLION. That is an uncomprehensible amount of people. That’s essentially a New York City dying ever year. I implore you to read the entire article from David Wallace-Wells. It’s shocking.
Not all deaths are created equal. In February 2020, the world began to panic about the novel coronavirus, which killed 2714 people that month. This made the news. In the same month, around 800,000 people died from the effects of air pollution. That didn’t. Novelty counts for a lot.
But air pollution kills more than ten times as many as the flu every single year, and we hear even less about it. In 2017, a Lancet study put the figure at almost seven million a year, about two-thirds from outside air pollution and one-third from indoor, household pollution. More recent estimates run higher, with as many as 8.7 million deaths every year attributable just to the outdoor particulate matter produced from burning fossil fuels. Add on indoor pollution, and you get an annual toll of more than ten million. That’s more than four times the official worldwide death toll from Covid last year. It’s about twenty times as many as the current annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined.
–London Review of Books, by David Wallace-Wells, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/david-wallace-wells/ten-million-a-year
