By Srećko Horvat, ROAR
Magazine
The damage caused by air
pollution is now being compared to the effects of tobacco use. According to the
World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution poses the greatest environmental
threat to global health in 2019, killing seven million people prematurely every
year, which is around the number of deaths caused by cigarettes.
No wonder a common joke about
air pollution in contemporary India says that “living in Delhi is just like
smoking 50 cigarettes in a day.”
Or that a joke in China even
suggests ways of dealing with the air pollution in the best Graucho Marx
manner: “Individual therapy: put a mask on. Family therapy: buy health
insurance. If you have money and the time: go on holiday. If you’ve no class:
emigrate. National therapy: wait for the wind.”
Unfortunately, as usually with
dark humor, the joke is reality. When in January 2017 China announced the first
ever nationwide red level fog alarm, haze-avoidance soon became a trend and hundreds of thousands of Chinese would start
traveling abroad during winter months — when pollution is critical —
specifically to escape air pollution. At the same time, those who do not have
the means to escape have to stay with masks and literally wait for… air.
When we hear or read about air
pollution, we immediately think of India or China. Yet the death rate from air
pollution in Hungary happens to be the second highest in the world, coming just behind China. As
many as 10,000 people die prematurely in the country each year because of
diseases linked to air pollution.
In 2018, the European
Environment Agency (EEA) published a report showing that air pollution causes
almost 500,000 premature deaths in Europe every year. The report warned
that the toll on health was worse in Eastern European countries than China and
India.
CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION,
EUROPE’S REALITY?
Only a few years ago it would
have sounded ludicrous to compare Europe’s present to Chinese science fiction:
how could an imagination of a future coming from today’s China be telling us a
story about Europe’s own destiny? Yet, to understand Europe’s current
ecological catastrophe, it is useful to reach out for one of China’s best
contemporary science fiction writers, Hao Jingfang and her Folding
Beijing.
It depicts a future Beijing
which is divided in three social classes, each of which live on a different
physical surface of the city. What Folding Beijing describes is a
polluted dystopia in which the main character works as a waste processing
worker belonging to the third class. Sunlight is so scarce that it is rationed
based on economic class. Technology and automation serve the rich who live in a
First space with fresh air, while the poor literally live in and from garbage.
It is a truly disturbing
depiction of a future where worlds are literally separated — even Time itself
is carefully divided and parceled out to separate classes — as a sort of
“parallel realities,” which are, nonetheless, interconnected and part of the
structure of one and the same world serving the ones living in the First space.
As with every good science
fiction, this story does not so much describe a distant future, but a world
which is already unfolding below our feet. But what if Folding Beijing is
not just pursuing the current social inequalities in China and its rapid
development to its logical conclusion — in order to depict an inevitable future
if the current trends continue? What if it might represent Europe’s current
ecological catastrophe and environmental breakdown?
Over the past years we have
already become accustomed to the smog photos from Beijing as one of the worst
places for air quality in the world. But these days we are witnessing similar
images from Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Bulgaria,
Hungary and other less developed European countries.
At the end of January 2019,
1.7 million inhabitants of Belgrade, the Serbian capital, woke up in the
morning to find themselves in the most polluted city in the world. That day, in a city
and country with continuing and growing anti-government protests, the activists
of the social movement Don’t Drown Belgrade sent a gas mask to
the mayor with a simple message: “Soon everyone will need a gas mask.”
FRESH AIR IN THE WEST, GAS
MASKS IN THE EAST
And here we come from Folding
Beijing to “Folding Europe.” There is a sharp divide in air quality
between the West and East of Europe. Even Forbes magazine recently
called it “the New Iron Curtain.” But beside naming the reasons
for this air pollution, such as brown coal as the main energy source of
post-communist countries, Forbes did not name the true origin of the
problem.
The problem is not so much
that Eastern European countries — former Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc states
— are not “developed” enough. The problem is that the current architecture of
the European Union is actually based on a deep and growing divide between the
center (Western Europe) and periphery (Eastern Europe). Without the
under-developed East, the West could not really go through its “green
transition” — or what the Germans would call Energiewende.
If it was ever tangible that
Europe is rapidly transforming itself into a dystopian “Folding Europe,” with
different spaces of air quality depending on whether you belong to the center
or the periphery, to the global rich or the global poor, then it was with the
current Diesel ban in Germany — and its consequences for the East.
The ban itself, of course, is
a development in the right direction, but it does not solve the deeper
ecological and economic problem which goes beyond national borders. Even if
Germany is at the moment, as one of Europe’s most developed countries, going
through its “green transition,” this has devastating environmental and health
consequences for the rest of the European Union.
In late January, when children
in Belgium were protesting against climate change, it became clearer than ever
that you cannot just “outsource” or “export” air pollution while at the same
time schools were closed in Macedonia because of extremely high levels
of air pollution. Already in December 2018, two cities in Macedonia — the
western city of Tetovo and the capital, Skopje — were named by the European Air Quality Index as the most
polluted cities in Europe.
In other words, Western Europe
is literally exporting “air pollution” to the periphery of the EU. According to
the German Handelsblatt, the export of German used diesel cars
increased to 233,321 in 2017, up 18 percent from the year before. Although the
main export is still to France, Austria and Italy, a significant number went to
Eastern Europe: 11,841 cars went to Hungary, 9,439 to Slovakia and 10,899 to
Romania. In 2017, the import of second-hand diesel cars from Germany to
Croatia rose by 89 percent.
But once again, this time
explicitly, the framing of the story was a typical dismissal of the true
problem. The German newspaper carried the title “Eastern Europe’s appetite for
dirty old diesels,” as if the people of Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Romania and Bulgaria would not be happy with an Energiewende and
would not rather breathe fresh air instead of… wearing gas masks.
“THERE IS NO GREEN TRANSITION
IN ONE COUNTRY”
What this reality of “Folding
Europe” — less science fiction, more capitalist realism — makes more and more
evident is that the solution to today’s universal problems (like climate change
or environmental breakdown) cannot lie in solutions that are already
distributed according to the different realities or “folders” of contemporary
Europe: “green transition” for the West, Diesel for the East.
This “uneven development” is
not only manifested in the stark division between the center and the periphery,
becoming tangible with air pollution; it is at the same time a deep class
division within societies, as became visible with the Yellow Vests protests in
France, where it was — once again — the poor who were destined to pay the costs
of the “green transition” through a “carbon tax.”
What is becoming more obvious
when faced with the recent reports about a complete planetary
environmental breakdown is that “green transition” for the rich, and ecological
catastrophe for the poor, is not a solution if we want to have a liveable
planet at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment