India's $15 Billion Diesel Subsidies Mean Delhi Air Tastes Different From Beijing, W. Same Results

[hatrack]

Molecular biologist George Easow’s move to India to start a clinical diagnostics business lasted just three weeks before he was convinced to return to the U.K. The convincing was done by his seven-month-old daughter Fiona. Within days of moving to New Delhi, the child was wheezing and gasping for air because of smog. “She could hardly breathe,” said her father. Fiona was kept indoors and put on medication. Nothing worked. “We had to make a call,” Easow said, adding her symptoms disappeared once back in the U.K. and haven’t returned.

For the 16.8 million residents of India’s capital, the wheezing continues. The bad news is it’s going to get worse. New Delhi isn’t alone as cities across the nation suffer from some of the worst air quality in the world. That’s costing the country 1.1 trillion rupees ($18 billion) in shortened life spans of productive members of the urban population each year, according to a June World Bank report.

While Beijing and Shanghai make the headlines for air pollution caused by factory smokestacks burning coal, Delhi residents get their smog right in the face from cars and trucks running on cheap diesel.

India subsidizes sales of the fuel to the equivalent of $15 billion a year, encouraging purchases of diesel vehicles that can pump out exhaust gases with 10 times the carcinogenic particles found in gasoline exhausts. The result: Delhi’s air on average last year was laced with double the toxic particles per cubic meter being reported in Beijing, leading to respiratory diseases, lung cancer and heart attacks.

EDIT

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-02-27/diesel-leaves-delhi-air-worse-than-beijing-s-carbon-and-climate

[bloomington-lib]

1. "costing the country 1.1 trillion rupees in shortened life spans of productive members"

I know this isn't the point of the article, but I hope someday in the future, we'll look back on this period and think how crazy it was that we always referred to people as "productive members" as if our main purpose in life was to make money for either ourselves or someone else. Hopefully our priorities will be different.

[MisterP]

2. that's pretty close the "humanistic" INC's language (and Mexico's PRI)--a sort of hollowed-out

Leninism

[quadrature]

3. so Venezuela can sell gasoline for 10 cents a gallon...

that is OK.

but when India sells diesel for $3.34 a gallon,
which is above the world wholesale price
(at least as of the, last time I looked)

that is bad.
Why is that?

[Systematic Chaos]

4. Any day now they'll come up with a way to "regulate" this shit, I just KNOW it!

Thank the Kea for a new, almost endless supply of material!

*boom tiss*

[kristopher]

5. Right because the Chinese couldn't possibly figure out how to pass a Clean Air Act

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112765339#post6
-So sayeth the kea.
ba da boom!