The Brown Cloud Of Asia-A Man-Made Degradation Factor Environmentalists Won't A

South Asia puts out more soot from its industrial chimneys than anywhere else on Earth, but even this is dwarfed by the smoke from millions of cooking fires. Research at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay has found that more than 40 per cent of the soot in the air comes from cooking, with another 13 per cent from forest fires. It concluded that the warming effect of the soot was 10 times as great as greenhouse gases over the Indian Ocean. Even before this discovery, the cooking fires of the poor were known to be one of the world's gravest environmental hazards. A cocktail of poisonous chemicals swirling in the smoke from dung or wood fires kills 2.2 million people a year - mainly women cooking on them and their children. The United Nations Environment Programme says they are responsible for 5 per cent of the world's disease - more than HIV/Aids - and cost the world economy up to £400-billion a year in lost production through sickness and death. Yet worldwide two billion people have to burn wood and dung because they cannot access or afford modern forms of energy. Soot from the fires is also one of the main causes of the so-called Asian Brown Cloud, a vast pall, two miles thick, that hovers over the south of the continent, reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground by up to 15 per cent. Now the NASA study shows that it may also have global effects. Dr Koch says that the soot has "potentially long-term implications on climate patterns for much of the globe." So as the Greenland ice sheet melts, flooding in the Thames estuary may be caused by the cooking of sparse meals far away in the Indian countryside." Why do today's environmentalists want to wage a very costly fight against pollution based on a controversial scientific model which may be seriously flawed? Many suggest the cost will be crippling, even life-altering. Is CO2 a pollutant or the natural result of carbon-based life on earth? There is growing evidence to suggest that we have misplaced priorities and that people are dying because of it. Surely in terms of dollars in impoverished places, environmentalist blind spots are obscene. India and the other great polluters in the region are not subject to Kyoto. As a result their people suffer first and foremost from the poisons we allow them and also allow our companies like Union Carbide who have relocated there. We don't seem serious about the tragedy in Bhopal if we keep setting up Bhopals again and again. In terms of life and death this failure is close to homicide. The phrase “Kyoto Genocide” may come to describe our negligence concerning the poorest, most suffering people on the Earth. I am ashamed that we squander our resources when the battle seems as simple as life or death for so many of us. [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on April 5, 2005]