The air we breathe transformed into a commodity – 06/14/2023 – Rodrigo Tavares

Fires raging across Canada last week sent a plume of orange smoke over several US cities, including New York. We’ve all seen the standard Mad Max apocalyptic imagery.

Air quality in Manhattan has reached the lowest levels since the 1960s, local officials said. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the emission of one of the main air pollutants (PM_2.5), which should not exceed 15 µg/m³ (micrograms per cubic meter), reached an alarming 27 µg/m³ in the US on June 7th. Americans responded to the emergency scenario by resorting to masks, air purifiers and home confinement.

How does this US scenario compare to São Paulo? An analysis by Iema (Institute of Energy and Environment) revealed that air pollution in the capital of São Paulo has remained, over the last two decades, above the maximum recommended by the WHO. In some regions of the city, pollution rates exceed four times the limit. Even in the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, atmospheric pollutants crossed the barrier of what is considered safe for public health. What, last week, was an emergency episode for New Yorkers is the past and present of São Paulo residents.

According to this study, 8,409 deaths in São Paulo can be attributed annually to the levels of concentrations of pollutants in the atmosphere. The WHO considers air pollution the greatest environmental risk to human health, contributing to the increase of respiratory diseases and infections, lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Worldwide, it kills about 7 million people.

The safety limits defined by WHO have been adjusted at the same pace as science advances. It happened in 2005 and 2021. But in Brazil, air quality standards are more static and significantly more permissive than the values ​​defined by the World Health Organization.

Updating the limits would imply declaring the weather conditions in the country to be catastrophic. It is a politically sensitive step.

If atmospheric pollution is not tackled, the tendency is to privatize oxygen consumption. The same happened with another essential good, water. We pay it to public and private sanitation companies and companies that bottle it. The town of Paisley, in Scotland, was the first to sell treated water distributed by a sewerage system (1804). São Paulo, Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro were pioneers in Brazil to build piped water supply systems, in the second half of the 19th century.

The first companies selling “clean air” from Norway, New Zealand, the English countryside or the Himalayas began to appear a decade ago. In India, in 2019, the Oxy Pure bar was opened, where customers can inhale oxygen for 15 minutes to escape the strong pollution of Delhi. As with the domestic water supply, our homes and workplaces could eventually be adapted to receive oxygen.

The air we breathe was the last bastion immune to commoditization. Currently, practically all the ingredients of our experience can be commoditized, including everything we consume, social relationships, access to nature, spirituality, the arts. Our physical survival as a species depends on our individual ability to be buyers. The rapid growth of artificial intelligence, with its impact on the way we produce and consume goods and services, will consolidate the passivity of human beings. As we abdicate being active creators, we will become receivers of goods and knowledge produced by third parties, including algorithms.

The intensification of pollution rates will also oblige us to bring involuntary morphological acts, such as breathing or blinking, to the field of consciousness. If I inhale air about 20,000 times a day, how many inhalations of contaminated air can I take daily without harming my health? Thousand? Ten thousand? And how to avoid them?

Currently, a 50-liter oxygen cylinder costs approximately R$ 3,000. Depending on the flow rate, it can be consumed in up to one day, which represents a monthly expense of BRL 90,000. It is an inaccessible value for those who do not have a bank account represented by exponentials. The alternative is better public policy.

Some Brazilian states have adopted strategic air quality plans, but unfortunately without executive muscle or long-term vision. Most states don’t even have an air quality monitoring station. If we are left to our own devices, how much are we willing to pay for the air we breathe?

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