Global Warming Kills

This is blood-boiling stuff.

A World Health Organization (WHO) study says that 77,000 people are already dying every year in Asia and the Pacific as a direct or indirect result of climate change.  That’s not a hypothetical number; that’s the current state of affairs.

Why so many deaths?  The WHO cites the “increasing frequency of summer heat waves in temperate zones, and typhoons, hurricanes and floods throughout the world.”

Down the line, the death toll is bound to rise as rainfall is reduced and disease-carrying mosquitoes appear in new areas.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to exacerbate the problem instead of lifting a finger to solve it.  In a recent Harper’s, Bill McKibben gives the following assessment of Bush’s abysmal record on climate change:

Bush came into office promising that he would require U.S. power plants to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, and if he’d stuck to the plan, our country would already look quite different. Solar panels would have begun to sprout in real numbers, cars would be smaller, we’d be building more passenger trains. Instead, Bush repudiated the promise within a few weeks of taking office. He said he didn’t want to do anything that would raise the price of energy. His energy task force, chaired by Dick Cheney, barely even mentioned the possibility of global warming. It concentrated on new places to find fossil fuel, new pipelines to carry it, new refineries to refine it — and indeed, just as Cheney suggested, there are about 159 new coal-fired power plants in some stage of planning or construction around the country. Meanwhile, carbon-dioxide output has increased an average of 1.6 percent every year — and the average price for a gallon of gas has nearly doubled.

But Bush’s folly at home isn’t the worst of it. As soon as he took office, he also repudiated America’s participation in the Kyoto treaty process, the one international attempt to begin reining in carbon emissions. And he did it at the critical moment when China and India were just beginning their rapid energy takeoffs. It’s possible that this is what history will judge Bush most sternly for, even more than the Iraq war. With real effort and real resources, we might have nudged the emerging economies onto a different energy trajectory in 2000, but by now their path appears set. Plans call for some 600 new coal-fired plants in China and India alone; the Chinese open a new plant every week.

The blood of those 77,000 people a year is therefore on Bush’s hands.  Indeed, it’s on the hands of every one of our national leaders — Republican or Democrat — who has sat idly by as the environmental wreckage has mounted.

No more excuses are acceptable.  No more delays.  No more hand-wringing about the “cost” of action.  The cost of inaction is plenty high.

Update: A new Pew survey shows that as the U.S.’s image remains in decline around the world, concern about climate change as the “top global threat” is rising.