LThe brakes are familiar. From the perspective of states, decarbonization has two daunting aspects. Firstly, our emissions are lost in the mass of CO₂ At the global level, any major effort will be intangible if we are the only ones making it. Second, the climate is influenced by inertia, and reducing our emissions, even globally, will not produce results for decades.

These two elements (dilution and delay) have been repeated so often that they are part of our inner myths. In the minds of political leaders, they together form a perfect excuse not to commit to necessary changes. Technically speaking, neither argument is wrong, although neither is it irrefutable. But just look at CO emissions₂ amounts to ignoring a central evil: environmental pollution.

Pollution is anything that is transferred to the environment and alters ecosystems and human health. Pollution is an unintended and overwhelming consequence of industrial growth. It is the older sister of climate change. Their origins, i.e. their causes, are the same, namely fossil fuels. Pollution arose much earlier and is much greater, in the sense that its impact is much greater today.

Pollution is the world’s greatest environmental risk, contributing to the deaths of nine million people each year, or one in six deaths. In France, estimates vary but are significant, ranging from 40,000 to almost 100,000 people per year whose deaths are partly due to pollution. There is no organ in the human body that escapes him.

Huge economic losses

However, the phenomenon is not given enough attention and does not receive the attention it deserves for several reasons, one of which predominates: environmental pollution causes frequent diseases. Its toxicity is nonspecific. It contributes to cardiovascular disease and cancer, which are already the two leading causes of death at global and national levels. It plays a role in respiratory diseases and mental illnesses, etc., in all the pathologies that we expect around us and from which we will one day die. However, we do not think of blaming pollution as the culprit for the occurrence of these diseases.

The economic losses are also enormous, but are not stigmatized anywhere. They never appear in accounting, the basic language of governments. The estimates of lancet or the World Bank estimate that 6% of annual wealth would be lost to pollution-related damage, which is undoubtedly an underestimate as the data is again incomplete.

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