From University of Southern California another lesson from the economic train wreck that is Greece; people stop worrying about the environment when you make cleaner fuels too expensive to use.
The price for heating oil has skyrocketed in Greece over the last two years (the government raised the taxes on heating oil 450% this fall alone), and now many residents are turning to wood burning for winter heat since they can’t afford the oil, which has affected the city’s air quality:
Greek economic crisis leads to air pollution crisis
Levels of dangerous air particulates jump 30 percent as people turn to burning cheaper fuel sources
In the midst of a winter cold snap, a study from researchers in the United States and Greece reveals an overlooked side effect of economic crisis – dangerous air quality caused by burning cheaper fuel for warmth.
The researchers, led by Constantinos Sioutas of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, show that the concentration of fine air particles in one of Greece’s economically hardest hit areas has risen 30 percent since the financial crisis began, leading to potential long-term health effects.
These fine particles – measuring less than 2.5 microns in diameter (approximately 1/30th the diameter of a human hair) – are especially dangerous because they can lodge deep into the tissue of lungs, according to the EPA.
“People need to stay warm, but face decreasing employment and rising fuel costs,” explained Sioutas, senior author of the study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology and Fred Champion Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the USC Viterbi School. “The problem is economic hardship has compelled residents to burn low quality fuel, such as wood and waste materials, that pollutes the air.”
Unemployment in Greece climbed above 27 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, heating oil prices have nearly tripled in Greece during the Greek financial crisis of the last few years – driven in part by a fuel tax hike. Cold Greeks, it would appear (according to the air quality), have turned to wood as a major fuel source.
In their study, the researchers collected air samples that supported anecdotal evidence of Greek residents burning of wood and trash for heating. Taken over two-month stretches in Winter 2012 and again in Winter 2013, the samples reveal a dramatic increase in airborne fine particles since the beginning of the economic crisis.
The concentration of these particles, which has been linked to increased risk for heart disease and respiratory problems, rose from 26 to 36 micrograms per square meter over the study period, the researchers found. The EPA standard in the United States is an average of 20 micrograms per square meter over a 24-hour period. Worse yet, the concentrations of carcinogenic organic compounds such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) increased five-fold during the study period, the researchers found.
The concentration of the particulates was highest in the evening, presumably when more people were burning fuel for warmth, the study found. An analysis of the air samples also showed a two-to-five-fold increase in the airborne concentrations of organic compounds such as levoglucosan, mannosan and galactosan, which indicate the burning of biomass. The presence of these compounds has been strongly correlated in past research to oxidative stress in human cells, which is linked to inflammation, aging and the development of age-related diseases.
“Wood’s cheap, but it’s having a major negative impact on air quality,” Sioutas said. The authors recommend active involvement of public authorities and local agencies to implement effective air pollution control strategies. They suggest increasing natural gas distribution in residential areas as a practical long-term solution. Catalytic domestic wood burners and increasing the energy efficiency of existing buildings might be additional possible solutions, according to the report.
Sioutas collaborated with researchers from USC, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the study. Arian Saffari, a Provost PhD fellow at the USC Viterbi School, is lead author of the study. The research was funded by the USC Provost, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the City of Thessaloniki Mayor’s office.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Stop taxing heating oil would be another solution, one that does not seem to have occurred to the authors…
Well if the Greeks are burning wood for heat, that means the Greek trireme threat will recede.
Where Greece is now, most of Africa, S. America and Asia have been since forever.
If CAGW had not been invented by the politicians, many of these places could have had clean energy by now.
And they couldn’t see this coming?
I nominate another Tag: Energy Poverty
Shouldn’t the headline be:
Environmental concern disappears with economic INstability?
Athens is once again showing humanity the way of the future.
Welcome to the third world. Newspapers with non smearing ink, cardboard, polyelthylene bags, anything that burns,etc, will be recycled in ways unanticipated by the economic wizards and bureucrats. The response will be to outlaw burning, then the burning will happen at night. Then there will be heavy enforcement action. Then it will be too dangerous to enforce.
Nothing new in my neck of the woods (Northern Ontario). When the cost of heating oil goes up, my dad just cut more wood. When it went down, he cut less.
People who want to put “green taxes” on heating oil should understand this. I mean, they are all very smart. He has to fall back on his Grade 8 diploma…
Economic stability disappears with environmental con
cernAnother alternate title: Environmental concerns disappear when economic stability disappears.
I think everyone agrees that the title, as it stands, gives the opposite indication as to the point of the post.
You know, next they’ll be telling us that impoverished 3rd world countries have worse environmental records than the developed industrial countries do.
Apparently one of the reasons for increasng the taxes on heating oil was to equalize its price with diesel fuel so that people would stop selling heating oil as diesel fuel. Apparently “equalizing taxes” always means increasing the lesser taxed article. You know, they could have reduced the taxes on diesel fuel to achieve their goal. But NOOOOOO…….!!!
Not just the third world that depends on wood. I live in rural SE England and for me and my neighbours wood burning is the most cost effective way to heat our homes.
Heating oil has shot up to unacceptable levels and with no mains gas wood is the only sensible alternative. There is also the aesthetic factor – I don’t think you can beat sitting round a roaring log fire when the snow is lying thick on the ground.
Andrew Marvell says:
December 19, 2013 at 12:03 pm
+1.
Think how history would have changed if they had burned that Trojan horse to stay warm.
What is it with do-gooders that makes them incapable of seeing more than one move down the chess board?
Wood burning is a small worry compared to the mess they have in Greece. They and many other EU countries are all experiencing the failure of a socialist style government. Untenable entitlements abound and there is nobody left to tax or borrow from to pick up the tab.
Take a close look mighty USA, this is the exact same thing you are blindly heading towards via Obama.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
If the basics for survival are uncertain, who has the time, energy or money for non-essentials or luxuries? By no means delude yourself — today’s environmental movement is not only a daydream but also a rich man’s avocation.
The whole environmental and climate catastrophe movement and it’s infestations of completely irrational do-gooers and “saving the earther’s” has created a vast morass of unintended consequences, nearly all of which finish up as being considerably worse in their effects than the supposed and unproven, hypothesized problems would have ever created themselves.
Along with all those lists of those innumerable faded and totally wrong predictions of catastrophes to come and destroy life as we know it if CO2 [ due to pure and total ignorance, falsely labelled as “carbon” ] was allowed to increase, perhaps it is time for somebody to start the onerous task of listing all the unintended and usually harmful consequences arising from the past implementation of the numerous “planet saving” actions [ sic] of the “do-gooding” and “saving the earth” eco nuts.
A list of the suffering and the destruction of wealth and treasure and the destruction of living standards and the immense levels of destruction and damage to the environment and quality of living [ think bio-fuel; wood burning in power generators compared to coal, wind turbines and bird and bat killing, choosing “eat or heat” and etc and etc ] brought about by the do-gooders and the eco-nuts and their “saving the earth” policies would be quite enlightening to most of the public.
The law of unintended consequences always wins in the end. Will they never learn?
In my city of Christchurch NZ where we have an earthquake recovery of sorts going on,(Its mostly still theoretical), all building is to meet the strictest CO2 emissions and land is being cleared to protect wetlands (aka swamps) and river banks according to Agenda21. Of course open fires are prohibited and electricity has a habit of failing when you need it most, (cold stormy days & nights). But we are tough here. Just need to keep a great coat in the closet. Mind you part of our government’s rebuild plan is to cram the population from the suburbs into the CBD. When that part of the total rebuild is done, at least we will keep each other warm.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
This may be of interest.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/tree-theft-on-the-rise-in-germany-as-heating-costs-increase-a-878013.html
Not just poor countries. But the pollution from the people burning wood will be eclipsed I would think by the brown coal to be burned in their many new power stations
Supplying more wood might help. Wood burns a lot cleaner in a hot fire with good airflow, but if you are so poor you are trying to conserve wood, you reduce down the airflow, and create a much more smoky fire.
What a surprise – that any starving person would eat the last surviving Dodo! The question is this: how did Greece get to its Dodo moment?
It is quite correct that poverty drives people to impoverish their environment further, bearing in mind that the poor generally get the impoverished bits as their share of the environment anyway.
But It is quite erroneous to argue that the decline in Greece’s air quality suddenly started with some taxes on heating oil.
Greece has spent the past several millenia treating its environment as infinite source and infinite sump. The net result is exhausted minerals, exhausted, thin soils – including much bare rock, and a sea (shared with others) that is one gigantic over-fished sump. It has to be a sump because water no longer flows out of the Mediterranean Sea into the Atlantic Ocean. The reason for that is that too much water is extacted by too many countries that border the Mediterranean.
Faced with this decline in resources, Greece has for decades exported its best and brightest young people. The biggest single Greek population is not in Greece – it is in Melbourne Australia, where they have contributed mightily to the Australian economy.
For decades Greece treated foreign capital as an infinite, pain-free source of spending money and borrowed well beyond what they could pay. As for EEU ‘socialism’, the Greeks treated the ‘rules’ with utter and cynical contempt, systematically fiddling their national budgetary books. The Greek economic crisis was made worse by corrupt patronage politics, crony capitalism and featherbedded state institutions. As for Greek indigenous capital, it simply shifted its base ot other countries as soon as they could no longer screw anything out of the Greek economy.
Finally, there has been a well-documented and a marked unwillingness to pay taxes of any sort, let alone on heating oil.
The major direct competitor for tourism is Turkey. The ruins are generally in better nick, the sunshine is the same, the currency is competitive, the tourism infrastructure is competitive, and, by all accounts, the Turks treat tourists with respect.
What goes round comes round. Taxes on heating oil are the very least of Greece’s worries.
The take home messages are that we cannot treat the environment as infinite source and infinite sump and that the Greeks, and ourselves, have to live within our social, economic and enviornmental means.
rogerthesurf says:
‘In my city of Christchurch NZ where we have an earthquake recovery of sorts going on,(Its mostly still theoretical), all building is to meet the strictest CO2 emissions and land is being cleared to protect wetlands (aka swamps) and river banks according to Agenda21. ‘
I thought that the problem being addressed was liquefaction. Basically, the developers got it wrong and built suburbs on wetlands (swamps). With the big earthquake, the substrate liquefied, destroying or damaging the houses and urban infrastructure beyond economic repair. The New Zealand taxpayer is now paying for buying those houses and land and is subsidising the rebuilding of replacement accommodation elsewhere.
The developers, as they do, got away scot free with their profits.
But I suppose your theory, that it is a UN Agenda 21 plot might be more correct.