WHY WE SHOULD RAISE FUEL TAXES

Tax reform is no longer just a matter of raising revenues — but of saving lives.

Sometime tomorrow morning, some 13 million Metro Manila residents will brave their daily commutes — both in “Carmaggedon” and the daily MRT logjam. According to the 2016 data from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the commuters breathe smog with pollution levels three times above World Health Organization’s ( WHO) air quality guidelines.

From the 2012 National Emissions Inventory, 69% of national air pollutants came from motor vehicles, whereas for Metro Manila it was 90%.

Except this view of our dirty air dilemma is incomplete for two reasons.

LET THEM EAT POLLUTION

Take the issue of inequality in pollution. With 7 out of 10 Metro Manila commuters riding public transportation daily, intake levels of motor exhaust have been starkly regressive, with lower-income groups being more exposed to vehicle emissions than more affluent earners and air-conditioned car owners.

Yet none more so than transport workers and the urban poor — street vendors, public utility vehicle drivers, and slum communities near major roads. Not only are such groups forced, for occupational or residential reasons, to breathe filthy air for the brunt of their day, their diminished incomes leave them far less able to shield themselves from pollution and its impact.

The impact naturally includes carbon emissions that sully our global climate, but even more urgent for poorer Filipinos are their long- term health effects. In a 1991 University of the Philippines’ College of Medicine study, one in three ( 32.5%) jeepney drivers in Metro Manila was reported to have suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ( COPD), more than twice the rate of the average commuter.

A LEADING KILLER OF FILIPINOS

Our tainted air is not simply a national nuisance — it is a vast, yet silent, public health hazard, and already a leading cause of death. In 2014, the WHO already pronounced air pollution as the world’s single worst environmental health hazard, responsible for 40% of global fatalities from coronary heart disease, 40% from stroke, 11% from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and 6% from lung cancer.

The Philippines has been no exception to this trend. According to the World Bank, the number of Filipino deaths in 2013 attributed to dirty air was 57,403, out of the total recorded deaths of 531,280 that year. One can thus conclude that air pollution may have caused one-inten ( 10.8%) of all deaths in the country.

This figure should be no surprise once one considers some uncanny parallelisms between being exposed to exhaust- laden air and to tobacco smoking, another leading killer of Filipinos. Both involve inhaling harmful particulates (“tar” in the case of cigarettes); both are laced with combustion- related chemicals which are carcinogenic or toxic to human health ( e. g. carbon monoxide, benzene); and both entail some degree of involuntary exposure, most especially for the poor.

COMMUTING ON EDSA IS LIKE SMOKING TWO CIGARETTES

So striking are these similarities that scientists have even devised methods for estimating the “cigarette equivalents” of the harm wrought by airborne pollution on human health. If we applied one of the simpler versions of these metrics (endorsed by Berkeleybased scientists), we would find that breathing 2014 air pollution levels in Timog-EDSA, Quezon City has the rough equivalent of smoking 2 cigarettes on average ( see table).

To inhale this amount of cigaretteequivalents, a commuter would have to spend enough time on EDSA to breathe a cubic meter of polluted air, or around an hour and 40 minutes for a sitting traveler. Unfortunately, rush hour travel times for bus riders on EDSA can easily exceed more than two hours each way.

Doubly unfortunately, a 2016 study of the US National Cancer Institute concluded that smokers consuming just a single cigarette per day are already nine times likelier than non-smokers to die from lung cancer. The long-term toll on regular riders of jeepneys and open-window buses will be immense.

TAX REFORM FOR CLEANER, HEALTHIER CITIES

With our air pollution menace claiming such an outsized share of Filipinos’ lives every year, stronger policies to curb car emissions are urgently needed. Certainly, the importance of ongoing efforts to provide clean, affordable public transport and to raise fuel standards cannot be stressed enough. But it is doubtful whether these measures alone will act as quickly as necessary.

Arguably the single weakest link in our national response to air pollution has been our chronic neglect of effective tax measures — like the fuel and vehicle excise taxes ( now proposed by TRAIN, that is, the Tax Reform Acceleration and Inclusion bill) — as time- tested means for countering car pollution. Though overlooked since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1999, well- designed antipollution taxes have been consistently found to be one of the most effective means for curbing vehicle pollution worldwide. A 2013 study by Massachusetts