Biggest threat to health

Andrew Kenny’s views on fossil fuels and carbon dioxide (CO²) are dangerous (Fossil fuels good for Earth, July 21). Before responding, I declare a vested interest: as a paediatrician and grandfather, I am invested in the health of today’s and future children.

Kenny dismisses as unimportant the fact that fossil fuels “pollute the air with smoke, sulphur and nitrogen oxides”. In fact, air pollution, overwhelmingly from fossil fuels, kills more than 3-million people every year — more than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined. All the products of combustion — particulates, black carbon, hydrocarbons, mercury, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide — have multiple negative health consequences. Young children are biologically and psychologically the most vulnerable. Consequences include low birth weight, impaired development, reduced lung function, pneumonia and asthma.

Kenny asserts — against overwhelming consensus among climate scientists — that increasing atmospheric CO² is “the best thing we have done for the planet”. Climate change is the biggest threat to health in history.

Direct effects include increased disease, injury and deaths from extreme climatic events. Indirect effects include food insecurity, malnutrition, the spread of infectious disease and mental ill-health from displacement and social and political instability. Political instability leads to conflict, which causes migration, more conflict and overwhelmed health and social security systems. Again, children are the most vulnerable. I would like my grandchildren and their successors to live in a world where beauty still exists, where people are congenial, sociable and happy, and where everyone has growing freedoms and opportunities to strive for a better world. The possibilities to create such a world are shrinking, and climate change will kill them. I have an interest in keeping them alive.

Louis Reynolds

Rondebosch