New Delhi Could Impose Lockdown to Combat Pollution
You’ll have heard various climate change fanatics call for lockdowns to be used to reduce carbon emissions – because they worked so well to curb the spread of COVID-19! Well, it’s starting. India’s Supreme Court is calling for a lockdown in New Delhi because of a “health emergency”. But the “emergency” is not due to COVID-19. It’s due to air pollution. NPR has more.
At a hearing Monday, justices ordered authorities to halt all nonessential travel on roads in the national capital region. They also told them to close offices in the area, shifting tens of millions of people to work from home.
It’s unclear if or when such a lockdown would take effect, or how long it might last. Delhi’s air quality appeared to ease slightly Monday. The AQI is now in the low 400s on a 500-point scale. Last week, it was off the charts in some areas.
Delhi’s Chief Minister has indicated his willingness to impose a pollution-related lockdown but has said it would have minimal effect without similar measures from neighbouring states. Officials from the states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh plan to hold meetings Tuesday.
New Delhi’s schools are already closed this week because of air pollution that’s been about four times the safe limit. Construction sites are also on pause, which will ultimately slow the economy.
This is all because of toxic smog across much of northern India. It happens every winter as industrial and vehicular emissions mix with smoke from crop-burning after the harvest.
While farmers have often been blamed for exacerbating the pollution problem, government lawyers told the Supreme Court on Monday that crop-burning amounts to only about 10% of emissions. One justice responded by saying it might be even lower.
Some of the schools forced to shut this week had only just reopened for the first time in nearly 20 months, because of COVID-19.
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Seriously?
Just when you think they could not come up with something so nuts… They do it again.
What do they want?!
Total power. It’s not hard to figure out.
Interesting that they close the schools due to air quality fears.
Do the children get to breath different air when they’re at home?
How many street food sellers, traders etc. eventually die from poverty, as opposed to lives saved by locking down?
Funny, I read the BBC’s “disinformation specialist” today explaining that the notion of climate lockdowns is just another “unfounded” conspiracy theory put about by ignorant right wing trolls.
That is interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if said “specialist” had material about the Indian climate lockdown in front of him when he denounced the spreading of the notion of a possible climate lockdown as bad and sick.
In a similar case, as the Austrian police swarm into supermarkets and onto public transport hunting for the unvaccinated, the editors at the Guardian have celebrated by
singing the Horst Wessel songredefining the word “routine”: Austrian police carry out routine checks as unvaccinated enter lockdown.Get that word. “Routine”.
“It can happen any time and anywhere,” the interior minister, Karl Nehammer of the Austrian People’s party, said of the police checks. “Every citizen has to expect to be checked.”
The turd who wrote the piece calling the checks “routine” is Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s “head of bureau” in Berlin. The checks are described as “routine” not only in the headline but also in the body text, in what hacks call the “lede”. The guy has no excuse.
This may be the point when I decide I will never visit the Guardian’s website again.
Routine Train journeys one-way out of Germany to Camps in Poland where people can work their way to freedom.
I understand that this has been normal for a number of years now. Depending on climatic conditions the level of pollution can reach very high levels and the city authorities have to take action to clear the air. Nothing to do with C19 or climate change just that the air is unbreathable.
Respiratory disease is a big killer in Delhi due to air pollution, but the powers that be don’t want you to know that.
Similar in other cities in and around the India subcontinent. A friend does charity work in Nepal and he said you can see a cloud of pollution over Kathmandu and respiratory disease was common place. Now they say Covid is responsible for respiratory disease and death.
Agreed and the world so far has had one method of achieving better air quality.
Get rich fast enough that you start giving a s### about your environment.
All the 1st world went through the same curve in their history
The 2nd world is going through it now.
The 3rd world is yet to get there, starving to death is a real & immediate concern when you are that poor.
All the cretins who supported lockdowns in the spring of 2020 inadvertently did two things:
So, that is the precedent that was established and we all have to live with it now.
Because people panicked over a virus that ended up being little more than a flu.
The world has been wrecked by stupid people causing enormous harm to themselves and others.
Stop conflating carbon emissions with air pollution!
Climate change & smog aren’t the same thing at all, it’s just sloppy journalism.
Not that i’m condoning lockdowns for anything other than escaped tigers running loose in the streets, even then I’m a firm supporter of Darwin awards.
Quite right.It is said that some modern cars are good at sucking in polluted air and passing it though the engine and catalytic converter to produce exhaust gases that are cleaner than the air going in! OK – maybe that’s apocryphal but it does allude to the fact that the automotive industry has done a great job of efficiently burning fossil fuel to produce little else but carbon dioxide and water. Such a good job that the environmentalists had to declare CO2 to be a pollutant.
Actually, dealing with local air pollution by emitting less smoke, unlike fighting a virus with lockdowns, is both a reasonable and working idea. The pollution in Delhi decreased greatly during the early corona lockdowns, and soon went back to normal catastrophic levels after they ended.
Yes, that’ll be when all the poor street dwellers & itinerant workers lost all their income.
Their food intake went to catastrophic levels almost immediately, but SJW are never bothered about the poor going into penury or starving to death as long as they can virtue signal.
Why is it left wing nutters fail to understand Air quality is not am immediate concern on the hierarchy of needs.
I remember a great poem Rudyard Kipling write about passively accepting lockdowns.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
I am in no doubt, none at all, that the next thing added to our Social Credit Score after endless boosters will be “carbon credits”, which will grant (or more often, decline) permission to travel.
Yes, I know, vital, beneficial CO2 is unrelated to actual harmful air pollution, but when has reality been a consideration for ecomentalism.
Didn’t take long to segue into Climate Change lockdowns. Is India over with the dreaded covid having moved to Ivermectin? Maybe the smog is down to all the coal they are using. Even China reacted to smog a while ago.
Are they talking about real pollution (e,g, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen etc) or are they talking about CO2, which is a natural constituent of the atmosphere?