18/03/2019
Your government is hiding things from you. At least if you live in São Paulo, Brasil.
The current estimate is that 17,000 people die each year in the state of São Paulo due to air pollution. This calculation, carried out by a USP (University of São Paulo) research team, also estimated that if nothing is done to solve the problem, by 2030, 250,000 people will die in the metropolis.
SP has the most advanced environmental legislation in the country when it comes to air pollution. But it is far from being an international model. The World Health Organization (WHO) system recommends that the acceptable limit of ozone in the atmosphere should be 100 micrograms per milliliter within 8 hours.
São Paulo’s limit is 140 micrograms.
This is because the regulation and analysis of the air quality of the state is done by Cetesb. The organization has much weaker pollution standards than WHO.
In a simpler analogy, according to Cetesb the air pollution alarm sounded 36 times in 2015. If the metropolis followed WHO standards, there would have been more than 1,000 alerts in the year.
The main pollutant of the city comes from automobiles. These cause 73% of the emissions of greenhouse gases of São Paulo.
Read the original article: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/07/ar-sao-paulo/