Clean Air and Electric Cars: World Health Organization declares diesel fumes cause lung cancer

    What else do we need to act now?

Clean Air and Electric Cars: Most-Polluted Cities in US - American Lung Association Infographic

One more reason to Dump The Pump...

Clean Air and Electric Cars: Traffic pollution kills 5,000 a year in UK - Exhaust fumes are twice as deadly as roads

  "We are talking a lot about the economic benefits of electric cars here, and that they will be the only economically viable solution for our personal  mobility after the Oil Crunch. Unfortunately, there is another side of the oil - nobody is talking enough about, oil kills and not only on the battle fields far away during the "liberation" military occupations, but literally on the streets every day. If this price was seriously accounted among the other considerations about electric cars, we think, that our tipping point for the mass market for electric cars would be already here.

  We all have the right for the Clean Air, but why not on the streets? We do not think that the air quality in Los Angeles is any better than it is in London - all mega cities in the world are killing thousands of their residents by allowing to drive ICE cars slowly day by day."

Lithium Rush: The Art Of War In The Markets: China Getting Ready For 5 Million Electric Cars by 2020

"All our estimations about the Electric Cars and their adoption rates will be proven wrong in the end. It have happened with all technology, we can not really predict the future here. We can only estimate the trend. And here is another reason to move to Electrification of our transportation - Clean Air. When you have it - you never need it. Just the look at the picture from Beijing tells you why China is so anxious to move fast in the electric cars space. Question is not only about survival economically in the Peak Oil environment, but about surviving physically in our mega cities and China will have majority of them on its soil very soon."

The Economic Times:

World Health Organization declares diesel fumes cause lung cancer


Diesel fumes cause lung cancer, the World Health Organization declared Tuesday, and experts said they were more carcinogenic than secondhand cigarette smoke. 

The WHO decision, the first to elevate diesel to the "known carcinogen" level, may eventually affect some U.S. workers who are heavily exposed to exhaust. It is particularly relevant to poor countries, where trucks, generators, and farm and factory machinery routinely belch clouds of sooty smoke and fill the air with sulfurous particulates. 

The United States and other wealthy nations have less of a problem because they require modern diesel engines to burn much cleaner than they did even a decade ago. Most industries, such as mining, already have limits on the amount of diesel fumes to which workers may be exposed. 

The medical director of the American Cancer Society praised the ruling by the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer, saying his group "has for a long time had concerns about diesel." 

The cancer society is likely come to the same conclusion the next time its scientific committee meets, said the director, Dr. Otis W. Brawley. 

"I don't think it's bad to have a diesel car," Brawley added. "I don't think it's good to breathe its exhaust. I'm not concerned about people who walk past a diesel vehicle, I'm a little concerned about people like toll collectors, and I'm very concerned about people like miners, who work where exhaust is concentrated." 

Debra T. Silverman, a cancer researcher for the U.S. government who headed an influential study published in March that led to Tuesday's decision, said she was "totally in support" of the WHO ruling and expected that the government would soon follow suit in declaring diesel exhaust a carcinogen. 

Three separate federal agencies already classify diesel exhaust as a "likely carcinogen," a "potential occupational carcinogen" or "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen." 

Silverman, chief of environmental epidemiology for the National Cancer Institute, said her study of 50 years of exposure to diesel fumes by 12,000 miners showed that 

nonsmoking miners who were heavily exposed to diesel fumes for years had seven times the normal lung cancer risk of nonsmokers. 

The WHO decision was announced Tuesday in Lyon, France, after a weeklong scientific meeting. It also said diesel exhaust was a possible cause of bladder cancer. Diesel exhaust now shares the WHO's Group 1 carcinogen status with smoking, asbestos, ultraviolet radiation, alcohol and other elements that pose cancer risks."