Diwali is over. October is about to end. AQI has been well above 300 past few days and will be like this for the next couple of months (might even go beyond 500 on some days). Expect some showers because the government is going to try artificial rain on the 29th.
Here are 5 things about air pollution that have bothered me-
- Air Pollution is a symptom and not the problem. Unless we radically change our political and economic systems, air pollution is here to stay.
- The policy makers, analysts, and newspapers obsess over AQI and PM2.5 levels, but it is a fetishistic way of framing the problem. I draw here from Erik Swyngedouw’s work1 on CO2 fetishism, where all the climate discussions are woven around this magical greenhouse gas to get us out of the complex, incoherent, and traumatic confrontation with climate change.
- Air quality monitors do not and cannot capture the truth of air quality. Some of them don’t work, some are being manipulated, and others are being showered with water tankers to keep the levels low. Some are even switched off when things go really bad. This happens not just in Delhi but in other cities as well. The models and high-resolution maps rely on these data (which are considered to be ground “truth”). Faulty input and faulty output. Let’s not even go in the direction where we challenge the categories of AQI itself. If we were to follow British standards, then our air quality would be bad all year, and not just in winter.
- Half of the pollution for any given city (okay, maybe I’m taking a guess, but for Delhi it’s two-thirds) comes from outside. Localist actions will not help.
- Lastly, and perhaps the most indigestible fact, is that we all perversely enjoy this pollution, which Lacan calls Jouissance2. This is different from getting pleasure. Jouissance is about getting a perverse pleasure from pain, the obscene, from repeating things that we know are dangerous for us. An example is watching a horror movie, or doing an adventurous sport.
References
1. Enjoying climate change: Jouissance as a political factor
2. Jouissance
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