7 Billion People Breathing Bad Air, Most Denying Global Warming

Happy Halloween.

Eric Wesoff October 31, 2011

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

Forget global warming for now. Let's talk dirty air.

If you believe that human-induced global warming is a hoax designed to line the pockets of greedy scientists and Al Gore, it might be easier to acknowledge that fossil fuels are fouling the air.

Here's a chart from the Los Angeles Times that shows how China's Ministry of Environmental Protection interprets air quality versus those environmental alarmists at the U.S. Embassy. What Beijing calls "slightly polluted" qualifies as "hazardous" by the diplomats.

Dirty air might be a stronger agent for change than the threat of global warming.

According to PEW Research, in 2010, only 34 percent of Americans believed that "global warming is occurring mostly because of human activity." That's down from 50 percent in 2006.

And Halloween 2011 marks the day that the world's population reached the seven-billion mark. That's seven billion people aspiring to an energy-intensive higher standard of living and facing the choice of basing their behavior on petroleum fuel and coal or renewable sources.