Yellow Pad
By Jerik Cruz
Sometime tomorrow morning, some 13 million Metro Manila residents will brave their daily commutes — both in “Carmaggedon” and the daily MRT logjam. According to the 2016 data from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the commuters breathe smog with pollution levels three times above World Health Organization’s (WHO) air quality guidelines.
From the 2012 National Emissions Inventory, 69% of national air pollutants came from motor vehicles, whereas for Metro Manila it was 90%.
Except this view of our dirty air dilemma is incomplete for two reasons.
LET THEM EAT POLLUTION
Take the issue of inequality in pollution. With 7 out of 10 Metro Manila commuters riding public transportation daily, intake levels of motor exhaust have been starkly regressive, with lower-income groups being more exposed to vehicle emissions than more affluent earners and air-conditioned car owners.
Yet none more so than transport workers and the urban poor — street vendors, public utility vehicle drivers, and slum communities near major roads. Not only are such groups forced, for occupational or residential reasons, to breathe filthy air for the brunt of their day, their diminished incomes leave them far less able to shield themselves from pollution and its impact.
The impact naturally includes carbon emissions that sully our global climate, but even more urgent for poorer Filipinos are their long-term health effects. In a 1991 University of the Philippines’ College of Medicine study, one in three (32.5%) jeepney drivers in Metro Manila was reported to have suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), more than twice the rate of the average commuter.
A LEADING KILLER OF FILIPINOS
Our tainted air is not simply a national nuisance — it is a vast, yet silent, public health hazard, and already a leading cause of death. In 2014, the WHO already pronounced air pollution as the world’s single worst environmental health hazard, responsible for 40% of global fatalities from coronary heart disease, 40% from stroke, 11% from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and 6% from lung cancer.
The Philippines has been no exception to this trend. According to the World Bank, the number of Filipino deaths in 2013 attributed to dirty air was 57,403, out of the total recorded deaths of 531,280 that year. One can thus conclude that air pollution may have caused one-in-ten (10.8%) of all deaths in the country.
This figure should be no surprise once one considers some uncanny parallelisms between being exposed to exhaust-laden air and to tobacco smoking, another leading killer of Filipinos. Both involve inhaling harmful particulates (“tar” in the case of cigarettes); both are laced with combustion-related chemicals which are carcinogenic or toxic to human health (e.g. carbon monoxide, benzene); and both entail some degree of involuntary exposure, most especially for the poor.
COMMUTING ON EDSA IS LIKE SMOKING TWO CIGARETTES
So striking are these similarities that scientists have even devised methods for estimating the “cigarette equivalents” of the harm wrought by airborne pollution on human health. If we applied one of the simpler versions of these metrics (endorsed by Berkeley-based scientists), we would find that breathing 2014 air pollution levels in Timog-EDSA, Quezon City has the rough equivalent of smoking 2 cigarettes on average (see table).
To inhale this amount of cigarette-equivalents, a commuter would have to spend enough time on EDSA to breathe a cubic meter of polluted air, or around an hour and 40 minutes for a sitting traveler. Unfortunately, rush hour travel times for bus riders on EDSA can easily exceed more than two hours each way.
Doubly unfortunately, a 2016 study of the US National Cancer Institute concluded that smokers consuming just a single cigarette per day are already nine times likelier than non-smokers to die from lung cancer. The long-term toll on regular riders of jeepneys and open-window buses will be immense.
TAX REFORM FOR CLEANER, HEALTHIER CITIES
With our air pollution menace claiming such an outsized share of Filipinos’ lives every year, stronger policies to curb car emissions are urgently needed. Certainly, the importance of ongoing efforts to provide clean, affordable public transport and to raise fuel standards cannot be stressed enough. But it is doubtful whether these measures alone will act as quickly as necessary.
Arguably the single weakest link in our national response to air pollution has been our chronic neglect of effective tax measures — like the fuel and vehicle excise taxes (now proposed by TRAIN, that is, the Tax Reform Acceleration and Inclusion bill) — as time-tested means for countering car pollution. Though overlooked since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1999, well-designed anti-pollution taxes have been consistently found to be one of the most effective means for curbing vehicle pollution worldwide. A 2013 study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers found that fuel taxes in the United States were at least six to fourteen times more cost-effective at restricting gasoline emissions than fuel standards.
But it is not merely just cost-effective.
Against critics’ skewering of TRAIN proposals as “anti-poor” and “regressive,” both petroleum and vehicle taxes have been found time and again to be progressive measures in developing countries like the Philippines, where car ownership and gasoline consumption are badly skewed towards high income-earners.
The Department of Finance (DoF) has said that more than half (51%) of all Philippine fuel consumption comes from the richest 10% of households, while the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and World Bank reports have confirmed similar trends in other emerging countries.
And if planned public transport subsidies (the “Pantawid Pasada” program), earmarked cash transfers to the poorest 80% of households, not to mention the long-term health benefits of cleaner air are also accounted for, there is every reason to expect that these tax measures will become even more equitable.
In truth, the real issues that should be addressed now are not whether TRAIN’s intended fuel and vehicle tax reforms meet the test of being pro-poor and progressive, but how they can be carried further to reap the greatest possible health gains for all Filipinos. Will legislators in the Senate also index proposed fuel excise tax increases to inflation over the long term? Will they fine-tune proposed vehicle excise tax hikes to encourage car buyers to purchase more fuel-efficient automobiles? Will they create mechanisms to advance public trust, if not public oversight, over how the amassed revenues will be spent, such as for affordable, clean, and quality transportation?
Make no mistake: when daily commutes on EDSA are nearly equivalent to smoking two cigarettes each way, tax reform is no longer just a matter of raising revenues — but of saving lives. How we and our representatives resolve such questions in the months ahead will prove decisive to the well-being of countless Filipinos and of realizing healthy, sustainable Philippine cities.
Jerik Cruz is a lecturer in the Ateneo de Manila University Department of Economics, and was a member of the Action for Economic Reform team that campaigned for the Sin Tax Law in 2012. His views in this article are his own.
