Addis Ababa is one of the most polluted cities around. There is no sewer system, so the city is riddled with septic tanks. Garbage is frequently burned for disposal, including plastic, rubber, and so on. But the most obvious culprits are automobiles, including the ubiquitous ‘Blue Donkeys’ (public transport), so named because of the way they drive in tight traffic.
Blue Donkey
Now although automobiles don’t produce all of the pollution in Addis, they do have a significant impact. Sundays, with reduced traffic, are noticeably clearer, as was the day of the Great Ethiopia Run, when traffic was controlled. The thing is many of the cars don’t exorbitantly emit. I would guess that it’s the worst 10% that cause half of the smog in the city. It’s not uncommon to see a large truck rumbling up the road, belching an opaque cloud onto pedestrians on the adjacent sidewalk. It’s impressive how muny fumes some cars can produce from such a thin tailpipe.
This is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Individual operators profit by running unclean engines, without the need to install emission controls. They can save on mechanical work and gain horsepower without the need to limit their pollution. But everyone else suffers. The dirty air reduces quality of life and increases individual and state health costs.
So should this non-financial cost be accounted for? Eliminated through controls (pulling the worst offenders off the road) or taxed to reflect the true cost of this pollution to society? Intuitively (and in Canada) I would say yes. And we do. But in Ethiopia, it may be more complex. The drivers of Blue Donkeys and transport trucks are not rich. Economic development is very tenuous here. Costing their pollution might tip the scales, removing transport from the road and making life that much harder for everyone as transit and supplies are delayed. Tough call.
B
A relatively innocent example.
I actually sat out on the street with my camera for 10 minutes or so to catch these shots. Usually it takes much less time to see a bad offender. Clearly the solution for Addis’s pollution problem is to have Brendan try to photograph it, making it disapear.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I read a very surprising statistic about L.A. about 5 or 6 years ago. They said that despite (I vaguely recall) a doubling of the regional population, air pollution was at a par, or better, than in the early 70s. The reason was that the state had had a huge “buy-back” program for cars there were, say, over 10 or 15 years old. Because they’d figured out, as you say, that 70 or 80% of the pollution was from cars over 10 or 15 years old.
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Not to be fussy, but strictly speaking this isn’t really a tragedy of the commons (which is a misleading title in any case, since Harden is talking about open access, not common ownership - despite his examples), which requires open access to a particular resource and thus no implicit guards against individual overuse of a resource. Unless you are referring to air as a resource? But even then, it is not so much to say it is a tragedy of the commons, since the ‘air’ is actually regulated in some places, and ostensibly air travels across borders. Further, no one is really using air when driving cars, rather they are changing the chemical composition of the air - so we are looking at a contributory problem.
Your point about externalities makes sense, but to a point only. It is a mistake to think that you can price externalities of a global ‘resource’ like air or the atmosphere by simply pricing them into a single country’s economy. Any realistic effort requires a proper balancing of regulations that price in carbon costs to individual consumption. And, in a global situation, implicitly we also need to consider eliminating other externalities, which could lead to wealthier countries providing better poverty relief for poorer ones.
All that said, I enjoyed the post.
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All the above are the same in nearly every city in Africa. Kampala is notorious and badly in need of regulating it’s emissions standards on it’s vehicles.
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corporate sponsorship for blue donkeys - eg, plaster the inside/outside with (A) coke & pepsi advertising, in exchange for (B) retrofit & improvement to exhaust systems? no idea tho how A and B would compare in local economy tho…
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Brendan Reply:
July 2nd, 2009 at 8:45 am
Interesting suggestion. I wouldn’t be opposed to it, if combined with some minimum standards for emission control…
B
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