The Guardian view on Gove’s clean air plan: just hot air
The environment secretary must not use simplistic policies to avoid the complex and difficult trade-offs called for in dealing with the air quality crisis that is ending thousands of lives prematurely. (BULLSHIT BAFFLES BRAINS)
Chapter 5 - Smog and Vertigo
Stephen Mosley - School of Cultural Studies &
Humanities, Leeds Metropolitan University.
In 1950, the sight of sulphurous black smoke billowing out
from industrial and domestic chimneys still dominated the skylines around
Greater Manchester. Coal smoke was responsible for blackening urban
architecture, blocking out sunlight, destroying vegetation and, not least of
all, damaging people’s health. It was closely associated with high levels of
mortality from bronchitis and other respiratory diseases, particularly during
the cold winter months when demand for domestic coal fires was at its peak.
Manchester’s ugliness, as J.B. Priestley put it, was ‘so complete’ that it was
‘almost exhilarating.’
The impenetrable winter smog that fell
in 1950 in the dark early evenings was very exciting.
We had all managed to get home safely
through the streets without being able to see our hands held up in front of our
faces. Long woolly, double knitted scarves, in red and white bands, were
inverted to make head hugging balaclavas at one end, with the other end wrapped
several times and tightly around mouths and noses for warmth and air filters,
the end being tucked into the neck of a tightly buttoned gabardine. Sound was deadened before it could travel
even a few feet. Lampposts served as reliable landmarks in an otherwise
featureless dark sea of cloud and chemicals.
We could taste the bitter soot, from countless coal burning chimneys, in
the wet cold soup as it clung to our clothes, making everything filthy and clammy
to touch. The mile or so walk from school in that impenetrable darkness was
hugely exciting - hand over hand along suddenly unfamiliar garden walls -
navigating across streets that mysteriously seemed ten times wider than in
daylight, with no landmarks nor even sounds to guide us to the safety of a
pavement.
 |
| COULD'NT SEE YOUR HAND BEFORE YOUR FACE |
The school had disgorged a hundred and
fifty or so, five to eleven-year-old children alone into that dark oily smog to
make their way home as best they could. They were wrapped mostly in dark navy
gabardines, swathed in those popular double wool scarves, most with blue hands
and fingers but some boasting woollen or even fabulous fur backed gloves, with
one or two deeply envied boys sporting leather gauntlets. Most wore black
lace-up shoes, some crept stealthily like Red-Indians in white or black summer
cotton plimsoles or “pumps”; or swaggered along in swashbuckling wellies with
the white cotton interiors folded down to the ankles. At the school gates they
dispersed into the gloom to go their separate ways, disappearing in seconds
from each other and from the world. Little groups trailed together along silent
and cloaked suburban roads, guessing at the direction. At each junction the
groups divided and smaller parties groped along walls and pavements towards,
they hoped, their homes, reassured briefly by a sudden lamppost looming by a
recognisable wall before blindly creeping another fifty yards to where they
hoped the next light might be found. The lampposts always surprised the
fumbling travellers, leaping into view just six inches from their frozen noses,
casting a feeble yellow or blue glow on the slowly stirring smog, but failing
to illuminate the ground. Our breathing made the improvised woollen masks wet,
but it was more comfortable to keep the warm poultice of the scarf hugging the mouth
and nose than to pull it aside and suck in the cold, cloying blanket of filthy
fog. No cars or buses threatened the slow crossing of streets. No anxious
parents appeared out of the blackness, waving torches and proffering comfort
and guidance. No one came and no one was expected. The children managed the
journey alone and hugely enjoyed their small adventure.
I made it back to Birch House and crept
around the garden in that pitch darkness for a time, enjoying the privacy and
silence, before hunger and cold drove me into that brooding house.
At that time of year, it was dark by
four-thirty and in that weather all honest people were in their homes by six.
Even Father had made it back from Manchester, full of brief bluff comments,
thrown out to his personal, private watchers in the high dark corners of the
kitchen, which left no doubt as to his manly skills and courage, a foretaste of
his amazing rallying and racing skills yet to come, in cleaving his way
instinctively through the smog while lesser mortals abandoned their cars and
fumbled their way along the miles of impossibly dark, muffled pavements.
The smog even seeped into the kitchen,
making the light dimmer and casting an imperceptible shadow over the
table. The coal fire warmed the room,
adding its slow exhaust of smoke, carbon, tar and sulphur to the overburdened
atmosphere, burning slowly and dully in the grate as the smog pressed down the
chimney and choked the draught that the fire needed. By now Stephanie had been
born, though she was too young to be up at the table for tea. The rest of us sat at the kitchen table,
including Father, still happy with memories of our adventures outside, and we
waited in unaccustomed quiet while Mother heaved and juggled with pans full of
potatoes and piles of plates in the cold condensation of the scullery. The meal
was sausages, fried eggs and mashed potatoes; a firm favourite, which ensured
that not a scrap was left.
*******
CLEAN AIR AND ROAD TRANSPORT -
THE PAST
From The Economics of UK Transport
February 2017 - Noel Hodson
Since
1950 the UK
population has almost doubled; road vehicles
have multiplied by ten from about 3 million to 30 million; the roads have not expanded
at the same rates. In the 1950s, we played football in the street by my home,
pausing occasionally to let a vehicle go by. That leafy street today carries a
vehicle every 15 seconds, from 6 am till 10 pm. That is 240 vehicle movements
per hour for 16 hours, 3,840 vehicle-movements a day.
On
bad-weather days, when I did not cycle the 7 miles to school (and later 12
miles to work), I used buses which took twice the time as cycling. The buses
queued in exhaust corridors, with every roadside house, office and factory
burning coal or coke, poisoning the air – and creating the infamous yellow,
oily smog; when literally “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face”.
Inside
the 1950’s buses, most passengers smoked, puffing out yellow-brown condensation
that ran down the windows and dripped inside the tin roof.
Walking
along those smog-laden streets could be quicker than waiting for the traffic jams
to clear; but the smog-death toll of pedestrians from asthma and heart-attacks
was alarmingly high.
It
was found that lead, then added to all petrol and diesel to prevent engine
“knocking”, was highly toxic. DuPont had developed the lead additive:
1923 Sept - workers started dying in the DuPont TEL works…
“sickening deaths and illnesses of hundreds of TEL workers… Gripped by violent
bursts of insanity, the afflicted would imagine they were being persecuted by
butterflies and other winged insects before expiring, their bodies having
turned black and blue.” (Kitman 2000a)
These
deadly air conditions on our streets were alleviated, first by the 1956 Clean Air
Act,
requiring “smokeless” fuels for buildings. Next, vehicle makers were obliged to
improve engines and miles per gallon, creating less exhaust fumes. Eventually, the
USA banned lead in petrol:
1970 – US Environmental
Protection Agency created.
Car manufacturers ordered to begin building engines to run on unleaded gasoline
by 1975. Ethyl Corp. unsuccessfully opposes phase-out of leaded gasoline in
courts.
And,
after another 30 years of a bitter
campaign in the UK, led against Big-Oil by engineer and academic, Dr
John Beishon of the Open University, leaded petrol was
banned in January
2000;
77 years after it was identified as an untreatable poison.
Improvements
were made to traffic flow systems. Bypasses and motorways were built, the M1
opened in 1959.
Medic
Sir
Richard Doll, Oxford, after 25 years of academic
research, successfully argued against Big-Tobacco that smoking causes cancer. In
1984 smoking was banned on London buses. Later, buses acquired air conditioning.
POISONOUS
BUSES: Recent studies of commuters
2016-17 find that bus passengers receive the largest
amounts of NO2 and particulates. Car passenger with filtered air-con
are most protected.
In
1980, as the first Star Wars film was shot, our team built one of the first
hybrid-
Electric
vehicles are the near future of transport. In January 2017, Dutch railways
Nederlandse Spoorwegen, announced that all their trains, 5,500 trips a day for 600,000
passengers, are now powered by electricity produced
only by wind-turbines.
Electric
road vehicles will replace the internal combustion engine – and electric
pipeline-cargo-capsules will replace half the freight vehicles.
The
UK could lead this change.
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