I’d been looking forward to my interview with Dr Devra Davis, a Donora survivor and one of America’s leading epidemiologists. But, I must admit, I hadn’t thought to research her husband. On the phone she mentions that they have travelled together to Michigan to see their grandson perform a Brahms piano concerto, and I can hear the clattering of bowls and cutlery as someone prepares breakfast in the background. This call has been in the diary for weeks, but I have a feeling that – given the purposeful clamour of cutlery – whoever the ‘someone’ is, isn’t very pleased about it.
By the middle of the interview with Devra, whose 2002 book When Smoke Ran Like Water did much to highlight the issue of air pollution, we have discussed the epidemiological and toxicological evidence. Then we get on to the lack of urgency among policy-makers. Why is so little being done about an issue that destroys – and ends – so many lives? ‘That is one of the reasons why I continue to do this work at my advanced age,’ she sighs. ‘The whole approach to environmental policy rests upon a very fundamental requirement, which is: show me the bodies. What the economists say is, until you have dead bodies, we don’t have proof.’ What happened next in our conversation unfolded like a stage play. So, picture the scene: a married couple, an epidemiologist and an economist, are on vacation, trying to prepare some breakfast, when a journalist calls …
Devra [testily, on the phone]: My husband is in the room, I should say.
Man [bangs the cereal down, pointedly, on the table]: I would like to make a statement.
Devra: OK yes, please do! My husband is an economist, and by the way one of the chief economists of the EPA. We’ve had long-standing discussions on exactly this issue for 40-something years. So, this is Richard Morgenstern, former senior economist and acting deputy administrator of the EPA. [She hands him the phone.]
Richard: Devra points to situations which have turned out historically to support her point of view, no question about it. However, not all problems which are identified in initial studies turn out to be as severe as, say, [Tetraethyl] lead or something like that. So, what you have is a situation where we are all dealing with unknowns, society is dealing with unknowns … we operate in a world of uncertainty. Now, there are cases where people believed that certain chemicals were really very harmful, and it turns out that they are not as harmful to humans as they were in the animals that were tested – the one I’m thinking of was a component of gasoline that was tested in a certain type of animal, and it turned out that the carcinogenic effects found in the first animal were not supported in other animals. But the larger point is, you have to take into account the magnitude of the change you are asking for. It seems simple: you do a study, you find a problem, therefore you should ban it or try to reduce the exposure. But sometimes it’s not that simple. And sometimes communities actually want the jobs and they understand the risks.
Devra [shouts in the background]: Tell him about those coke oven workers in China!
Richard: I will! Many years ago I was in China – I have been there many times, but this was one of the earliest times I was there – there were people on top of a coke oven battery sweeping away the materials. Now we [the US] banned that a long time ago, we don’t allow people to do that, and we introduced machines to replace that. The Chinese were still using people when we were there. So, I said to the person who was guiding me through the steel plant, ‘Gee, do people know that that is extremely dangerous – it has been documented that benzene emissions from coke ovens are real killers.’ And he said ‘Oh yes, we know that.’ So I said, ‘Do the people up there working on the coke ovens know that?’ And he said ‘Oh yeah, they know that.’ I said, ‘So why are they doing it?’ And he said, ‘Well, they are getting a substantial increase in pay compared to other workers in the plant, and they are voluntarily accepting these risks.’ That brings me back to the economic and social question: yes, we have research that shows problems, but people react to them very differently – some people go for the jobs, they prefer the income, they prefer what they perceive to be the benefits of having these problems. In this case, there was no uncertainty because the scientific evidence was overwhelming.
Devra: Scientific evidence meaning we have plenty of proof of sick and dead bodies …
Richard: … Yes that’s right, associated with benzene from coke ovens, that was established. But in some of the other examples out there, there is uncertainty and it doesn’t always work out to be such a problem. But people say ‘yeah, I want the economic gain’. So, the dilemma for people in policy positions is to ferret out the situations where the economic gain is either very small, or the health damages are very large – those are the things that we regulate. But it’s a tough world out there.
Tim [by this point feeling less like a journalist and more like an interloper in a marital dispute]: But isn’t that also a common, consistent delaying tactic from industry and politicians, to say that ‘unless 100 per cent causation is proven, then more research is needed before we do anything’?*
Richard: Yes, it is a delaying tactic, I’m not disputing that. I’m just saying, if you look at it narrowly from the health perspective and the adverse effect on people, then it is just delay. If you look at it from the social perspective of ‘is there value to society of having people do this type of work, and what are our other options?’ Think about World War Two – all the people in Britain and the US worked in very hazardous jobs producing munitions and armaments, [during] which many of them died – forget the warfare itself, they died in the production process. Was that worth it? Well, as a society, most people would argue that the alternative [was worse]. There are a lot of issues here, and I think it is a little simplistic to focus narrowly on some particular losers in the system, because there are some complicated …
Devra [exasperated]: Oh God!
Richard: Well anyway, that’s my story.
Devra [to Tim]: So you can see why we keep having what we call ‘intense dialogues’?
Tim: So, what’s your comeback to what he just said, Dr Davis?
Richard: She doesn’t have one! OK, let’s hear it, let’s hear it!
Devra: It’s a question of the downside risk.
Richard: Right!
Devra: Do you value more the value of human life and the quality of life, or do you value more the immediate economic progress? And as John Maynard Keynes once famously quipped, ‘In the long run, we’re all dead.’ Of course, economists don’t tend to think about the long run, they think about the short run. Now I don’t want to put anybody out of work, but I think that we tend to dismiss health issues, especially when there is an immediate and obvious short-term gain … As an example, the Swedes – who obviously have a much more homogeneous society than we do – they managed back in the 1970s and 1980s to cancel about 80 per cent of pesticides because the risks – many of which were not proven but just suspected based on experimental evidence – were such that they did not want to expose them on their citizens. So they just cancelled them. We in the US continue to use some of those same pesticides today, because the industry here, especially now, is so much more powerful than those of us concerned about health issues.
Richard: So are we less healthy than the Swedes, as a result?
Devra: On some of these issues yes, as a result. In terms of Alzheimer’s and dementia, and …
Richard: … But you can’t demonstrate it. You can’t demonstrate it’s not due to other differences between the US and Sweden …
Devra: Excuse me. I stipulated that in my prior. They are a more homogenous society than we.
Richard: My final comment is, that it’s one thing for a – and I won’t say that Devra is any more upper middle class than I am – but for either of us who are relatively comfortable in society to offer such advice to people who are struggling to make a living. And that’s the sort of trade-off, that’s the issue – a lot of the people who are placing health protection above economic cost are themselves quite protected.
Tim: But it doesn’t have to be an either/or though surely – isn’t it about protecting the most vulnerable?
Devra: Yes, it doesn’t have to be an either/or …
Richard: It is true that there are some free lunches out there, but it turns out not that many. Most of these things come with a cost, whether obvious or not so obvious. Look, I am in favour, I am not anti-environment at all, I’m just pointing out that it’s a little simplistic to ignore the economic impact.
I loved every second of that conversation. Because – and I couldn’t help but think this while they were talking – it highlights a crucial ‘final chapter’ point. Which is, despite everything we’ve learned about air pollution, can we afford to change, or should we just learn to accept it? Is the economic impact of clearing the air a net loss, or a net gain?
Given that air pollution is first and foremost a public health issue, let’s answer that question by looking at the public health costs and benefits first. According to the Lancet Commission, treating air pollution-related diseases is responsible for 1.7 per cent of annual health spending in high-income countries and up to 7 per cent of health spending in middle-income countries. ‘The costs attributed to pollution-related disease will probably increase as additional associations between pollution and disease are identified,’ the Commission found, referring to the new disease links to air pollution we’re discovering seemingly every day. The OECD believes that global air pollution-related healthcare costs for its member countries will increase from $21 billion (£16 billion) in 2015 to $176 billion (£134 billion) in 2060, while welfare costs would be well into the trillions. United Nations figures in 2016 show that air pollution across Europe is already costing $1.6 trillion (£1.2 trillion) a year in deaths and diseases, nearly one-tenth of Europe’s gross domestic product (GDP); in 10 European countries, the cost was above 20 per cent of GDP. A South African study in 2012 found that 7.4 per cent of all deaths that year were due to chronic exposure to fine PM, costing the country up to 6 per cent of its GDP, or $20 billion (£15 billion). For Africa as a whole, the estimated economic cost of premature air pollution deaths in 2013 was roughly $215 billion (£175 billion) a year for outdoor air pollution, and $232 billion (£177 billion) for indoor air pollution.
I could go on with stats like that for the rest of the chapter (though for the sake of mercy and readability, I won’t). The total economic cost of air pollution in London was £3.7 billion in 2010 (sorry, last one). But where exactly do such costs come from? To give an example, in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, a 2015 paper led by the New York University School of Medicine calculated the economic costs of pre-term births caused by PM exposure – just one health effect, from just one category of air pollutant. The costs included treatment for medical conditions caused by pre-term birth in the first five years of life, and costs accrued in the years afterwards due to associated developmental disability and lost economic productivity due to reduced cognitive ability. In total, annual pre-term birth-related costs attributed to PM2.5 were estimated at $5.09 billion (£3.88 billion) in the US. The findings, say the authors, ‘provide a sense of the potential economic benefits that could be achieved by regulatory interventions aimed at reducing air pollution exposure during pregnancy’.1
A cost-benefit analysis by the EPA in 2015 explained that:
Avoiding incidences of premature mortality, especially those associated with exposure to fine particles, contributes the vast majority of the direct benefits of 1990 Clean Air Act programs measured in dollar value terms … First, the differences in air quality, human exposure, and resulting risk of premature mortality … are substantial. Second, these changes in risk of premature mortality are estimated to have significant economic value.
Welfare outcomes and worker productivity have a big impact on economies beyond the direct healthcare costs, too. The Lancet Commission found that productivity losses caused by pollution-related diseases reduce GDP in low-income to middle-income countries by up to 2 per cent per year. Reduced workplace fitness and productivity globally due to pollution are estimated to amount to $4.6 trillion per year: 6.2 per cent of global economic output. To understand how this is possible, let’s again zoom in to the micro scale. A 2016 study conducted by the Marshall School of Business of two call centres in China found that increases in the pollution levels found in the Air Quality Index (AQI) correlated with a decrease in the number of daily calls handled by the call centre operatives: workers were 5 to 6 per cent more productive when air pollution levels were rated as good (AQI of 0–50) versus when they were rated as unhealthy (AQI of 150–200).2 A separate study of agricultural fruit pickers in California found that a 10ppb change in ozone resulted in a 5.5 per cent drop in worker productivity, measured in the amount of fruit they picked. The authors calculated that a 10ppb reduction in ozone across the US would therefore translate into an annual cost saving of approximately $700 million (£530 million) in agricultural labour.3 All of which starts to turn the question ‘can we afford to clear the air?’ on its head – can we afford not to?
The UN estimates that the global benefits of phasing out leaded petrol alone amounted to $2.45 trillion (£1.87 trillion) a year in improved health, fewer early deaths, increased IQ (and therefore increased lifetime earnings) and decreased violent crime. Frank Kelly tells me that, in the European context, wherever measures have been introduced ‘to decrease emissions from urban areas and remove coal power stations from urban areas, [governments have] seen an improvement in air quality, they have seen an improvement in life expectancy and decrease in certain diseases, which they can’t explain by other causes … that if you do spend this money here, you are going to get a big benefit, because the health costs are always more.’ As for the chosen means of reduction, such as replacing short car journeys with active travel such as walking and cycling, the UK Chief Medical Officer’s annual report makes the point that – aside from the consumer saving on petrol and car maintenance – ‘getting one more child to walk or cycle to school could pay back as much as £768 or £539 respectively in health benefits, NHS savings, productivity gains and reductions in air pollution and congestion.’
Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of Atmospheric and Climate Science at the University of California, San Diego, wrote in a WHO news bulletin in 2016 that ‘the tragedy is that there are perfectly feasible solutions to the air pollution problem, but these are surrounded by myths’. The biggest myth, he believes, is that tackling air pollution is more expensive than the benefits: ‘In California we found that if you clean up the air, each dollar invested in air pollution returned nearly $30 to California. There were huge health benefits along with a large increase in new jobs and thus in people’s well-being.’
Another big myth is that we need to dig up and burn fossil fuels in order to grow economies. Since 2010, GDP in Germany has been on an upwards trajectory while gross power consumption, primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions have all been on a downward trend. At the Paris climate talks in 2015, the California Senate leader similarly boasted, ‘We have successfully decoupled carbon from GDP.’ The amount of petrol pumped in California has declined every year since 2009 while the state’s economy grew by 5 per cent over the same period. Fossil fuels don’t, in fact, come cheap. According to one report, Europe provided at least €112 billion (£99 billion) in subsidies per year between 2014 and 2016 towards the production and consumption of fossil fuels. We continue to fund coal companies, which are no longer profitable without government support, because they have entrenched and powerful political lobbies: in Europe, at least €3.3 billion (£2.9 billion) per year is provided annually in financial support to private (not state-owned) coal-mining companies alone. And that’s just the domestic markets. Countries spend a huge amount importing coal and oil; remember that a third of all shipping is simply transporting oil around the globe. According to the US Central Intelligence Agency, the US is the world’s biggest importer of oil at 7,850,000 barrels of oil a day, exporting just 590,900 barrels a day. India is the world’s third largest importer of oil. Whichever way you look at it, the idea of becoming self-sufficient with renewable energy makes complete economic sense.
For anyone doubting the impact of government policy on this issue, consider this quote from Melba Pria, the Mexican ambassador I met in Delhi: ‘[Mexico] imports 1.5 million cars from India per year – [seemingly] every taxi or Uber is a Vento. The 1.5 million cars we import from India have a catalytic converter, because those are the standards for us to buy a car, from anywhere, and the catalytic converter has to have X, Y and Z standards. So that technology is built in India. But they don’t use it [in India], because they don’t have [the same regulatory] standard. They are [also] exporting petrol gasoline that doesn’t have sulphur, aluminium or lead, but they are not using it.’† Another economic own goal, noted by a report to the Indian Supreme Court in 2014, was that buses paid much more in road tax than cars, contributing to the boom of private taxi operators at the expense of bus companies.‡
Clean air legislation has historically been shown to work with dramatic effect. The UK’s Clean Air Act (1956) dealt with the causes of air pollution of the day, most notably sulphur dioxide and PM10 from coal smoke, with astonishing speed. The Act granted local authorities the power to designate smoke control areas where only authorised smokeless fuels could be used, with 40 per cent grants made available to householders to replace coal fires with gas or electric. It was a carrot-and-stick approach, recognising both the upheaval it would cause householders as well as the urgency required. By the 1970s, the air in the UK’s major cities had changed beyond what anyone had thought possible. We need to do the same again. The success story of diesel cars – rising from 22 per cent of new car sales in western Europe to 51 per cent in just nine years (from 1997 to 2006) – also shows just how quickly change can happen with a shift in government policy. If the same was done to promote electric or hydrogen fuel-cell cars over diesel, then levels of NOx and nanoparticles – the worst pollutants to human health – would fall off a cliff.
We are starting to see the first signs of this happening. In October 2016, the Bundesrat, the German legislative body, passed a resolution to approve only emission-free cars for use on the roads by 2030. It also called for the European Commission to consider implementing the same across the entire European Union. Tokyo has effectively banned diesel engines since 2003. At the C40 Mayors Summit in Mexico City in December 2016, mayors of four major world cities – Paris, Madrid, Mexico City and Athens – committed to banning all diesel vehicles from their cities by 2025. They also committed to doing ‘everything within their means’ to incentivise the use of electric, hydrogen and hybrid vehicles, as well as improve the infrastructure for cycling and walking. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, avoided any possible accusation of ambiguity by saying, bluntly, ‘we want to ban diesel from our city’. This wasn’t just empty rhetoric: her Paris Crit’Air scheme (see Chapter 7) has revealed a step-by-step means of doing so.
In agriculture, too – the number-one emitter of ammonia – emissions regulation actually gives back more to the farmers than it takes (and, quite obviously, for the society around them too). The Netherlands reduced ammonia emissions by 64 per cent between 1990 and 2016 through various regulations regarding manure treatment and an emissions certification for animal housing. The schemes cost the Netherlands an estimated €500 million (£440 million) a year, but resulted in annual societal benefits of €900–€3,700 million (£800–£3,280 million) including €150 million (£133 million) in fertiliser savings for farmers.
Even if you are convinced about the net economic returns from reducing air pollution, there is still the question: where does the money for such schemes and infrastructure projects come from in the first place? California’s answer, described in Chapter 7, is to make the polluters pay for it. The proceeds of California’s cap-and-trade system are distributed to the communities most affected by air pollution as grants or loans. Other cap-and-trade schemes around the world such as the EU’s Emissions Trading System, and China’s scheme, launched at the end of 2017, could do the same. Cap-and-trade was a central part of the US 1990 Clean Air Act amendment, brought in during Devra Davis’s husband Richard Morgenstern’s term at the EPA, to target acid rain and sulphur dioxide emissions. But even cities without anything as fancy as a cap-and-trade mechanism can – and undoubtedly already do – have some form of monetary fine for pollution offenders: this should be diverted towards clean transportation infrastructure and incentive payments for residents to switch to clean transport and heating options.
Such policies are never popular with industrial manufacturers, of course. James Thornton, who founded the NRDC’s Los Angeles office alongside Mary Nichols, argues, ‘the car industry has always said “That’s impossible, that’s impossible, that’s impossible” with every single regulation, and it turns out it’s a lie every time … They have sometimes used lawsuits to slow down California, but … it’s always very responsible regulation, it’s always based on good science and that’s what you need to do.’ Since taking the fight to the UK, he has met similar opposition from the UK government in response to meeting EU NOx limits. The UK, largely forced by ClientEarth’s legal action, finally announced some NOx and traffic reduction measures in 2017, including the ban on new diesel and petrol cars from 2040. But the government has been slower to move on other vital measures ClientEarth has long called for – including emissions charging zones and diesel scrappage schemes. The idea behind ‘diesel scrappage’ is to offer car drivers grants to trade in their old diesel cars and replace them with new electric ones. The UK government previously ran a vehicle scrappage scheme in 2009–10; in the midst of a recession, it offered the domestic car industry a much-needed lifeline to sell new models as well as helping to meet national emissions reduction targets. The grant of £1,000 ($1,400) towards the purchase of a new vehicle when a car or van over 10 years old was scrapped was matched by manufacturers, giving a total of £2,000 ($2,800). The same is needed now, for exactly the same reasons. Domestic electric car makers, such as Nissan, whose Leaf model is made in the north-east of England, need a new customer base, and cities have stricter NOx criteria to meet. Diesel cars need scrapping.§
‘Then the question is, where will the government get the money to pay for that?’ asks Thornton, helpfully. ‘The Germans just got a contribution of a very large amount of money from the car industry, I think €250 million, towards such a scheme. What I suggested to Michael Gove [UK Environment Secretary] was that he bring a case against the car companies [that installed diesel defeat devices] and settle it for somewhere between £3 billion and £5 billion and that money then goes into a scrappage scheme.’ What was his reaction? ‘I suggested that we could do a legal memo showing him the laws he could use and he said “I’d be very happy to see that memo”. So we’ll see … In America I think Volkswagen settled for $20 billion [£15 billion]. You don’t need $20 billion to do a great scrappage scheme.’
The levers that governments can pull will always be greater than those available to business or civic action groups. When I visited the low NOx district heating boilers in Beijing, Manny told me, ‘We met with a factory in Shandong, and they said “thank you but we don’t need your technology right now because our NOx standard is 50ppm.” They basically said “it’s great you can get to 5ppm, but we don’t need to” … if the regulation says you have to get to 5[ppm], then people will buy it. But don’t believe that the guys out at the factory level are altruistic and inspired to get to a lower level … the key to all this, what will drive decisions, is regulation.’
However, regulation is only as effective as its enforcement. When the Israeli Clean Air Act came into effect on January 2011, it required big industrial plants to obtain an emission permit from the Ministry of Environmental Protection, with limit requirements set for each industrial plant. Ronit Piso, formerly the Director of the Coalition for Public Health and a leading health campaigner in her home city of Haifa, believes that it has not always been enforced: ‘The Ministry of Environmental Protection have a permit to get into any factory in the area and do their own [emissions] test. The gatekeeper has to let them in. I was personally, with my own team, inside one of these visits … we went to an oil tank factory in Haifa Bay and the gatekeeper kept us for more than three hours at the gate, because the director refused to let us in. Completely against the law. The ministry did nothing about it. I said “hey, they deserve a fine, you should do a special hearing, you should prosecute the director” – nothing … We have the industry with lots of money, lots of networking with high-rank, high-profile people in government, they control the media, actually they control everything – and on the other side we have the citizens, who on a weekly basis put up [photographs on] their own websites [of] pipes that pollute the area, all kinds of gases that appear in the sky. They don’t feel any confidence in the authorities any more. This is a very, very major issue.’
This was the major focus of Chai Jing’s 2015 Chinese documentary Under the Dome, too. Enforcement of emissions legislation in China was shown to be surprisingly weak, with city mayors and business CEOs openly admitting on camera to flouting regulations. Following the outcry caused by the film, China swiftly stepped up its enforcement efforts. In 2016, China’s Minister of Environmental Protection, Chen Jining, told state media that 1.77 million enterprises had subsequently been inspected, uncovering illegality at 191,000 of them, temporarily halting production at 34,000 and closing down 20,000 altogether.‖
In Delhi, according to the Hindustan Times in October 2017, despite the newly implemented Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) to counter severe air pollution, which includes greater pollution control for vehicles, inspection of buses, trucks and interstate vehicles, stopping interstate diesel trucks, and if necessary an odd/even number-plate scheme – the enforcement wing of the transport department had only 250 employees for a city of some 10 million vehicles. Of those employees, fewer than 50 had the power to prosecute. Meanwhile the Delhi Pollution Control Committee, tasked with distributing green licences to commercial establishments, ensuring PM control at construction sites, stopping the use of thousands of illegal diesel generators, issuing public health alerts and monitoring the levels of pollution, reportedly had only 60 officials.4 A new law which bans diesels over 10 years old and petrol cars over 15 years old is also hard to enforce, Dr Sharma at the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI), told me: ‘Implementation now is the issue … and also corruption. Unlike in the UK and US where you can easily identify the vehicles which are 10 years old, in India where millions of vehicles are plying the Delhi roads, the monitors are not there. You are taking a risk driving a vehicle which is not permitted, [but] there is a very rare chance that you will be caught … it is a cumbersome process for the traffic policeman to get involved with these things, so what they will do instead of impounding they will simply challah – challah means monetary fine … Very good laws and orders have been passed, but enforcement is grossly lacking.’ He does, however, have some personal sympathy for people who do flout the law. Dr Sharma himself owns a petrol car older than 15 years, ‘in perfect working condition … it is meeting all the numbers, the only numbers it is not meeting is 15 years old. It is quite painful for me to take to a scrap dealer who is buying for 1 per cent.’ Professor Khare at IIT repeats this sentiment too: ‘this ban is not very acceptable amongst the public … when we buy a car, we keep them as a family member.’ He also adds that stubble-burning in the regions surrounding Delhi is ‘banned but not enforced’.
The contrast with Mexico City, and the radical steps taken there in its fight against air pollution, is stark. Ambassador Melba Pria tells me about going for a morning jog on a recent visit to Mexico City: ‘I heard a tap tap of shoes running up behind me and suddenly a male voice saying, in English, “lady, lady – no run!” So I stopped. It was a policeman. And he said, “Are you American? Only Americans run when we are in [an air quality alert] contingency … turn on your TV, madam,” as if to say, don’t be so stupid! I took out my mobile phone, and we were at [AQI]156. Contingency starts at 150 … There is a public [acceptance] of what you can and cannot do.’ A Phase I alert in Mexico City is triggered by an AQI of 150 (and/or an hourly ozone concentration of 155ppb or PM10 above 215mg/m3 for 24 hours), meaning that schools and government institutions are expected to cease all outdoor activities, all public construction and repair work stops, and citizens – as Ambassador Pria discovered – are advised that exercising outdoors represents a health hazard. A vehicle sticker system similar to the Paris Crit’Air scheme also kicks in. All vehicles must have a holographic sticker on their windscreen, showing a rating of 00, 0, 1 or 2, with 00 being the lowest emissions (i.e. electric vehicles), and 2 being the most polluting. When a Phase I level alert is issued, vehicles with class 2 stickers are banned from driving, while class 1 stickers move to an alternate day ‘odd-even’ number plate system; during a Phase II (above AQI200), both 1s and 2s are banned. The zeros are exempt throughout. So, that’s another blueprint point: no matter how good your clean air laws, you’ve got to back them up with rigid enforcement.
During the global clean-up, we’ve got to avoid unintended consequences this time. Diesel was promoted in the 2000s, possibly in good faith (though as we saw in Chapter 5, I have my doubts), to reduce CO2 levels. In so doing, the resultant increase of NOx and PM – let’s not sugar-coat this – killed tens of thousands of people. Similarly log burners were (and still are) incentivised for being a sustainable fuel source, irrespective of where the smoke ends up, leading to domestic stoves becoming a major pollution source in Britain for the first time since the Second World War. Both those outcomes were foreseeable if policy-makers had spoken to a scientist or two. But there’s an easy way of making it less likely to happen again: burning ‘cleaner’ fuels is not the answer. Let’s not forget the meaning of ‘renewable’ in ‘renewable energy’. The Earth’s biological fuel supply is finite; its solar and wind energy is not (at least not in a timeframe that need concern human civilisation). Whether it’s inside the engines that propel vehicles or for our heating and cooking, we need to stop burning fuels within densely populated areas. Some forms of renewable energy are benign in terms of air quality: solar, hydro, wind, fuel cells and ground- and air-sourced heat. Others, such as biomass, biodiesel and wood chips, cause PM and NOx emissions. So, it’s pretty simple: in urban areas, choose from the former list, not the latter. In Brazil, a percentage of bio-ethanol content in blended petrol fuel has been mandatory for decades. There are many reasons why this is good, but air quality isn’t one of them. A study found that ozone levels actually increase due to the added ethanol while PM2.5 levels are broadly the same as in conventional petrol. That is just one study, but it makes the point: burning fuel will always cause air pollution.
Electrification is the answer. When I visited Ally Lewis in York in summer 2017, he told me, ‘the need to burn things for electricity has massively diminished now … I first taught a course on electricity generation 10 years ago when there was this tiny renewable fraction in the UK’s energy mix and lots of nay-saying that it couldn’t be integrated. Now 10 years later I can give lectures with the majority of the UK’s electricity now coming from renewables. Wind is the largest resource today. There are days with zero coal. It’s almost hard to imagine the rate of improvement in wind turbine gearboxes and [solar] photovoltaics … in the middle of the day five years ago gas-fired power picked up most of the slack, when demand increases, and you used to have this flat amount of nuclear, flat amount of coal … Now [it’s provided by] solar. It’s phenomenal.’
California’s governor Jerry Brown told the One Planet Summit in December 2017 that California was on course to meet its 50 per cent renewable target a decade ahead of schedule. That, as Ally suggests, is thanks to the falling price and rising performance of the technology. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), the price for solar PV between 2009 and 2018 fell by 77%, and for onshore wind by 38%. The cost of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars fell by 79% during the same period, a fact that BNEF’s head of energy economics called ‘chilling for the fossil fuel sector’. By 2018, more than 300,000 Americans were employed in the renewable energy sector, compared to just 52,000 working in the coal industry. This crosses party political lines. Traditionally Republican states such as Texas, Utah and North Carolina have each installed more than 1 gigawatt of solar (each able to power over 700,000 homes). California has since announced a renewable target of 100 per cent by 2045 and has called for the entire United States to go 100 per cent by 2050. If that sounds like wishful thinking, or just plain unaffordable, then consider the award-winning 2015 study led by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson: he looked at the feasibility of a 100 per cent wind, water and solar (WWS) power grid for the United States by 2050, and for a range of factors (such as baseload energy, how you store the energy and likely increases in extreme weather events) it found a future renewable grid to be 40 per cent cheaper than a conventional one.5 It projected a renewable electric system cost of an average 10.6 cents per kWh, compared to a conventional grid of 27.6 cents per kWh.¶ The reason is simple, writes Jacobson: renewable energy ‘requires zero fuel cost, whereas conventional fuel costs rise over time’.
That might be OK for the richest country in the world, but what about everyone else? In 2017, Jacobson et al. repeated the study for 139 countries and consistently found renewables to be more affordable than fossil fuel energy over time. They also argued that moving to 100 per cent renewables would create 24.3 million full-time jobs (net – accounting for jobs lost in the fossil fuel sector) as each country becomes responsible for producing and maintaining its own power supply, as opposed to outsourcing it to Saudi Arabia or Russia.6 While certainly bullish, Jacobson and his numerous co-authors are hardly maverick outliers. A 2017 literature review of 24 papers modelling transitions to a 100 per cent renewable future found that, ‘100 per cent renewable systems have been shown in the literature to be not just feasible, but also cost-competitive with fossil-fuel based systems.’
Even Simon Bennett at the International Chamber of Shipping surprised me with a vision of what reduced shipping could mean for the world: ‘Assuming the world does decarbonise, that’s going to have an impact on the movement of fossil fuels – if nothing else, moving fossil fuels contributes to about 30 per cent of the demand for maritime transport … if the shore-based economy decarbonises, ships won’t be required to move large quantities of crude oil around the world. So, the decarbonisation of the rest of the world is probably going to reduce shipping demand which will in turn reduce … emissions from shipping.’
You could argue, then, that we are already on the right path. That we can just sit back and wait for clean air to blow in with the coming winds of change. While there is an element of truth in that, there’s a lot wrong with it too. For one, how confident are you that you’ll be alive in 2050? How old will your children and grandchildren be? If we have decades of high NOx, PM and nanoparticles still to come, are you comfortable with the health consequences of that? Without public engagement and pressure, there’s a wealth of vested interests happy to slow down the transition to clean energy indefinitely. And misguided politics can always screw things up. As just one small example, the UK energy department began a Capacity Market auction in 2014 for relatively small power providers to contribute electricity to the grid at times when the contribution of wind and solar is low. This caused a boom in the numbers of diesel generators. And diesel generators emit … actually, we know this bit by now, don’t we? The Capacity Market auction in December 2015 awarded contracts of over 1GW to small-scale diesel or gas generators. It raises the very real possibility that our future power supply will look much like the lone electric car-charging point I saw at the LCV show, hooked up to a diesel generator. The amount of own goals inherent in a system like that are too many to contemplate.
Just as the world is waking up to the benefits of tackling air pollution, politics can just as easily derail it. The aftershocks of populism caused by the likes of Brexit and Trump threaten to turn the tide against environmental laws with the promise of returning to a rose-tinted industrial past. Although, as we have seen, the industrial past was anything but rosy. Devra Davies quotes a former zinc factory worker from Donora who remembered conditions so bad that, ‘five guys had gone before me to shovel out the finished zinc. Each one of them keeled over, real sick … I was the sixth one in. I couldn’t take it either. I left. Spent a week in bed and never returned. Not many made it to the age of 30 as zinc workers.’
Does appalling pollution inevitably force the hand of politicians to clean up their cities? I asked the scientist and historian Peter Brimblecombe whether the UK’s Clean Air Act of 1956 was an inevitable consequence of the Great Smog of London in 1952. ‘No, I don’t think it was inevitable,’ he says. ‘It was strongly resisted for a number of reasons. Harold Macmillan was very concerned, he was Minister of Housing during the smog … his idea was that there were already, within the Public Health Act of 1936, plenty of smoke [abatement] clauses … And many politicians worried enormously about how can we tell people what they do in their own homes? That this is an appalling affront to personal freedom.’ It only won through due to political will and public support. ‘For me the Clean Air Act was always important as a political statement about how you make environmental legislation,’ says Peter. ‘How you challenge personal freedom, how you provide new technology to do things, how you fund the generation of knowledge needed to improve the atmosphere.’
Then there are the car lobbies. I have some sympathy with those car companies who tried their best to meet increasingly stringent emissions standards set by the likes of CARB and the EU. But, as we have seen, many didn’t try at all, and even when forced to, their models regularly failed when tested in real-world driving conditions. This still amounts to production lines full of models that need to be sold. In early 2018, the car industry body SMMT attempted a fight-back, with a marketing campaign promoting the environmental benefits of diesel cars (déjà vu, anyone?). Tweets and infographics released by SMMT included such golden nuggets as ‘Latest Euro 6 vehicles are the cleanest in history’ – which, in the context of the very dirty history of diesel, is like claiming a new half-pound cheeseburger is the ‘healthiest ever’ because it has a sugar-free bun. And that these cars ‘feature technology that converts most of the NOx from the engine into harmless nitrogen and water before it reaches the exhaust’ – my response to that being, according to the EQUA tests of Euro 6 models in real-world conditions (see Chapter 5), no they don’t.
There are clean-ups on offer, and there are cover-ups. Historically, we are very delicately poised: we could get stuck in an indefinite cover-up phase. Cheap desk-top air filters for the home sell for as little as $20 (£15), but strain in vain against the volume of gases and particles we pump daily into the air. On my writing desk sits a voucher from a packet of washing detergent, inviting me to ‘Keep calm and breathe deeply: Enter for a chance to win 1 of 8 air purifiers with this pack.’ Breathable air is now a competition prize. In the 1980s sci-fi comedy Spaceballs, Mel Brooks’s hapless President Skroob sucks down cans of ‘Perrier Air’ because the air on his planet has become so dirty. That sci-fi parody became modern-day reality in a worryingly short space of time when, in 2013, an enterprising Chinese businessman began selling cans of clean air on the streets. But that wasn’t a one-off. In 2015, a Canadian start-up called Vitality Air shipped 4,000 eight-litre cans of ‘Rocky Mountain air’ to China for 100 yuan ($15, £11) a pop. In 2016, another Beijing entrepreneur started selling canned air – only this time it was of Beijing’s polluted air, for tourists to take home as a souvenir. When I spoke to the shop owner in 2017, he told me he had sold thousands of them for around $4 (£3) a can, and ‘I have a new pollution-related product hitting the shelves today: the Beijing Pollution Globe, which is like a snow globe with the iconic Beijing CCTV tower in and when you shake it it’s covered in grey pollution floating around.’
There are grand plans to fight the symptom rather than the cause, too. When Dutch artist/inventor Daan Roosegaarde first visited Beijing in 2013, he came up with the idea of an outdoor air purifier – a giant vacuum cleaner that could suck PM out of the air. Three years and several prototypes later, Roosegaarde unveiled a 7m-high (23ft) ‘Smog Free Tower’, supported by the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, in Beijing’s 751 D-Park. It uses positive ionisation, a similar principle to static electricity, to attract airbourne particles to it. ‘We found a technology which is used indoors for hospitals and we scaled it up,’ says Roosegaarde. ‘We charge the small particles with positive ions, then a large negatively charged surface [inside the tower] attracts them … basically you suck the polluted particles in from the top, and you drag them down.’ It captures and collects more than 75 per cent of PM in an area the size of a football field, running on just 1,400 watts, less than the average desktop indoor air filter. As for what happens with the collected PM waste once collected, he currently has a sideline selling the compacted black substance as jewellery. Prince Charles owns a set of ‘smog-free’ cufflinks. Roosegaarde and his team are now looking at how to scale up the Smog Free Tower: ‘We're working now on the calculation, how many towers do we actually need to place in a city like Beijing to get a pollution reduction of 20 to 40 per cent? … It shouldn’t be thousands [of towers], it should be hundreds. We can make larger versions as well, the size of buildings.’
However, he may have already been beaten to it. In 2018, the Shaanxi capital of Xi’an announced a very similar device towering up to 100 metres (330 feet) tall, around the height of a 30-storey building, called a Solar-Assisted Large-Scale Cleaning System (SALSCS). The idea was first proposed in a PhD thesis at the University of Minnesota in 2015. The Xi’an system consists of a large glass greenhouse with a 100m (330ft) chimney sticking out of it. The air inside the glass is heated up by the sun (just as it would be in a back garden greenhouse, only many times bigger) and as it rises, it is funnelled back out through the chimney fitted with a particle-trap filter, and clean air then comes out of the top. Short-term measurements show PM2.5 concentrations in the district surrounding the tower can be lowered by approximately 12 per cent. Models suggest that eight 500m-high (1,640ft) SALSCS towers (over 100m or 330ft taller than the Empire State Building) could reduce PM2.5 in Beijing by 15 per cent. A version covered with video advertising displays has been already been designed. It could be lifted from a Blade Runner film – smoky emissions continue side-by-side with giant filter towers, as glaring advertising films urge you to consume more and carry on.
When I attend the Smogathon London semi-final – a competition for start-ups with smog-busting business and technology ideas – in late 2017, I get the same uneasy feeling. The Smogathon London semi-final at the Google Campus is an intimate event, with maybe 30 people. The teams pace nervously in gleaming new trainers, waiting for their turn to pitch their ideas. Behind the stage a screen displays tweets from recent on-campus events, including one from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, that reads, ‘If you’re never doing anything that fails, you just aren’t innovating hard enough’. As the five-minute presentations get under way, a theme is quickly established: they are proposals to create small, paid-for pockets of clean air within urban environments. A pram with a £115 ($150) filter to fit around the baby; a car with an improved internal filtration system; a city bench that purifies the air for those sitting on it. They do nothing to tackle the underlying cause of air pollution, but do everything to mask it, to make it palatable. They strike me as the equivalent of the tobacco industry’s first response to smoking health concerns: by adding a small white filter to the end, they said ‘It’s OK – you can keep on smoking now.’
Canned air, 30-storey smog towers and prams with inbuilt air filters are a sign of our folly, of how far down the wrong path we have already strayed. They also admit defeat. And admitting defeat remains a real option that some cities might settle for. In Delhi, Rana Dasgupta told me, ‘a huge part of [middle-class] discussion about this has to do with masks and air purifiers … [That] you can buy your way out of the problem in various kinds of ways. It is totally absurd. Whereas being asked to drive less is [seen as] a huge affront. Most people I know basically just try to make sure that they have one car that is odd numbered and one car that is even numbered so they don’t have to be in any way inconvenienced.’ This, despite the fact that when we spoke the odd/even scheme had only been triggered twice, lasting for a total of 20 days. ‘There is always a way that people just insulate themselves from the consequences,’ said Rana.
Removing the sources of air pollution is not, however, the hardship option. It is an equally innovative, high-tech vision of the future, but it’s one that doesn’t put Mel Brooks’s President Skroob in charge. Stanford’s Professor Jacobson puts it most succinctly: ‘If the world electrifies all sectors, and the electricity is obtained from wind, water and solar … then future progress will not result in any further air pollution.’ (If you remember just one quote from this book, make it that one!)
Manufacturers now offer consumers cleaner options that are more attractive on their own terms than their rivals. Tesla’s electric Model S displaced Mercedes to become America’s best-selling luxury car in 2016, selling almost double its nearest rival by 2017. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that the cost of ownership – including both the purchase price and running costs – of electric cars will dip below vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2022. Volvo is aiming to only sell electric vehicles by 2025 – the same year that Norway, Austria and the Netherlands plan to achieve 100 per cent zero car emissions for new cars. Laura Parry from Islington Council, London, tells me that the zero emissions alternatives she offers to small businesses and residents are ‘not just affordable, they will save you money. One guy I worked with … figured out that by using an electric van he is now saving £4,500 ($5,900) a year by not having to fill up with diesel … if you are spending less money on it and it’s good for the air of your customers and your family … people are comfortable with that, they understand it.’
Consumer purchasing power can speed up the pace of change better than anything else. Antonia Gawel of the World Economic Forum writes, ‘Each of us take decisions on a daily basis. We can drive or cycle to work. We can carry a reusable coffee mug or throw away a plastic equivalent every morning. We can ask questions about the food we buy or the clothes we purchase. While these actions may seem trivial at an individual level, at a collective level they will … grow the market for cleaner products and decrease demand for things that we know cause pollution.’ The idea that zero emissions options are always more expensive is, frankly, nonsense. Most people can’t afford a Tesla. But the end goal for any sane city is not for most people to own a Tesla (except maybe Oslo, where Tesla topped the new car sales charts in 2017). The end goal is to get more people walking, cycling, sharing public transport and joining car clubs – all far cheaper options than vehicle ownership.
David Newby, the cardiology professor who strapped cyclists into diesel exposure chambers, knows more than anyone the dangers of cycling through polluted air. Yet he diligently rides his own bicycle to work every day, up and down the steep Edinburgh hills, sharing the air with ageing vehicles belching blackened fumes. He insists that his children walk the mile to school and back rather than taking them in a car. He knows the air they are exposed to is unclean, he says. But it would be even more toxic were they to add another car to the streets. ‘We need to find a way of getting people back into walking,’ he says. ‘If you go to a city where they have cleared out the cars and it’s just people walking and cycling everywhere, my God it’s such a nice place to live.’
So, the end goal is clear: 100 per cent renewable energy and zero emissions transport. But is the goal zero pollution? Even I would argue that’s a step too far. For one, it’s impossible – even large volumes of people walking and cycling will create some PM through resuspension of dust. The WHO sets a safe limit for PM of 20mg/m3, but the science increasingly shows there is no ‘safe limit’, only incrementally worse health effects for every 5 or 10mg/m3. I don’t think you could ever get to the point of not making so much particulate matter that it wouldn’t breach those [20mg/m3] limits,’ argues Ally Lewis. ‘That’s not a debate that people are currently having … I don’t think yet we’ve got to the point of people saying well, OK, what [level of pollution] would be acceptable?’
Chris Griffiths at St Barts Hospital believes the answer is to ‘go with the evidence of what is safe for people. People can have a happy life if they heat their houses in a different way – everybody likes an open fire, but if the health effects of that are demonstrably severe then we have to think about whether that’s the right thing to do or not … When the health effects are known you then have to decide what to do about it. But if you’re saying we need to live in a sort of Stalinist world where nobody is allowed to light a bonfire or have an open fire, that’s not what we’re after.’ He draws the parallel with the ban on smoking cigarettes in bars and restaurants, which is now common in most countries. When we were kids, says Chris, being surrounded by cigarette smoke was just normal; now, nobody questions the ban: ‘I don’t think changing what is appropriate or allowed in public spaces is a problem, if the data is there to inform you.’
There are cultural red lines that some countries and cities may want to keep. The argument over fireworks during Diwali in India becomes heated because it is seen as part of Hindu tradition. As several Delhiites pointed out to me, firecrackers are a more modern tradition than many care to admit. But does anyone want zero fireworks on Diwali night? Or zero fireworks during Fourth of July celebrations in the US** , or 5 November in the UK? Do Australians want to ditch their barbecues in favour of electric hobs? It sounds flippant but it’s an important point. I mentioned at the start of Chapter 4 that my surprise at the PM2.5 levels from frying my tortillas caused me to start baking them instead; well, in all honesty, I now fry them again, because they taste better cooked that way, but only when it’s just me in the kitchen – while I can accept the personal risk-versus-taste gamble, I shouldn’t expose my kids to it.
My favourite example came during my visit to Helsinki – a clean air city doing more than most to clean up what little pollution they do have. With one exception: saunas. Finns love their saunas, and most homes have at least one of them (there are an estimated 2 million saunas in a country of just 5.3 million people). A quarter of combustion-derived PM emissions in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area comes from wood burning, and half of that from wood-burning saunas. When I met Sampo Hietanen to talk about his transport ideas, I couldn’t help sneaking in a question about this too: could Helsinki residents ever be persuaded to replace wood-fire saunas with electric ones? ‘No. Because the wood sauna is just best,’ he says. At first I wonder if he’s joking. But then I realise he isn’t. ‘The Finnish fireplace manufacturers are quite innovative and have addressed this issue, like making new kinds of designs of the fireplaces to make them burn more efficiently … if it burns cleanly there is no problem.’ There is, again, no such thing as clean burning. Burning solid fuel, by definition, creates emissions. But even Esa Nikunen, the head of the Helsinki Environment Centre which manages environmental protection across the city – and distributes leaflets promoting the benefits of electric saunas – told me, ‘[the] sauna is really a holy thing in Finland. Of course, it can be heated with electricity … but it’s nicer if you burn wood.’
If a whole society is happy with that as a cultural red line, while being aware of the risks, then maybe that’s OK? In general, however, societies (countries, cities, towns, villages) are rarely so homogenous. The most vulnerable and socially disenfranchised are disproportionately affected by air pollution. Often many of the polluters, especially individuals in their homes, simply don’t know the damage they are doing due to a basic lack of awareness. Their choices need highlighting, debating and either re-affirming or scrapping, with equal input from all sections of society. But I refuse to believe there is any cultural or holy attachment to the refined versions of crude oil we pump into our vehicles’ fuel tanks. Ultimately, if an alternative energy source can give us the same speed, journey time and comfort level that we’ve been used to, but for zero pollution from the exhaust pipe, then who cares what they run on? We know that electric and hydrogen cars can not only match petrol and diesel on all those points, but in fact beat them: electric motors can accelerate faster than fuel engines, they don’t need gears, the ride is smoother and quieter. Better still, with the right cycling infrastructure, bicycles can be even quicker, healthier and far cheaper than electric cars. So, the final blueprint point should be made loud and clear: ban all petrol and diesel cars from cities as quickly as possible, and pay for their replacements by fining industrial emitters and the worst car industry cheats.
When I visited the British Museum, the final thing that Anna Davies-Barrett wanted to show me was a new display she had curated – her first, in fact – in the public collection of 1,000-year-old Sudanese skeletons with clear signs of the diseases they had suffered from, many linked to atmospheric pollution. Behind glass cases, bones and spines are warped, twisted and damaged in various ways, through diseases including TB and bone cancer: ‘these things go hand-in-hand with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,’ says Anna, potentially there were other diseases [they were suffering from] too.’ I ask her whether this helps to visualise the effects that present-day air quality is having on our own bodies, too? ‘Yes, I’d like it to raise awareness about life now. I’d like people to be able to say, “look, they had all these respiratory diseases, that’s awful, maybe we should change the way we think about air quality today?” … If you are confronted by the physical evidence of something, if you can see the bone changes in the sinuses, bone changes in the rib, it is more shocking.’ While writing this book, I was diagnosed with a condition myself (a very minor one, I should hastily add). Perennial rhinitis is, at least in my case, like mild hayfever, but year-round. After a particularly aggressive coughing fit one morning I thought I’d get it checked out, and there it was, written in black and white: ‘occurs year-round and can result from … air pollution such as automobile engine emissions’.
Air pollution is affecting our quality of life – everyone reading this book, everyone you know. Given the overwhelming links between air pollution and stunted childhood development, it is plausible – likely, even – that you and I would be healthier, more intelligent individuals than we are, had we not grown up breathing the pollutants that we have – the stubble-burning, the leaded petrol, the unregulated marine fuel. Remember the very first study at the start of this book, linking lead pollution exposure with the lowering of childhood IQ? Professor Bill Yule, who took part in UK lead pollution studies in the 1980s, recalled for a BBC Radio 4 documentary in 2018: ‘Of course the argument that opponents … would add is that “IQ” is very unreliable … and it varies from morning to evening, and so a difference of four to five points [due to lead levels in the blood] is neither here nor there. I thought a lot about that … If you imagine the normal distribution of IQ, the bell-shaped curve, and now imagine that it is shifted by four points to the left. In other words, lower. It makes little difference in the middle range. But in the lowest range, IQ 70 and below, there are at least double the number of children … It is enormous.’ The very last leaded petrol pump in the UK was removed in the year 2000. Prof Yule also said, ‘There is a wide consensus now that there is no safe level. Back when I started working on lead almost 40 years ago, if you look in a paediatric textbook you would find that 60mg per decilitre [of lead in a child’s blood] was the upper limit of normal … [now] population blood-lead levels have dropped to the point where we can ask the question, is 5mg per decilitre bad for children? Previously we were unable to ask that question because virtually all children had a level above 10mg per decilitre.’7 As a child of the 1980s, I may have had blood lead levels above 10mg per decilitre, with the cognitive detriments that come with it.†† Today’s levels of diesel emissions, ultrafine particles and NOx could seem as astonishing to readers in the 2030s and 2040s as those leaded petrol figures seem now. And the children of today are exposed to higher levels of diesel emissions and nanoparticles than I ever was in the 1980s.
Children growing up in towns and cities could do so alongside roads of electric vehicles and cycle lanes, live in homes powered by renewable energy and breathe air almost entirely devoid of the pollution we take for granted today. This is an achievable vision. It is achievable right now in your city, in your town, in your back yard. Unlike climate change there is no ‘2 degrees’ scenario, no knowledge that ‘things are going to get worse whatever we do’. Urban air pollution is local, short-lived, and can be stopped at the source; the benefits are instant and dramatic. Whether this zero-emissions, low-carbon future happens in 10, 20 or 100 years, is down to public pressure and political will. It’s down to us.
Notes
* The erstwhile head of the EPA in 2017, Scott Pruitt, was a big fan of this tactic. In mid-2017 he made a statement saying ‘what the American people deserve … is a true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2’ – the inference being that such an exercise hasn’t happened, despite in reality having been ongoing in thousands of peer-reviewed journals for decades, including five reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In late 2017, Pruitt again told CNBC, the American news channel, that there is ‘tremendous disagreement’ about whether man-made emissions are causing climate change, and that ‘we need to continue to debate, continue the review and analyse’. There is very little disagreement among the scientific community on this issue. However, by repeatedly saying there is, the status quo can be maintained indefinitely.
† This kind of double standard is not unique to India. H. F. Wallis, writing in 1972, asked why the UK car manufacturers ‘neglect to build safety factors into cars for the home market while compelled to do so for those meant for export’.
‡ Electric rickshaws were also briefly popular in Delhi before being banned in 2012 for supposed ‘safety reasons’. After a few years in the courts, an ‘E-Rickshaw Bill’ was finally passed in March 2015, allowing electric rickshaws, albeit with restrictions on load and speed. Potential e-rickshaw drivers, however, were now understandably reluctant to make the switch.
§ By late 2017, Nissan gave up waiting for the government and began to offer its own scrappage scheme, offering UK customers up to £2,000 ($2,800) plus trade-in value on their old vehicles to switch to a Nissan Leaf. But it was only a one-month trial.
‖ China named Chen Jining as its new Environment Minister one day before the documentary was released. This adds weight to suggestions that Under the Dome was not a scandal that shocked the authorities, but was fully choreographed with their help. According to a report by the BBC, the documentary script and interview were sent to the National People’s Congress for comments and feedback prior to its release.
¶ Comparing the probability estimates – i.e. the range between best and worst case predictions - is useful here too, as even the worst-case scenario for renewables (14.1 cents per kWh) beats the best-case scenario for fossil fuels (17.2 cents per kWh).
** Home fireworks are already illegal in Los Angeles County, including for Fourth of July celebrations due to air quality and wild fire risks.
†† I blame any mistakes you might find within this book on that, and that alone!