Forum topic: How the next Mayor can tackle London's environmental crisis

Stepping in in my moderator role, this has gone back to the familiar Paul vs Tom debate and has strayed away from the topic of air pollution. So a request to you both to desist.

However, I just want to correct one earlier point about the sources of emissions from diesel vehicles in London:

This is not actually the case:



Cars are a bigger problem that buses or trucks in London. For a start, they greatly outnumber buses and trucks, but also they have not had the same strict emissions standards applied, not to mention the scandalous business of rigged test results vs real life.

See also this parliamentary answer, in this case referring to the entire country, showing cars as emitting nearly half the NOX:

As Paul points out, successive governments are culpable in the popularity of diesel cars. However, I think that Paul is being charitable with regard to the law of unintended consequences.

The toxicity of particulates emitted by diesel engines has been known for 15 years or more, but has only been widely publicised recently. Governments were aware of it but deliberately chose to sweep the problem under the carpet.

By contrast, governments were under pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions (quite correctly) and saw encouraging diesel as an easy way to do that rather than doing the right thing, which would have been to take steps to reduce emissions from petrol-engined cars - both through stricter technical standards and by encouraging people to drive smaller cars and to drive less.

Whether or not my conspiracy theory is right, it's clear that something has to be done about diesel vehicles urgently. There is some good progress as regards buses in London (apart from the Borisbus fiasco) and it seems that cleaner taxis are not far off. HGVs will continue to be a problem, but there are proposals to combine deliveries to inner city destinations using depots on the outskirts. Private hire vehicles (minicabs) need to be tackled too - no less stringently than black cabs.

But diesel cars need to be phased out as quickly as possible. There should be an immediate ban on their sale and I think the government should introduce a scrappage scheme, since they are partially responsible. In the meantime, people should use them less.

The Royal Colleges, in their roughly 400 pages of reporting on research findings and after hearing expert evidence on air pollution “attribute” approximately 40,000 deaths to this source. An (expertly) estimated 40,000 annual UK deaths represents a lot of heartache and shortened lives, deserving some serious reflection. Air pollution is already acknowledged as the UK’s second largest public health issue and was subject to a recent verdict by the UK Supreme Court on HMG’s own long-running inactivity.

The Royal Colleges, in calling for urgent, community wide responsibility and related action to alleviate a “clear and avoidable cause of death, illness and disability” are essentially being anti-car in as much as they specifically seek a move away from that travel source in each of us towards public transport, walking and cycling.

And while its obviously positive to see any reduction in air pollution levels, published research last month from the MRC / PHE Centre for Environment and Health identified that this pollution has effects on mortality that persist for three decades after exposure. (The study can’t reveal beyond that given its start point.) So we are affected by air pollution levels in 1986, 1987 and all other intervening years, as well as ourselves effecting future generations by our present actions. Again I suggest a case for reflection and hopefully each taking the personal responsibility the Royal Colleges (and indeed other bodies) call for.

None of this gets away from the fact that the fact that the claim, " pollution causes thousands of premature deaths a year, mainly from vehicle emissions, the latest estimate puts it at nearly 9,500" (Clare Rogers 14 December 2015); is pure alarmism and comes from a badly written Guardian Article, totally misrepresenting the Kings College report “Understanding the Health Impacts of Air Pollution in London."

www.kcl.ac.uk/lsm/research/divisions/aes...ort14072015final.pdf

In the Executive summary of that report it says:
“In addition, for the first time, emerging techniques have been used to assess the mortality burden of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in London, following on from WHO recommendations (WHO, 2013b). WHO acknowledged uncertainty in the evidence so the associated figures are considered approximate and need to be used with care.”




In Table E1 , the figure of nearly 9,500 is the top estimate and, is not actual deaths per year, it is some mysterious “equivalent deaths at typical ages.”


The mid range of the total number of life years lost per annum is 96,685. Statistically, if average life expectancy at birth is 82 years, anthropomorphic air pollution kills 1,179 people each year in London, most of which is down to diesel emissions. What “Equivalent deaths at typical ages in 2010” means is a bit of a mystery to me.

UK life expectancy tables show that the highest life expectancy in the UK is in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and some of the lowest is in rural parts of the Celtic fringes. Air quality concerns has become a cause celebre of the Islington Worrying Class, but it would seem an exaggerated one.

However, the cost of replacing the diesel fleet in London overnight or even over say five years would be exorbitant (probably about £50bn and economically many times the value of lives saved.

The report estimates the cost of air pollution being £3n a year. But, putting a money value on a life is a very subjective matter. But think what the NHS can do with that. If a triple heart bypass costs £20,000, that £3bn gets you 150,000 of those and if each one of those adds 10 years to each patient’s life expectancy, it is the equivalent 150,000 life years gained.

To me this appears to demonstrate that, although petrol is environmentally far better than diesel, and electric better still, there is no point rushing to ban diesel powered vehicles from London or anywhere else for that matter.

Please also remember, that the EU, concerned about climate change, has for many years encouraged the development and manufacture of diesel engines, because of their lower CO2 emissions.

If the EU was to immediately ban the sale of Diesel engines, with the amount of R&D and plant invested, many car manufacturers would probably go immediately bankrupt. I do not think Basil’s proposal is therefore practical.

Basil has produced a chart, top try to disprove something I wrote, though it is not clear it does, that appears to have been generated in 2010 projecting a steep decline in NO2 emissions from TFL buses of about 75% between 2008 and 2015. If that has been achieved, it would be a remarkable achievement, considering that the TFL bus fleet is still almost entirely powered by diesel. It also seems to show that in 2008 NO2 emissions from diesel powered cars in London were around 2,000 tons, against 3,500 tons for other vehicle class. It predicted that NO2 emissions from diesel cars would rise sharply to 2015 whilst emissions form buses would collapse.

Could Basil let us know, what actually a happened.

What is true, is that overall NO2 roadside sites show a downward trend of 2.1% per year, equating to a total reduction over the six year period 2009 -2014 of 12.6%.
www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/ma..._for_publication.pdf

It is far better, to continue on ever improving emissions standards, and a gradual shift in taxation to make diesel

Less a Guardian article than UK scientists. The 9500 (London rather than the larger UK) figure is an aggregate of particulate and nitrogen dioxide impacts (from all sources). The recent Royal Colleges work has endeavoured to disaggregate double counting from the figures (some will die as a result of both rather than one or the other, hence a circa 40,000 UK total rather than circa 60,000 UK deaths some reported when the Kings NO2 (only) research was first released).


Clearly there is statistical work in all this for unless someone is say, struck by a lightning bolt, the cause(s) of death are often not clear neither individual contributory factors. Because the UK has been tracking and analysing population pools for so many decades (one such received much press last week), and through the NHS, has an unrivalled data base of health data, it is an acknowledged leader in epidemiology. The loss of life is seen as being over eleven years for those impacted; on average six months for each of us living in London (varying slightly by Borough).


But there is no need to second guess the ever increasing body of (worldwide) work emerging in this field for the core message is inevitably consistent – more active travel (walking and cycling) and if you need to use motorised transport makes it as clean as possible.


There will be more research data emerging and doubtless more rections such as that quite recently in Southern California where the law now prohibits a school being developed within 500 yards of a main road due to the air pollution risk – and that’s a very low diesel-traffic using country.


Paris will be banning diesel near term; a different approach to the health and wellbeing / economic equation which some may view as more appropriate.


As for pollution levels reducing, the UK Supreme Court were clear enough in ruling on that and didn’t agree with your own position. Few in the sector seem to.

Karl Brown says:

"The 9,500 (London rather than the larger UK) figure is an aggregate of particulate and nitrogen dioxide impacts (from all sources). "

This is possibly not many fewer than the number of people who are smokers, who die in London each year! And surely, smokers are exposed 1000s of times the toxic air borne pollutants than urban dwelling non-smokers.

Where's your source Karl?

Furthermore, it's the top end of estimates (probably the 99th percentile); It is not the average. And it is not the cause of death, it is a contributory factor.

The people most exposed to these pollutants should be the most affected, so are taxi drivers dropping like flies because of pollution? If taxi drivers have a far lower than average life expectancy, it could be other factors: sedentary life style, bad diet, smoking, stress from the job?

How about people working in garages? They probably do have lower than average life expectancy, but again, other factors could be more significant.

It is very difficult to establish causal relationships and all too easy to get it wrong, either through prejudice or genuine error.

As far as I can see, it is exaggerated alarmist rubbish.

I will tell you, the people who really were affected most by respiratory diseases caused by poor air quality, were deep pit coal miners.

I remember that it was the same sort of people, Boris Johnson and a few others excepted, who in the 1980s were obsessively protesting against pit closures who are now the most concerned about vehicle emissions now. Funny isn't it.
Could it be that much of it comes down to political prejudice, rather than sound science and reason?

Yes, very scarily an order of magnitude close to that of smoking. Air pollution is now seen as the UK’s second largest public health issue (after smoking), making it more significant then eg alcohol, diabetes, obesity and inactivity. The big difference is that 100% of us necessarily breathe.


For the most up to date sources, try last months report from the joint Royal Colleges; for Air Pollution’s cross-party nature try the London Assembly (report - Air Pollution in London) or the Environmental Audi Committee (Action on Air Quality – several reports spanning various governments); for a wider picture, either the WHO or the input from 17 European health bodies to the EU (Royal College of Physicians being the UK body) highlighting that EU deaths in 2012 due to PM2.5 (alone) exceeded four hundred thousand. Locally you could do little worse than review The Air Quality in Enfield, A Guide for Public Health Officials. All are publically available, all seem to exclude political prejudice rather than sound science and reason. (A lot of professional and public use such a different lens.)


Bear in mind these are early days, with the general public only recently being aware of Air Pollution as an issue and research being seen as currently equivalent to the early days of smoking. That trend is only going to go in one direction.


I can’t follow the reference or relevance to Boris Johnson, coal mine closures and the “same sort of people”. As I've said previously, this is a serious issue being addressed by many serious bodies and people. It deserves to be.

The big difference, Karl, is that 100% necessarily need to get around and have people get around to them. That means cars, vans, buses and lorries, that you with a multi(?) car household know well.

The people who screamed "Coal not Dole" and "Maggie Maggie Maggie, Out,Out,Out" in the 1980s when the government closed most of the filthy, polluting, disease causing coal pits are very often the same (sort of)people who are anti car today - those of Socialist tendencies. Do you get it now?

The crisis isn't nearly as big as you and Basil make it out to be. It may be a public health worry, but compared to public health worries of the past, it is just a pinprick. Imagine if we still had to put up with the smogs of the 1950s and earlier, malaria and no medicine to treat it, or even worse, did not have a supply of clean safe water and an efficient sewerage system. In many part of the world, people still lack these basic things.

Basil produced a graph showing projections diesel emissions shooting through the roof in the first part of this decade. But did this actually happen? He hasn't been able to demonstrate this yet.

In fact Euro diesel emission standards mean that particulate emissions from diesel cars built now are just 1/5th of those built before January 2005 are a mere 1/10 of those built before January 2000 and a miniscule 1/35th of those built before January 1992.

As these older vehicles reach the end of their lives, the air will become sweeter and as diesel cars become less popular again, which I am sure they will, the air will become sweeter still. Banning things and the huge cost that entails for consumers and businesses is neither necessary nor desirable.

As regards estimating mortality burdens associated with particulate air pollution, look no further than the Public Health England report of that name. In London (2010) it estimates 41,404 life years are lost among a population of an age 25+ of 5,330,600. and attributable deaths are 3,389 out of a total of 47,998. This means that particulate air pollution costs in London costs an average of 25 days off a life, in 2010, and for reasons set out in the 4th paragraph above, can only be on a downward path.

Whilst even this is undesirable, there would surely be far more lives lost by not having diesel powered vehicles. Banning them would be hugely disruptive and the cost would massively outweigh any gain.

You are right, those 3100 buses, trucks, vans, lorries going through the A105 daily are important, but they are dwarfed by the 13,500 cars.

More tired ''bikes lanes = socialism" rhetoric. The road network is all socialist, as is public transport. You just don't like cycilng infrastructure just because.