Britain faces fines and court appearances for failing to reduce 'excessive' levels of nitrogen dioxide fumes from traffic
The UK faces fines of up to £300m a year and embarrassing court appearances after the European commission launched legal proceedings against it for failing to reduce "excessive" levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) air pollution from traffic, despite 15 years of warnings and several extensions and postponements granted to the government.
The affected areas are Greater London, the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Teesside, the Potteries, Hull, Southampton, Glasgow, the east, the south-east, the east Midlands, Merseyside, Yorkshire & Humberside, the west Midlands, and the north-east. But the commission said that Britain had not presented any "credible and workable plan" for meeting air quality standards by 2015.
Potočnik was spurred into action by the UK supreme court's landmark ruling last year which declared that Britain was in breach of the directive and said: "the way [is] open to immediate enforcement action at national or European level."
Air pollution causes 29,000 early deaths a year in the UK and the World Health Organisation has confirmed that air pollution causes cancer. Poor air quality also causes heart attacks and children living near busy roads in the UK have been shown to grow up with underdeveloped lungs.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/
Kind regards,
Gordon.
P.S.
I'd like to see geoengineering (chemtrailing) brought into EU Air Pollution Legislation.
TAP - Why have the oil industry been allowed to promote diesel cars? They are far dirtier and smellier than petrol, and are carcinogens. I think we know the answer to that. The depopulation agenda requires as many poisons as possible be placed into our environment to increase rates of death and lower health and fertility.
Tap - the article said traffic - not diesel - isn't the headline a bit misleading? I read that the emissions from diesels were lower than petrol - but am no expert so open to more information. And of course we need to clean up our act in vast areas - not just car emissions.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
Peace.
It is a long proven fact that many people have produced engines that run on compressed air, water etc etc but those inventions are never allowed to be made available in case the sales of oil and associated goods are affected.
ReplyDeleteThere is abundant resources available for all on this planet and renewable clean energy coupled with natural foods but still we are being sprayed, injected and dosed with toxins on a constant daily basis so what do we really expect any more but simply more of the same! Time to get right in the faces of the same criminals of all parties and the establishment per-se and refuse to comply!
reiverdave
http://hipknowsys.blogspot.com/2014/02/benjamin-fulford-february-17-2014.html
ReplyDeleteI stand by the title. Diesels are highly carcinogenic and would be responsible for a high percentage of the deaths. The information about diesels being so evil is well buried, so people don't realise they're being persuaded by the industry to poison themselves and everybody else by purchasing diesel cars.
ReplyDeleteJust Announced
ReplyDeleteCO2 Dogma Driven EU Idiots Announce – Binding CO2 Targets For 2013 – Economic Sabotage !
http://www.sovereignindependentuk.co.uk/2014/02/20/co2-dogma-driven-eu-idiots-announce-binding-co2-targets-for-2013-economic-sabotage/
Hey Tap I would tend to agree with the carcenogen hypothesis but further would add that since lead was removed from petrol Benzine has been added as an anti-knocking agent. Benzine is very very carcenogenic & poisonous too.
ReplyDeleteDue to EU/UK policy car manufacturers were compelled to drop fuel efficient "lean burn" engines and use catalytic converters ( incurring a 15% hit on fuel consumption who gained from that ? ). The cat' does not function until its hot so that carcenogenic benzine and other byproducts are pumped out on the school run.
ReplyDeleteAir pollution. “Pea souper” smog may be a thing of the past, but less visible pollution is still exacting a toll on the health of commuters and city dwellers. And it’s not just our lungs that are affected. A landmark European study published just last month found a link between invisible particles of soot and the risk of heart attack.
Frank Kelly is Professor of Environmental Health at King’s College London.
Kelly
It builds on a very large literature which indicates that there is an association between living in an area which has got higher air pollution and a major health outcome, which is heart attacks. So the study was done across five European countries, it ran for 12 years and it involved over 100,000 people.
Porter
And that increased risk was how much?
Kelly
That increased risk was relatively small, it was the order of between 5 and 10% but it’s still a risk and…
Porter
Heart attacks are common as well.
Kelly
… there’s 45,000 people die from heart attacks in the UK every year and if we can help that component of that sector by minimising the risk then I think everybody would be very grateful.
Porter
So a small increase but in a common thing?
Kelly
Yes, we all have to breathe.
Porter
Looking at the pollutants themselves, I mean with the advent of the catalytic converter of course petrol engines were cleaned up and you can’t smell the fumes like you used to be able to but there’s a new danger emerged?
Kelly
Yes, Europeans have got a great love for the diesel engine because we thought it was a more efficient than the petrol engine, we could get more miles to the gallon. That’s not really true anymore and we’re left really with the problem of diesel being much more of a polluting fuel than petrol is. A typical figure that’s usually used is that you’ll get 20 times more particles from a diesel exhaust engine than you will from a petrol engine.
Porter
And explain what these particles are.
Kelly
So these are small carbon particles, so small you can’t see them. And to try and put that into context – a human hair, which you can just see, is 60 micrometres in diameter, the largest of these particles that can get into your lung are only 10 but the majority of them are much, much smaller than that. So they’re invisible to the naked eye but they’re produced in very large quantities from all our transport systems and in urban environments.
Porter
Are modern cars with all of the latest emissions are they still producing these particles?
Kelly
Modern cars – they have become cleaner but they haven’t become clean enough. And what has unfortunately has become apparent, just in the last 12 months is, is that these fantastic exhaust systems work beautifully in the factory whenever the car is running to a very set cycle but the technology, it turns out, doesn’t work that well in real life. So if you have a vehicle on a London road, which is running at maybe 12 or 13 miles an hour because of congestion, it never gets up to the right temperature to effectively work properly. So we’re getting a lot more pollution from a vehicle which is meant to be very clean.
Porter
And how are these particles actually harming us?
Kelly
The difference about these modern vehicle exhaust particles are that they’re very small, so they’re actually getting to parts of our bodies, deep parts of our lung, which particles have never been able to get to before because we’ve always had the larger ones associated with burning wood and coal. But these modern diesel associated particles are so small that some of them can actually get across our lung into our circulation. Now that’s never happened to the human lung before but if you get this happening day in, month in, year in over decades then clearly it can build up to a big problem.
Porter
This new study looked at a link between pollution and heart attack, do we think that these small particles getting into the bloodstream are affecting the heart that way, is that how…?
HETT
ReplyDeletepart 2
Kelly
There are two main theories. One is that yes they are transferring across from the lung into the circulation and affecting blood vessels and the heart directly. The other theory is that it’s not the particles themselves but it’s what they carry on their surface, so they carry these complex chemicals of metals and organic compounds which you get from combustion and then when they get into the deep lung they leach off and they move across the cells into the circulation – that’s the chemicals. And it doesn’t really matter, the bottom line is that they’re getting across whether they’re on the particle’s surface or not.
Porter
What happens to these particles once they come out the back of an exhaust pipe, are they dispersed like gases would be?
Kelly
Absolutely. So immediately beside a busy road there’ll be a high concentration of them and if you happen to be moving along that pavement or whatever you’ll be breathing them in fresh. But very quickly they do move up into the air and depending on the weather conditions they’ll be mixed with older particles and they may, if there’s not high buildings on the road, they may be cleared across out of the city very quickly.
Porter
What about people who are cycling and pedestrians who are commuting, the children who are walking to school, presumably the more vigorous the activity that you’re doing in this polluted air the more likely you are to draw these particles in?
Kelly
Absolutely, so everything I’ve been talking about so far is to do with concentration of particles in the air. Obviously someone who’s cycling they’re breathing much harder, or if they’re running they’re breathing much harder, if it’s a child playing they’re breathing much deeper and longer. So it’s that volume of air and the concentration of pollution in the air which gives you the ultimate figure which we all need to pay attention to.
Porter
What about filtering these particles out? First of all let’s talk about the cyclist then – we see lots of cyclists in London wearing masks, do any masks work?
Kelly
Certainly the relatively cheap disposable masks they will not prevent the particles entering the lung because they are too small. So effectively if you’re going to stop those you would have to have something which basically stopped you being able to breathe. There are some higher end masks which have activated charcoal as part of their makeup and they will trap some of the gases which we worry about – we haven’t talked about those, like nitrogen dioxide which also has health effects – though actually to stop these very small particles you have a big challenge on your hands.
HETT
ReplyDeletePorter
If it’s not practical to wear that sort of mask what would your advice to cyclists be?
Kelly
So unfortunately many of the major cycle routes are along our busiest roads and that’s where the most pollution is. So there are now apps and maps available which will allow cyclists to plot their route from A to B by maybe adding two or three minutes to their journey but just going down some side roads, some back roads, through parks and they’ll have a much pleasanter experience and they can drop their exposure level to this pollution considerably, I mean many fold.
Porter
And to put diesel cars in context, I mean we haven’t talked about buses and other – the heavy goods vehicles, but look at the cars – a modern diesel car compared to the equivalent modern petrol car, how clean is petrol now?
Kelly
Very, very clean, the technology for the petrol car has really led to a much improved combustion of the fuel and as a result some of the new Euro Six petrol engines are producing very, very small amounts of particles and very, very small amounts of oxides and nitrogen in the gas. If you want to drop pollution with the technology that’s available at the moment then a small engine petrol vehicle is ideal.
Porter
Professor Frank Kelly. And don’t think you are protected because you are sitting in a car - most modern automotive filters are not fine enough to remove diesel particulates, and you are breathing the same air as the cyclists and pedestrians.
Just time to tell you about next week when I will be looking at the latest thinking on how to manage children with constipation. And another cause of cough, but this one makes your chest sound like it’s full of Velcro.
HETT
Thanks for the updates - remaining open to more info on diesels.
ReplyDeleteThanks Tap.