\\ If dirty air was such an issue.
More birth defects would have occurred when this nations airs were dirtier.
Scaremongering. Money making tactics //

hmmm dunno about that cos here in UK, air pollution doesn't seem to cause birth defects
but he has a point
we have the 2 bland PR claims
- "9,000 equivalent deaths pa"
Or "9,000 people die early each year"

But if air pollution has a lifespan effect :Birth year & Location should make a huge difference
eg Granny born & living in 1950 in London should live 2 years shorter
Grankid born & living in 2010 in London should live 1 month shorter

but no one ever gives us a stat like that
If they had the data they would
I reckon they don't have real data that's why we get these PR stats instead.

Yorkshire Post dramaqueening opinion piece from councillor Don MacKenzie of North Yorkshire highways dept

Every step counts to banish fumes that foul our air. - 2018-07-03
- TOO many of Yorkshire’s towns and cities have been included on a UK ‘league of shame’ for pollution problems, with a recent report revealing fumes from cars and vans costs the nation nearly £6bn worth of damage to our health every year.

Meanwhile the World Health Organisation set a global target to cut inactivity by 15 per cent by 2030, encouraging governments to do more to move people away from cars, towards walking and cycling

Despite the region’s cities and industrial towns such as Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Kirklees, Doncaster and Wakefield being highlighted among the worst in the report, most of our towns across Yorkshire suffer with congestion and resulting fossil fuel pollution..//

The context is that air is way cleaner than it used to be and getting cleaner every year
So by dramaqueening about today the writer
#1 fails to acknowledge how far we have come
#2 That doing nothing still leads to cleaner air
BTW I don't know where he cherrypicked his stats from.

The councillor is using £1m of people's own money to socially engineer people to leave their car in the garage more.
I'm guessing people think "I've paid for my car so I'll get into it with my tools and go to work and pick up the kids on the way back etc."

Councils seem to waste so much money on dream projects that don't work out, and escape accounatbility.
(I've never own a powered vehicle, but I am a single man)

\\ Optare supplying electric buses to London fleet
Leeds-based bus manufacturer, Optare, is supplying 31 all-electric double decker buses to Transport for London to start operation next year.
This follows Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, this week announcing the creation of the largest double-decker electric bus fleet in Euerope, with 68 set to join the capital’s bus fleet.

Of these, 31 will be supplied by Optare for Route 131 running from North Finchley bus station to Tottenham Court Road. //

#1 remember that Sadiq's previous attempts flailed, cos the batteries didn't last long so buses ran mostly on diesel
#2 31 is nothing .
"In London Over 8000 scheduled buses operate on over 700 different routes"
mostly double decker

The Times DieselsRpaedos PR team haven't worked for a while
today there's a normal one column news article, so not by them
Girl’s death from asthma linked to car pollution
This will be the girl whose mother was on the Radio 5 Live prog , saying "we lived on the north Circular so this must have caused her death"

\\ Ella Roberta Kissi-Debrah died in 2013
after making 27 visits to hospitals in three years due to asthma attacks.
She lived 25m (80ft) from London’s South Circular road,

Professor Stephen Holgate, an expert on asthma and air pollution based at the University of Southampton, found a “striking association” between Ella’s emergency hospital admissions and recorded spikes in nitrogen dioxide and PM10 [particulate matter] pollution.
She died after one of the “worst air pollution episodes in her locality”.//

5 years to reach a conclusion seems very long
Is it a case of fishing for expert quote ?

Ah yes the materia has been gathered for a court case
\\ The report is being submitted as part of an appeal to the attorney general to reopen an inquest into Ella’s death.//

\\ no medical professional had ever explained that air pollution could be making her daughter’s asthma worse.//
Doh !

\\ She claims that had she been properly advised, she would have considered moving and changing Ella’s school.//

\\ She is being represented by Jocelyn Cockburn, the human rights lawyer who represented the family of Stephen Lawrence, the murdered teenager. //
Oh well that makes me less suspicious , not

Times today suddenly has a #3 leader saying "Green Van Man"
..urban deliveries must go electric

...em if the new diesels are clean..then why scream for EV vans ?

Then Ed Conway has a long article saying the Jaguar i-Pace EV is super important

Today the dieselsRpaedos campaign continued on BBC lunchtime news according to commenter

\\ Biased, socialist, collectivist BBC banging on on the 1pm tv news about ‘increases in transport pollution’ .
In fact, the focus was entirely on car use.
Ergo, why we should move to friendly public transport and electric cars.

What a shame all those highly talented investigative journalists in the news room just cannot quite do what we plebs out here do. Which is to read the ‘Transport Statistics Great Britain 2017’ report

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/664323/tsgb-2017-print-ready-version.pdf

Mmmm. Quote ‘most air pollutants (from transport) have more than halved since 1990’.
Quote ‘there has been a long term decrease in new car fuel consumption’ (by about 30% since 2000).

There are many others, and tables, some of which (by combination) suggest train pollution vastly exceeds car pollution per unit journey. Headline car pollution is only higher because 30 times (yes, 30) more trips are by car than by train. When one considers that fuel duty and new car tax rakes in £30bn a year but only £8bn is pent on roads versus £16bn on rail you can see the massive extent to which car users are totally ripped off.

So, the facts do not exactly match the story.
But as we know, what do the facts matter when the real aim is the subjugation of the private citizen ( i.e. in this case car user) by the centralised state level bureaucracy (i.e. the BBC) //

There's a Times letter today
The prof's letter like Aaaronovitch's original article makes claims that don't stand up to analysis.

\\ Sir, David Aaronovitch (“Conspiracy theorists make monkeys of us all”, July 5) is right to draw attention to the importance of science, rationality and evidence in public policy and public health decision-making. Sadly UK public policy is strongly antiscientific and averse to making decisions based on evidence.

We have known for over 20 years that air pollution in UK cities breaches scientific thresholds put in place to protect public health and there is not one example of a council that has taken action to bring air pollution below those thresholds. Similarly, there is a huge amount of evidence that 20mph limits on residential roads reduce casualties by 30 per cent and collisions by over 25 per cent. However, councils like Shropshire refuse to adopt a scientific/evidence-based approach to road safety and scientifically proven strategies to improve public health.
Professor John Whitelegg //

eg "breaches scientific thresholds" .. are they really scientific ?
... those UN limits that people like the BBC are so fond of using seem on examination to be quite arbitrary,
... which is why many pollution monitor spots in the world break them despite the air in the west being much cleaner than 48 years ago.
What counts is not what happens at the monitor station, but what happens in your body.

Secondly look how stats are thrown around like the 2 completely different ones mentioning 40,000 deaths/premature-deaths
both bunk, cos what counts is total QALDs Quality Adjusted Life Days Lost

PO captain charged in Marseilles
cos ship Azura fuel broke port sulphur limits
France Nature Environment says that fine particle pollution around the port is a hundred times higher than in other districts of Marseilles.

The captain of the 115,000-tonne Azura, which can carry up to 3,000 passengers, has admitted using fuel that did not meet the regulations, local investigators have said.

Our mate Dr Grigg is in in the news
Asthma UK got an article into the Guardian which the Times have copied
It gets a kicking in the comments
\\This article represents dreadful alarmism by a charity Asthma UK.
The fact is with 5.4 million asthma suffers in the U.K., only 1 in 4100 suffers die.
As the article states 2/3 deaths are in part due to poor care from doctors.
Given the rise in asthma deaths is tiny, and the failure of doctors to prescribe basic care unacceptably huge and easily remedied, blaming this on Londons wood burning stoves etc seems like missing the point.//

A lot of the pollution articles in the papers seem to be PR from the charity Asthma UK
..and sure enough Yorkshire Post have "1 million mothers are asthma sufferers" .blah blah blah

Next page claims that the gov is thinking about offering low price leccy to recharge your EVs when renewables peak or network is off peak.

"Flexible charging would allow 60% more EVs to be recharged "
... I bet they made that number up

the Sept 2017 Fake Britain prog was repeated tonight

The adblue costs a lorry firm £25K year , so they buy a cheat device

A common problem : enviro laws are set at almost unattainable so people feel forced to cheat
..result that while you are watching 50 lorries the , that action is balanced by a bad truck pushing out 50 times more NoX

more intelligent laws would have led to no cheats and lower pollution

YP :Number of deaths due to pollution 'too high'
THE NUMBER of deaths related to air pollution in England remains at an “unacceptably high level”, the Environment Agency has warned

. ... dirty air still poses significant threats with 5.3% of total mortality attributable to tiny particles known as "particulate matter"

#1 The EA has as much credibility as a cub scout group

Seems to be based on https://www.gov.uk/government/news/report-on-state-of-air-quality-in-england-highlights-urgent-action-needed-on-ammonia-emissions

New EA state-of-the-environment reports are out

there is a bullet point "Air pollution related deaths remain at an unacceptably high level, with 5.3% of total mortality attributable to particulate pollution alone in 2016. "

hmm, I don't accept that 5.3% of deaths wouldn't happen if people lived in the cleanest air areas.
The same rule applies if you don't use QALDs then it's a bogus stat

5.3% ? I tracked back reference 18 to
here

Diesel parking surcharge will help pollution claim Westminster Council
"Our experience in the Marybone trial shows that the diesel parking surcharge works to improve air quality, by reducing journeys by diesel cars"

...him skeptical that a trial did what they wanted.
Is the theatre/restaurant still full ? or did people just stay away ?

In the borough wide plan parking in the west end would cost £7.35/hr instead of £4.90

Times DieselsRpaedos team are back with short article

Headline : Three in four diesels exceed pollution limits
hangon the text says "Tests run since the start of last year found "
that's 20 months old, why report now ?
The actual Which? page has a far less alarmist take
\\ With headlines about polluting diesel cars, diesel manufacturers cheating emission tests and cities around the world promising to ban diesels entirely, it’s no wonder that potential buyers are steering clear. But while most diesel cars are dirty compared with other fuel types, we’ve uncovered some surprising exceptions that produce less NOx than the average petrol car in our tests. No, really.//

here's the Times entire article
\\ Three out of four modern diesel cars are much dirtier than official pollution limits, the consumer group Which? has said.
Tests run since the start of last year found that 47 out of 61 models exceed the Euro 6 limit for oxides of nitrogen, despite conforming to official standards. The worst performer, the Subaru Forester, produced more than 25 times more NOx than the legal limit. Which? claims that its tests are more rigorous than official versions, with vehicles being tested in the default start setting rather than a more economical driving mode. However, Mike Hawes, of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said: “The new lab test, with the real driving emissions test, will help to assure drivers that new cars are the cleanest in history.”//

The Tony Robinson drone prog is basically a series of adverts for different businesses
He just featured a honey biz who place their hives on top of London officeblocks
Hang on isn't London supposed to be mega polluted ?
They claimed the pollen and bees are magically protected, cos the pollen is deep inside the petal channel.

Hmm basically London isn't that polluted.

==============

But the pollution it has , isn't only negative
In summer 1995 I used to cycle from Brixton to the internet company in Hatton Garden everyday
I never got sunburnt, cos the local ozone protects you.
However one Sunday we went to Brighton and I got sunburnt red raw, cos the sun got through the Brighton air