What we can do to clean the air

Finally, having established the scale of the pollution problem and the potential health impacts, we’re going to examine what policy-makers can do to help improve the quality of the air that we breathe. Beth Gardiner is an American journalist based in London and the author of Choked: Life and breath in the age of air pollution…

Beth - This is not actually an impossible problem, right? It is fixable. It's not climate change that requires a wholesale sort of shift to new kinds of energy. The US has improved its air quality much more quickly than Europe has. And that really comes down to a very strong law passed in 1970, effective regulation and good enforcement. That doesn't sound really sexy and exciting when you talk about regulation and enforcement, but the thing with air pollution is that there's not one cause. So there's not one solution, right? You have to address the cars. You have to address the smokestacks. You have to look at all the different factors. What that law did in the US and what's happening today, actually, in China, which we're sort of used to thinking of as a poster child for bad air quality, they are actually making enormous strides. It's through some of the same things the United States did in decades past. Cars sold in the U.S. are now 99% cleaner, not in terms of greenhouse gases and climate, but in terms of the stuff that we are breathing in that comes out of the tailpipe.

Chris - Why though, flipping it over, is Europe still in a bad way then? You're saying that the U.S. has performed well. China is cleaning up its act. Europe has been lagging behind. What's missing in Europe then?

Beth - This really comes down to an enforcement failure. If you remember in the headlines almost 10 years ago now, in 2015, the Dieselgate scandal, when we learned that all these car companies, led by VW, but many others as well, were selling cars whose tailpipe emissions, the pollution they were putting out, was many times over the limit by six, eight, ten times over. Europe has never really built an effective mechanism for actually making the car companies follow the law. And what we've seen even today, because of those enforcement failures across the continent and in the UK, are that those cars are still out there, those Dieselgate cheating cars. They are not meeting the legal limit as it exists today of what they're allowed to pollute. And it's why what we've seen across Europe and the UK is this kind of patchwork approach where every city, every local council is left on their own. In London, the mayor, Sadiq Khan, has passed some really effective laws that have improved air quality. And that's great, but it would be so much more effective to be done at the national or Europe-wide level. No mayor, no local council can force a giant multinational corporation like VW or another car manufacturer to get their cars into compliance. Only national governments and the EU can do that.

Chris - How does it vary geographically though? Because you began this conversation with me talking about America and Europe, Western societies. Presumably, around the world, there are going to be different threats hitting different people to different extents. So are we in a situation where one size fits all is not going to work and we do need a kind of bespoke plan for different geographies? Or are there some generic things we all should be doing and we've got to get everyone to sign up to them?

Beth - There are a set of policies and approaches that have been shown to work in fixing air pollution. How any individual country approaches it is going to be down to them. And the mix of what the pollution sources are is obviously going to determine that. But wherever you look, really, this is something that needs to be addressed at a governmental level. And what tends to work is the government doing a careful scientific analysis of what their pollution sources are, and then tackling them one by one, whether that's the farmers burning crops in their fields that's such a big problem across India, South Asia, whether it's heavy industry, for example, in China. And in a lot of ways, what it comes down to is difficulties around the effectiveness of government. China has proved itself able, being a significantly wealthier country now than it was even 10, 15 years ago, to clean the air. And in India and Pakistan, the governments have not been able to flex that muscle to require the old coal power plants to clean up, to give the farmers different ways of clearing their land rather than burning the crops every year in this way that creates huge clouds of smoke that drift towards the big cities. So a lot of it comes down to the ability of the government to be effective. And of course, that does tend to correlate with wealth and development and good infrastructure in countries.