After you read Chapter 7, post three thoughts and questions related to the reading.  ALSO, make sure you don’t repeat questions or points others have already posted. In grading, I look for thoughtful and unique answers. If you state an opinion or fact, please back it up. You are also graded on driving the discussion and participating with others. 

CHAPTERSEVEN

The Greatest Smog Solution?

London: 2015–2020

London is slowly waking from its smog-induced slumber and fighting back. The first day after the Labour Party candidate Sadiq Khan won a famous mayoral election victory in May 2016, he announced plans for a London Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), effectively taxing heavily polluting vehicles out of the city centre. Choosing a school in east London to make the announcement, Khan stood in the playground and told the assembled media, ‘I have been elected with a clear mandate to clean up London’s air – our biggest environmental challenge … I want to act before [there’s] an emergency.’ Just two days later, the new mayor found an old report buried in predecessor Boris Johnson’s files. Left unpublished, the report, titled ‘Analysing Air Pollution Exposure in London’, had found that 433 of the city’s 1,777 primary schools were in areas where pollution breached the EU limits for NOx. Of those, 83 per cent were considered deprived schools, with more than 40 per cent of pupils on free school meals. The poor were the hardest hit by air pollution. The news quickly appeared on front pages and homepages.

In the months that followed, Khan introduced a new air pollution alert system, giving pollution warnings on electronic signs at bus stops, tube stations and at the roadside, as well as issuing social media and text alerts. On 23 January 2017, the mayor tweeted: ‘The shameful state of London’s toxic air today has triggered a “very high” air pollution alert’. People with children aged between three months and five years were advised to keep them inside as a result of the widespread toxic air. He set a target of only buying electric or hydrogen buses from 2020, and introduced a £10 charge for older, more polluting cars to drive into central London. He also repeated the air pollution schools study that his predecessor had tried to shelve. Now, rather than 433, the number of affected schools had passed the 800 mark – all exposed to levels of NO2 that breached EU legal limits. It was splashed across newspaper front pages that weekend, and the usual cries of ‘what can be done?’ were given a clear answer by Khan himself: a national diesel scrappage scheme, and a new Clean Air Act.

Leonie Cooper of the London Assembly, a long-time friend and colleague of Khan’s, tells me that the Mayor takes air quality personally: ‘He ran the London Marathon, and did a lot of training near roads – and I think, and this is my guess, that’s when he developed adult-onset asthma. This is a very personal campaign for him. It is about health … as part of his campaign even before he was elected, Sadiq did a whole day with a King’s College [air pollution] monitor and went to Putney High Street with me, and then on to Oxford Street, and to the North Circular ring road … it was pretty bad … in March [2017], he put the last of the zero emissions buses onto Putney High Street.’ By March 2018, levels of NO2 in Putney High Street were up to 90 per cent lower. Modelling of the ULEZ that now spans central London suggests it could lead to a 51 per cent reduction in NOx emissions, a 64 per cent reduction in PM emissions and a 15 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020. By 2020 all single-decker buses operating in central London will be fully electric or hydrogen. In 2018, the Mayor stated his ambition for 80 per cent of all journeys in the city to be taken on foot, by bike or by public transport by 2041.

In July 2017, Khan found he had an unlikely ally when a Government Minister stood up and gave the following speech: ‘Ultimately, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the energy which powers enterprise, are all threatened if we do not practise proper stewardship of the planet.’ The words came from Michael Gove, the new Secretary of State for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), recently returned to the political fold following his role in the Brexit referendum. A disastrous general election campaign by Theresa May had left her with a small parliamentary majority and an even smaller group of political friends, meaning Gove’s right-wing appeal was needed. He was thrown a political lifeline: Environment Minister. Environmentalists including myself were concerned. His first speech, held at WWF’s London offices, therefore came as something of a pleasant surprise. He continued: ‘If we consider the fate of past societies and civilisations, it has, again and again, been environmental factors that have brought about collapse or crisis.’ He even added, as if directly addressing his critics: ‘It is because environmental degradation is such a threat to future prosperity and security that I deeply regret President Trump’s approach towards the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.’

Two weeks later, Gove announced that the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars would be banned by 2040. The obvious criticism from some clean air campaigners was ‘why so long?’, but the importance of the announcement shouldn’t be underestimated. For many environmental policy watchers, it wasn’t new news – to meet the UK’s 2040 carbon reduction targets, transport would be unlikely to run on fossil fuels by then anyway. But it was new news to most of the population, and the word ‘ban’ hadn’t been uttered before. Electric cars were suddenly no longer a question of ‘will it happen’, but a question of ‘when’. The stories about air quality and diesel that had slowly been creeping up the news agenda were now underlined with mainstream political targets. Following that announcement, in January 2018 diesel car sales in the UK dropped by 25 per cent compared to January 2017, while growth in ‘alternatively fuelled vehicles’ rose by 23.9 per cent.

It took a political ego like Gove’s to bring clean air to the front and centre of British politics. But Defra, and the UK government, had in fact been led there kicking and screaming via a number of embarrassing court cases. The UK had been allowing its major cities to violate EU legal air pollution limits for NO2 for years, until a then little-known environmental group ClientEarth, led by a charismatic New York lawyer-cum-Buddhist priest, James Thornton, took it to court.

I first interviewed James Thornton for the Financial Times in 2016. He began his career at the US Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in the early 1980s, suing the Reagan administration when it briefly stopped enforcing the Clean Water Act. He set up the NRDC office in LA, where he also trained in Zen Buddhism and became pally with some green Hollywood A-listers including ‘Leo’ (Leonardo DiCaprio). He initially moved to the UK to take a break from legal activism, teach meditation (‘the Dalai Lama asked me to do that’), and marry his English husband – then not an option in the US. But his legal itch soon needed scratching. He retrained in European law and set up ClientEarth as an NRDC equivalent in the UK (a Hollywood friend, Emma Thompson, lent him a room in her West Hampstead flat as his first office). ‘There are about 15,000 corporate lobbyists in Brussels, many with very highly paid lawyers,’ he tells me in a soothing yet direct voice, which I imagine works equally well for both Buddhist and courtroom duties. ‘There was a great inequality of arms. Our idea was to balance that … When I first came up with this idea of bringing an air quality case, there was nothing in the papers, even major environmental organisations weren’t interested.’ The EU’s Air Quality Directive (1996) gave member states until 2010 to reduce the concentration of NO2, with legal eight-hour and monthly limits. The 2010 deadline was fast approaching, yet there was very little action to be seen. The UK government responded to ClientEarth’s first information request by admitting it had no intention of meeting its target. So, Thornton sued.

His first case in 2011 saw the High Court rule that the UK was indeed in breach of the EU directive. But it didn’t specify what the government needed to do about it, so again the government chose to do nothing. The second case in 2013 at the Court of Appeal also sided with ClientEarth, but this time passed the buck to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). ‘In EU law, human health takes paramount importance – it takes precedence over all other considerations including economic costs,’ says Alan Andrews, Thornton’s right-hand man on the air quality case, picking up the story. ‘The ECJ gave a landmark ruling which is now the leading precedent for air quality law across Europe. We see the right to clean air now enshrined within EU law … It is an obligation on member states. It is no longer a case of trying to comply – you must comply.’ The ‘final’ win in October 2016 ruled that the ‘Secretary of State had fallen into error’, and must speed up all plans to comply with the EU law. Furthermore the 2015 plan was described as ‘unlawful’. That day Prime Minister Theresa May announced in the House of Commons that the government would not appeal, and would comply in the shortest time possible. Not a bad result for a rabble-rousing New York Buddhist. According to Thornton in mid-2017, Defra under Michael Gove is no longer ‘disputing that you need to clean up the air; the government before did dispute that’.*

The UK’s first ever National Clean Air Day (NCAD) was held on 15 June 2017. It wasn’t exactly celebrated with royal anniversary-style street parties, but as I took the train to London, early signs on Twitter were promising. A collective effort including my own tweets had got #CleanAirDay trending UK-wide, and I started to see pictures from Leeds of parked cars with flowers emerging out of their engines, and from Manchester of the mayor, Andy Burnham, visiting a pop-up ‘lung information dome’ in the city square.

Arriving in London, after a train and a tube, I emerge out of Archway station a little disorientated. I lived in this area for years. The sight of cars and lorries trudging wearily up the A1 was a virtual ‘welcome to Archway’ sign. The giant roundabout at the top – so big that it was technically a ‘gyratory’, apparently – was infamous among the capital’s cyclists. In 2013 there was more than one serious accident every month involving cyclists. But the gyratory has – I now realised – been replaced by a huge, permanent pedestrianised zone with cycle lanes. The roundabout island, previously home to the apocalyptically unenticing ‘Dusk Till Dawn’ bar, has now rejoined dry land (the bar reborn as the only slightly more appealing Tropical Bar). The cycle lanes hosts a trickle of grateful cyclists, like war survivors returning home from the trenches – albeit only for a short while, before battle recommences up the cycle-lane-free Highgate Hill.

A short way up the hill at Whittington Hospital, I have arranged to volunteer with the Islington Council ‘no idling’ team: walking up to people in parked cars and vans with engines still running (i.e. ‘idling’) and asking them to turn their engines off. The group of volunteers gather ready to go out onto the roads, and I’m handed a blue high-vis vest with ‘Switch off engines for clean air’ written on it, and paired with Jo, from the council’s clean air team. I’m wholly expecting open hostility from the drivers, but I’m actually surprised by how polite all the exchanges are. We ask if they would mind turning their engine off, and would they like a leaflet, and largely hear ‘Ah yes, sorry, I’ll turn it off, no problem.’ Would you like this educational game for your children? ‘Yeah, OK, why not. Cheers.’ Most people don’t actively, aggressively pollute. We simply forget how pollution is caused.

After my ‘no idling’ shift I meet with Victoria Howse, who boasts the wonderful job title ‘ZEN Manager’ – ZEN, in this instance, not being the James Thornton kind, but ‘Zero Emissions Network’, an air quality collaboration between the London boroughs of Islington, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. She is manning a stand on the other side of Archway tube station, offering free bike repair and free coffee (the queue is longer for the coffee). The ZEN, part-funded

by the Mayor’s Air Quality Fund, is ‘trying to work with businesses to get them to switch to sustainable travel methods with lower emissions’, Victoria tells me. ‘We’re hoping that the removal of the gyratory and the new cycle lanes will be a big improvement.’ When I leave her and go on to Shoreditch I find a ‘pop-up’ wooden-clad green space of benches, trees and plants, plus bicycle racks, inviting walkers and cyclists to sit and rest. It’s actually on the road, taking up two parking spaces, literally reclaiming the tarmac from cars and returning it to the public realm. Laura Parry, the second of two ZEN Officers, meets me at the ‘parklet’. ‘This area will soon be an “electric street”, where only zero-emissions-capable cars can go down … It’s currently where two of the worst air quality readings in the Borough are.’ I ask whether the café opposite minds losing its parking spaces. ‘For them it’s really good because it basically creates extra outdoor space for their customers. Around here there are multiple places for parking, so it is not affecting things like deliveries. But also with the changes like the ULEZ [Ultra Low Emissions Zone] and the Electric Streets, it’s not going to be practical for local businesses to be using polluting vehicles anyway. So, we are helping businesses swap over to cargo bikes, or electric bikes, or EV [electric vehicles].’

I end National Clean Air Day in Greenwich, south-east London – the opposite end of town from where I had started. The Greenwich Centre has a shared district heating scheme –

private apartments, a library, leisure centre and swimming pool are all heated by a single large gas-powered boiler. Its CO2 and NO2 emissions are much lower because of this. At 5.30 p.m. Dan Thorpe arrives: a local primary school teacher by day, and elected Borough Councillor the rest of the time; as he strolls into the Greenwich Centre and glad-hands a few people he recognises, I realise who has had the longer day.

Greenwich has some obvious air pollution hotspots, most notably the city’s busiest traffic tunnel under the Thames, the Blackwall Tunnel, and London’s only major car ferry, which crosses the Thames at Woolwich. Dan helped create the local Air Quality Action Plan, and successfully bid for funding to implement a Low Emission Neighbourhood area that will bring £2 million of investment for schemes such as car-free days and electric vehicle grants. ‘When I became a councillor in 2004, environmental issues were not really on my agenda,’ he admits. ‘In 2014 when I joined the Cabinet, there was growing awareness around the issue of air quality … the deaths attributable in our borough are somewhere in the region of 600 [a year]. Any death is one too many. That has focused people’s minds.’ In Mayor Khan’s new London, the fightback has begun.

Beijing’s Olympian feat

In the spring of 2014, China’s President Xi Jinping stepped outside for a photoshoot in the smog. Chinese anthologist Jerry Zee later described its significance as a moment when, ‘the highest official in China allowed himself to be captured throwing in his lot with the common Beijinger … held together not by citizenship but by shared exposure to toxic weather.’ Beijing residents had flooded social media with facemask selfies, holding placards reading ‘#I don’t want to be a human vacuum cleaner’ (#我不要做人肉吸尘器), and were getting a response. Xi Jinping’s number two, Li Keqiang, gave a speech later describing air pollution as ‘nature’s red-light warning against inefficient and blind development’. Live on Chinese state television he declared a ‘war against pollution’. It was a game changer. Li immediately outlined the measures to be taken: reducing PM and eliminating outdated power stations and industrial plants. China cut steel production capacity by over 27 million tonnes (the equivalent of Italy’s entire output), slashed cement production by 42 million tonnes and shut down 50,000 small coal-fired furnaces. Li promised to change ‘the way energy is consumed and produced’ and to promote green and low-carbon technology. Beijing, until recently reliant on coal for its energy, closed its last remaining coal-fired power station in 2017.

The Beijing-based Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) is a short but confusing walk from Jianguomen Metro station, and when I arrive at the tower block there is no company or organisation branding, simply unmarked doors and an elevator. I phone to check I am at the right place, and am told to come up a few floors, where I’m met by a young American who speaks fluent Chinese, Kate Logan, a director at IPE and a board member of the Beijing Energy Network. She offers me the customary drink of steaming hot water. IPE was founded in 2006 by Chinese environmental activist Ma Jun to promote information transparency and public participation in environmental reporting, and was China’s first genuinely independent environmental non-profit. IPE began by collecting public (but often obscure) environmental information and collating it into an easily accessible database. This became the China Water Pollution Map, and later a broader database of environmental violations including air quality information known as the ‘Blue Sky Roadmap’. I’m intrigued to know how IPE got away with openly criticising the government in the days when air pollution was not officially recognised, publishing statements such as ‘large cities are increasingly suffering from the rapidly expanding and serious problem of air pollution’ and criticising ‘China’s lax environmental supervision and the low cost associated with violating’ as early as 2011.

‘In the beginning it was very sensitive in a lot of ways,’ admits Logan. ‘I think when IPE first started producing the database, the specific decision was made to only take information from government sources or officially verified sources. That was basically a means of mitigating that sensitivity … if anyone came doubting the validity of the data, you can verify the source [because] it’s an official source. That led to a certain level of credibility … if you look at the trajectory of environmental laws and policies in China you will see a lot of trigger events significantly influencing a government policy response.’

There were three main trigger events, says Logan: the 2008 Olympic Games; the US embassy air quality data; and the ‘Airpocalypse’ smog of 2013. Each of the three built upon the others to force Xi Jinping out onto the balcony that day in 2014, and forced air quality up to number one in the political agenda.

The run-up to 2008 Beijing Olympic Games was plagued with international concerns about the smog that awaited the world’s visiting athletes. Beijing was already synonymous with smog, and with one year to go, the Olympic president Jacques Rogge was forced to reassure invited nations that certain events could be moved to new venues or dates on the smoggiest days. Reuters described it as the most ‘intensely scrutinized preparations for any Games in Olympic history’, and China was going to do everything within its power not to be embarrassed on the world stage. The actions it took inadvertently created a blueprint for the city’s future. With a month to go until the opening ceremony (on the auspicious date 8/8/08) the Beijing Dongfang Chemicals Factory, Yanshan Petrochemical Company, Shougang HONGYE Steel Plant and Beijing Flat Glass Group Corporation either halted or limited their production. Four major coal-fired power stations began to use only low-sulphur coal and operated at 30 per cent capacity. All cement companies temporarily halted production. Industrial produc­tion was also slowed or halted in a vast area surrounding Beijing, including Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, and as far as Inner Mongolia some 200km (125 miles) away. Open field burning was banned across the whole of northern China from May to September. From 1 July to 20 September, all vehicles that did not meet European Euro 4 emission standards were banned from entering the city, and only half of those that did meet the standards were allowed in each day via an odd/even number-plate system.†

In the first 20 days of August, sulphur dioxide, PM10, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide decreased by 27 per cent, 40 per cent, 50 per cent and 61 per cent respectively, compared to the same month the year before. August 2008 was Beijing’s cleanest month for 10 years (and back then, in 1998, Beijing had roughly 7 million fewer inhabitants).

The Olympics experience proved to the authorities what could be done with the right will and regulation. It also proved beyond any reasonable doubt where the emissions had come from in the first place.

Then the US embassy in Beijing began publishing its own PM2.5 data. ‘That was a turning point that definitely influenced the speed at which policies were drawn up,’ says Logan. I hear this more than once during my visit to Beijing. Mary (her Anglicised name), a highly educated business woman from Tianjin and former university lecturer, told me that no one used to know what the air pollution was, including her. ‘I just thought it was fog. But it had a different colour, and different taste. Then the US embassy released the figures about something called PM2.5. And suddenly we had a name for it. And everybody started searching on the internet about “PM2.5” and learning what it was. That was a big change,’ she says. ‘Now everyone knows what PM2.5 is.’

On 1 January 2012, Beijing published its very first official trial PM2.5 data on the China National Environmental Monitoring Centre’s website, from a single monitoring site at the centre’s observation laboratory. By doing so, it became the first city in China to publish official PM2.5 data. Suddenly the monitoring sites started popping up all over China. On 8 March, Guangdong province published information from 62 monitoring sites in nine cities. By October, Beijing had already upped its official monitoring stations in the city to 35. Watching the expansion of transparent air quality data in China, says Kate, was like seeing one little red light appear on the map, ‘and one at a time lots of little lights start to pop up … first it was Beijing, then four cities, and then it jumped up to 170, 380 … now it’s across China.’

In 2014 the government made real-time industrial emissions data from ‘around 13,000 factories across China required to be publicly disclosed for the first time’, Logan informs me. ‘I think when the government started to realise that what IPE was doing was essentially helping to support the government’s supervision efforts … that was a shift in mindset. And because the pollution issue got so bad that the government basically knew they had to start doing something, that showed they were actively responding.’

With Beijing’s pollution now widely and accurately monitored, there was no hiding place from its worst pollution episode in history – the 2013 Airpocalypse (described in Chapter 1). Then came Under the Dome, an independent documentary film by former TV journalist Chai Jing, to underline the sheer levels of pollution the country was experiencing. Released on 3 March 2015, it was reportedly viewed 300 million times before it was taken down by the authorities four days later, on 7 March. In a very similar format to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Chai Jing’s film took the form of a mixed media lecture, interspersed with short films of her investigations across China. It pulled no punches. Pollution was shown to be an obvious result of China’s dependence on coal, cars and steel, and its inability to enforce what had become lax regulations. ‘A lot of people knew air pollution was there,’ says Logan, ‘they knew it was bad, there was [beginning to be] access to data … but how to protect yourself or how bad it really is or what the contributing factors are – I think Under the Dome answered those questions for the first time … if you look at the reasons why China has made such a big push to have better environmental governance [it is] basically because it threatens public health and then also threatens social stability.’

Rather than attempting to suppress or hide pollution data, now China is arguably going the other way. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment now has a five-digit hotline for members of the public to report any environmental transgression, via text message and WeChat. IPE’s own Blue Sky Roadmap app is now also used by the authorities as a public reporting mechanism, and departments are required to respond within seven days to any report made via the app. ‘It empowers the public domain,’ says Logan. ‘China is way ahead of many countries in environmental reporting and especially real-time emissions data. These sort of mechanisms are starting to come about as a result of this idea that the government needs to have better channels for communication and interaction with the public … but at the same time diffusing any sort of tension that will snowball if you had too many people for the government to be able to handle at the same time. Hence Under the Dome being censored.’‡

The red alert, the most serious warning level on the Chinese system, was first issued in December 2015. When pollution reaches this level, Beijing in effect implements the 2008 Olympics measures: polluting industries are shut down and vehicles are rationed, while pollution alerts are widely circulated on apps and social media (including Weibo and WeChat), television and radio.

James Thornton is now working with the Chinese judiciary to help strengthen environmental control laws, including the training of judges. ‘China is ahead of the UK in many respects,’ he tells me. ‘They have woken up to the fact that they need to clean up, and they are taking clear and dramatic action … they passed a law in 2014 that allows citizens to bring cases in Chinese courts against polluting companies. That is a deeply democratic operation … The government is incredibly eager to make the system work. They have closed down over 1,000 coal-fired power stations across China … [and have] actually changed the Chinese Constitution to articulate that they are building what they call “an ecological civilisation”.’

While in Beijing I am invited for lunch with a former Chinese ambassador to several major Western countries. I can’t use his real name, though I verified his identity prior to and following the interview. His Communist Party seniority makes me nervous, and I find myself fumbling with my chopsticks, but he is of course – being an ambassador – both polite and charming. The ambassador tells me that Beijing used to suffer from terrible sandstorms. The trees in the surrounding area had steadily been chopped down for firewood and building material. Trees of course provide a natural windbreak (and hold the soil together, preventing landslides) but after decades of clearance, Hebei province had become a dust bowl. The dust would blow into Beijing, choking its residents. A grand programme of replanting

the green belt then began. China even has a national tree planting day on 12 March. President Xi Jinping is eagerly photographed with a spade and a sapling every year. In March 2017 he told Chinese state media, ‘We expect blue sky, white clouds, clean water and fresh air, which are all related to ecological construction. The people should live in green shade, and this is the target of our efforts.’ The restoration of the green belt worked. Beijing no longer suffers from dust storms. In 2018, China went a step further, assigning over 60,000 soldiers to plant at least 84,000 square kilometres of trees (32,400 square miles, roughly the size of Ireland) by the end of the year, the majority in Hebei province around Beijing.

Another blight Beijing has removed is coal. The Ambassador reminisces how coal used to be the only fuel people used. Back in the 1980s, he remembers that briquettes of coal – made using the lowest grade of reformed coal dust – used to be a common sight on the back of bicycles. People would use them for the dual purpose of cooking and heating. Every home would be the source of coal smoke. By the 1990s, coal-fired powered stations were then added to the mix, many situated within the city itself. But coal too has since been dealt with, replaced in both homes and power stations by natural gas. The Ambassador tells me that coal mines are now often drilled only for their pockets of natural gas; the coal itself is increasingly left in the ground.

A Chinese tech entrepreneur, who also asked not to be named, told me, ‘One of the things that only China could do is they built a bunch of new [coal-fired] power plants in 2014. In 2015, they decided to get rid of them. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars, they had been in operation for three months, and then said “OK, new law, no coal power plants”. So now they are just being knocked down. That could not happen anywhere else in the world. And you could say it is a terrible decision, but it is also a great decision because it is the only way to fix the problem … They just decided they were going to tackle it. It is no longer a sensitive subject, it is something that we can change and be proud of, and show the world. Just like that. No more coal in Beijing.’ That sounds like an exaggeration, but the two plants he refers to were the tip of an iceberg. In October 2017 it was reported that China was to stop or delay work on 151 planned and under-construction coal plants, with capacity totalling 95,000 megawatts (equal to the combined operating capacity of Germany and Japan). In the year to that point, natural gas consumption had already increased by 17 per cent, replacing an estimated 47 million metric tonnes of coal.§

The province of Shanxi shut 27 coal mines in 2017 alone, while Taiyuan also banned the sale, transport or use of coal by individuals or small businesses, all for the sake of improving air quality.

By January 2017, Beijing’s acting mayor, Cai Qi, announced a crackdown on ‘open-air barbeques, garbage incineration, biomass burning, [and] dust from roads’, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang promised at the annual National People’s Congress that year to ‘make our skies blue again’. By 2020, the city plans to replace more than 70,000 petrol and diesel taxis with electric vehicles and install 435,000 charging stations. Starting from 2018, the Chinese government requires one out of

ten vehicles manufactured there to be electric. The official goal is the production of two million electric vehicles (EVs) a year by 2020, and seven million a year by 2025 – which would mean that by 2025 electric vehicles account for around a fifth of the total auto production of the country. As it stands, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, there were around 424,000 ‘new energy vehicles’ produced in China during the first three quarters of 2017 – which represents a 40 per cent year-on-year increase compared to the first three quarters of 2016.

Few stones are being left unturned in China’s war on pollution. Almost every building in Beijing (and most cities in China) is heated by district heating, from a residential tower block to the Presidential Palace. Huge boilers fire up on the same date every year, heating people’s homes and offices for an allotted time every day. It is already a very efficient system, one that many Western cities are keen to copy. Beijing’s boilers used to be coal-fired, but are now all gas. But even so, gas boilers produce NOx, and the Beijing authorities want to reduce NOx still further. In Beijing I accept an invitation from the US company ClearSign to visit a pilot project retrofitting district boilers to make them produce far less NOx. Each boiler is the size of a bus, and in Beijing alone there are approximately 3,500 of them. A boiler is effectively a tube with a large flame at one end, which heats up lots of water pipes that wrap around the tube to produce hot water or steam. In a typical boiler, the flame is a large flickering one that causes pollutants at high temperatures. The ClearSign retrofit installs ceramic tiles full of lots of little holes halfway up the boiler tube. The flame hits the tiles, and the tiles distribute the heat more effectively, turning one large flame into hundreds of tiny ones.

ClearSign’s man in China, Manny Menendez, picks me up from my hotel in the central business district and, as his driver takes us out to a residential area, we have a long chat on the back seat. I quickly realise there aren’t many people in the world like Manny Menendez. He was doing business in China before the rest of the world thought it was possible to do business in China, becoming friends with the then-reformist leader of China, Deng Xiaoping. The car pulls up at the metal gates of a grey Beijing District Heating Group building, near some large residential tower blocks. The lot is strangely quiet, and Manny walks confidently up to an unmarked door and pushes it open. The chill of early winter is just as present inside, so we keep coats and scarves on. A security guard welcomes Manny and his interpreter warmly, and we go through to the boiler room where four large tubular boilers, each the size of a minibus, stand side by side. Three are circled by large red metal flue-gas recirculation tubing, the current industry standard for NOx reduction, which recirculates some of the air from the chimney or ‘flue’ back to the flame again, which lowers the flame temperature and reduces oxygen content, lowering the NOx. The fourth boiler, retrofitted internally with ClearSign’s ceramic tiles, stands relatively naked. Despite the fact that we are standing so close to huge gas flames, this room is no warmer – all the heat is going into the water pipes.

We leave to talk in a nearby workers’ café, over a bowl of pepper soup. A kung fu movie plays loudly on a television mounted to the wall. ‘That building only has four [boilers],’ says Manny. ‘Within the Beijing District Heating Group, the ones that are in their direct ownership and control, there’s 1,500. Then through joint ventures or partnerships with others … there are another 2,000 … So we just saw a 29MW boiler. But in one of the other facilities I have seen 116MW boilers, much bigger … they also have a huge inventory of [smaller] 14MW boilers… We’ve already looked at those – they have 75 of those ready to go, and we will go through those one by one.’ He tells me that the Chinese NOx regulations have been getting lower year by year. ‘A few years ago in the cities it was in the region of 60–70ppm, and it is now down to 30–35ppm. In District heating now they have to meet 15ppm. And the new burners they are putting in from European and US companies require additional equipment, flue-gas recirculation [FGR], in some places FGR plus selective catalytic reduction – and there are issues with efficiency, maintenance … using things like urea and ammonia … It costs more and more money to operate … Whereas we don’t need any of that, and are getting 5ppm or less. The project we have in the States at the Exxon-Mobil Shell, they are getting 2.8ppm of NOx – it’s unheard of.’ Then we get back into the car, and Manny tells me about the time he played football with Franz Beckenbauer.

Delhi denial

Delhi almost won its battle against air pollution before most cities had even woken up to theirs. In 2003, Delhi was awarded the Clean Cities International Award by the US Department of Energy in recognition of its ‘recent improvements in air quality’. Between 2001 and 2002, all commercial passenger vehicles – buses, taxis and three-wheeler ‘rickshaws’ – were ordered by the Indian Supreme Court to convert from petrol and diesel engines to the cleaner fuel compressed natural gas (CNG). By the end of 2002, the conversion was swift and almost complete, totalling an estimated 15,000 buses, 55,000 three-wheelers and 20,000 taxis. According to the Energy and Resources Institute, diesel buses in 2002 emitted 54 times the amount of PM in grams per kilometre than a CNG buses, and 2.5 times the amount of NO2 (although the CO emissions of CNG were twice as high). After the implementation of CNG, the particulate levels dropped in the city by about 24 per cent compared to 1996 levels. A study by Jawaharlal Nehru University found a perceptible drop in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emissions. The Delhi Metro system, which began construction in 1998, also opened its first line in 2002, and by 2006 it had three underground electric train lines spanning much of the city. Delhi could briefly lay claim to having one of the cleanest public transportation systems in the world. Having solved its air quality problem to international acclaim, how then, just ten years later, did it become the most polluted major city in the world?

The Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) in Delhi is a veritable palace of bureaucracy – a huge stand-alone white and red building that spreads for hundreds of metres. Inside I meet one of its many princes, Dr Niraj Sharma, senior principal scientist, environmental science division. A larger-than-life, welcoming character, he has a booming voice and a ready smile. During our conversation, which lasts for almost two hours, a steady stream of subordinates come in with papers for him to sign, while another is summoned to bring us coffee and potato samosas. It is not yet 10 a.m., and I have just eaten a large cooked Indian breakfast. But he insists that I go ahead, and any pause in eating – or in drinking the coffee – causes a concerned pause in conversation and ‘please’ as he gestures to the cup or plate.

‘Most other countries in Asia suffer from a lack of democracy. We suffer from the excess of democracy,’ he laughs. When the Supreme Court ordered the mass conversion to CNG in 2001 ‘there was a lot of public demonstration [against this]’, he tells me. ‘Police authorities were given full authority to control the mob if they came within 100 metres of the Supreme Court.’ By his estimation, ‘around 1 Lakh [100,000] auto-rickshaws were converted into CNG … From 2002 to 2006–7, things were quite good. Then we started introducing Euro 1, 2, 3, 4, everything was introduced. Then what happened, probably you will be surprised to know – how much do you think the registered vehicle population [is] in Delhi? Any idea? Approximately 10 million … more than the combined vehicle population of Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai and Hyderabad. All of these four cities vehicles combined is less than the number for Delhi. Whereas the human population … Is it too spicy?’ He stops, looking concerned as I struggle to finish the first giant potato samosa. I shake my head and do my best to munch appreciatively. ‘In Delhi,’ he continues, reassured by my chewing, ‘the vehicles are growing at the rate of approximately 10 per cent per annum. Every day around 350 vehicles are added to the fleet. We have reduced the pollution coming out of each vehicle significantly. But that has been compensated by the increasing number [of vehicles], and increasing the travel distances of each vehicle. So, whatever we gained, through CNG, through vehicle technology, through improved fuel quality … that has been mitigated by the increasing number of vehicles, and increasing the travel distances of each vehicle.’ When I can’t quite face the second potato samosa, I fear I have offended him. I arrive at my next meeting with the second samosa – skilfully wrapped in a sheet of A4 of printer paper by one of Dr Sharma’s courtiers – in my laptop bag, for my lunch.

Delhi, like London and Beijing before it, is on the cusp of waking up – again – to its air quality crisis. But many parts of its society are happy to keep slumbering. Jyoti Pande Lavakare is an economist and air quality activist. Having lived

and worked in America for a time working for the Dow Jones, she was shocked by how much worse the air pollution had become when she returned home in the mid-2010s:

‘My friends [in Delhi] were saying, you’ve become a total American, get real, you’re fine, we’re fine. I started to question myself, am I over-reacting, is [the air quality] not so terrible? So, I decided to research this a little more to find out for myself … And I was appalled to find out it was worse than I thought. I started to talk to other mothers about this.’ Together they formed a campaign group, loosely under the hashtag #MyRightToBreathe, and started visiting schools to give presentations. ‘We would tell them about air pollution, have a question and answer session … We found a lot of myths –

that somehow being Indian you are above it all, that “my lungs are strong, I am Indian, I can deal with it”. Which is a complete myth, and now more and more research shows that actually Indians have lower lung capacity than average due to living in more polluted conditions … I feel we are still at a very early stage of awareness. It is like two steps forward, one step back.’

The steps forward include the 11 November 2017 front page of the Delhi Times, featuring 12 of the capital’s most highly respected senior doctors. In a striking image they pose in front of a smog-shrouded parliament, each wearing whites and a stethoscope, under the headline quotation: ‘NO ONE SHOULD BE LIVING IN THIS CITY’. Part of the caption beneath reads, ‘the doctors are unanimous: It’s an emergency’. Another member of the mothers’ group, Shubhani Talwar, tells me how it happened: ‘We called them and called them, and [the 12 doctors] said our passion was so infectious that they said let’s get on with it. They couldn’t say no.’ She didn’t know exactly who would turn up until the day of the photoshoot. ‘Then one came, then another came … the best doctors of Delhi, they all stood with us. We didn’t want to make it political. It is all about medical issues. It doesn’t matter which [political party you are], all of you sort it out, because mothers and doctors are just letting you know that what you are doing is not feasible.’

My B&B host during my stay, Vandana, tells me that 2017 felt like the first year there had been a real political argument about air pollution (although she admits she stopped watching the news about four years ago because ‘it got too depressing’). The sale of firecrackers at Diwali was a turning point, she said. Two to three years ago, there was a school movement to stop burning celebratory firecrackers due to the smoke pollution. Diwali celebrations reach a climax on the day itself, but for two or three weeks there are fireworks, and firecrackers make for unbearable levels of pollution. The street dogs began dying, said Vandana, who looks after some of the dogs herself. Visibility could go down to near-zero. This year, however, she saw far fewer firecrackers. The government has finally banned the sale of them.

But then there are the steps back. Everyone agrees that the autumn stubble burning of crops is a major contributor to the smog from September to December. Yet criticism of farmers does not play well politically. In October 2017, chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh announced that the Punjab government would not penalise farmers for breaking the ban on stubble burning. Of the 6,670 cases of stubble burning recorded that season, 80 per cent were reported to have occurred after his statement. An unnamed environmental official complained to the Hindustan Times, ‘Politics has once again derailed our drive against stubble burning … farmers are setting straw on fire every night.’

Alongside the stench of stubble burning there is the whiff of denial in the Delhi air. For every minister or ministry making bold and progressive moves – such as the Road Minister declaring an ambition to become a ‘100 per cent electric [car] nation’ by 2030 – there are others doing the opposite. A press release issued by the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences on 1 February 2014 claimed there was ‘no systematic increasing or decreasing trend in the level of PM2.5 during past 4 years in Delhi’, despite abundant evidence to the contrary including, astonishingly, a report that same month – February, 2014 – from the Environment Pollution (Prevention & Control) Authority for the National Capital Region, which stated: ‘The annual average PM10 levels were reduced by about 16 per cent between 2002 and 2007 [due to CNG]. But thereafter, with rapid motorisation, particulate levels … increased dramatically by 75 per cent. Between 2002 and 2012, vehicle numbers increased by as much as 97 per cent, contributing enormously to pollution load. Moreover, between 2002 and 2011 the nitrogen oxide levels have also increased 30 per cent indicating Delhi is in the grip of a multi-pollutant crisis.’ Despite this clear detail, the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences blamed high pollution episodes on ‘untimely synoptic weather’ and sudden changes in wind direction. The fact that such untimely changes seemed to happen every Diwali and stubble-burning season, or even every rush hour, didn’t warrant a mention.

The disproven claim that it is ‘just the weather’, however, remains popular. I heard it so much that I started to call it ‘Delhi denial’. When I interview Professor Mukesh Khare at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), despite all the facts and figures he gives me about pollution from diesel lorries and stubble burning, and his belief that ‘penalties on second cars should be very heavy’, he still says: ‘It is a meteorological smog, it is not a photochemical smog, it is not a source-level smog … Meteorology is making this smog happen in Delhi. There’s a lower mixing height, lower temperature, calm winds. You can’t control meteorology.’ And Dr Niraj Sharma at the Central Road Research Institute, who has spent 25 years monitoring vehicular emissions, also can’t help but say, ‘I am a firm believer that it is mainly meteorology – wind speed and wind direction along with rainfall – which controls the air pollution … In my opinion, dust is bound to happen in India. Because the wind is blowing from the Pakistan and Arab side, it contains a lot of fine particles. Once the small particles are there they remain in the atmosphere … It enters into Delhi. And my perception is dust in India is a natural phenomenon.’

The data clearly show how Delhi’s daytime peaks of PM2.5 (which includes transboundary ‘natural dust’) coincide with the morning and evening traffic rush hours. Cars are not blowing in from the Pakistan and Arab side. The coal smoke from Delhi’s inner-city power stations cannot be blamed on near-neighbours either: in 2014, 75 per cent of India’s electricity production came from coal, compared to hydroelectric-rich Pakistan’s 0.15 per cent. A major 289-page study of air pollution sources in Delhi by IIT, between November 2013 and June 2014, found that on average vehicle exhaust emissions account for 25 per cent of PM2.5 and above 35 per cent in certain locations, the remainder coming from road dust (38 per cent), domestic fuel burning (12 per cent) and local industry, including power generation (11 per cent). NOx emissions are even more localised, with 52 per cent of emissions from the local industry and power generation, and 36 per cent from vehicular emissions that, says the IIT report, ‘occur at ground level, probably making it the most important emission’. The city’s sulphur dioxide emissions come almost entirely from Delhi’s coal power stations and the roughly 9,000 hotels and restaurants that burn coal in their tandoor ovens – the traditional clay oven that uses charcoal or coal, similar to a Western barbecue. As for ‘agricultural soil dust’, the most commonly blamed external problem that supposedly blights Delhi, the report concluded, its contribution to PM2.5 ‘is negligible’.

I decided to visit the Mexican embassy while in India, too, because its ambassador Melba Pria has been an outspoken advocate for clean air in the city since her appointment in 2015. She immediately caused a stir by refusing an ambassadorial car, preferring instead to drive a three-wheeler CNG rickshaw. By highlighting the issue of vehicle pollution, she became known as much for her clean air activism as for her ambassadorial duties. But she has always been keen to stress that her interest is not that of a wealthy Westerner hectoring a developing nation – but that of a similarly large, developing country, that had previously had an extreme air pollution problem, and has emerged with some solutions to share. The embassy sits within a wealthy gated community of largely residential houses, and my Ola driver (the Indian rival to Uber) is not allowed in, so I take the opportunity to walk a few blocks. Unlike most of the city, its streets are relatively car-free and easy to walk down. The only people out on the street are the servants and labourers, who build and clean and guard these neighbourhoods, before returning to their homes – often at the very edges of the city – at night. The houses of the rich hide behind tall electric gates, while those under construction give off a mist of toxic dust from uncovered piles of cement that stand by the road.

Ambassador Pria is a striking presence, with floating long linen robes and free-flowing long hair with grey streaks. ‘I have been an activist on good air because I lived through that,’ she says of growing up in Mexico City. ‘We are just another country that has had various periods of pollution – we were there in 1992 … we were the worst city in the world, as maybe Delhi is today … I’ve been very vocal, very vocal [about air pollution]. Because of my using of the auto-rickshaw, I am very popular. But do you think that one person of the Delhi government has called me? Many of [Mexico’s] solutions will work here … But not one person from the local government has called me.’

I put some of the ‘Delhi denial’ comments I’ve heard to Ambassador Pria, and she shakes her head in rueful recognition. ‘I shouldn’t say this because I am not here to criticise anybody … But the other day someone said to me “it is karma”. No, no – pollution isn’t karma, we made it. It is the bad policies, bad practices … In Delhi we consume per capita the biggest amount of electricity in India … 80 per cent of that electricity is given to us by coal. In the middle of the city you will see the coal power stations.’ Of the two coal-fired power plants within Delhi’s city limits – Indraprastha and Badarpur – the latter is rated by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) as the most polluting in the whole of India. Then there is Diwali, when ‘every [official air pollution] monitor in Delhi registered 999 [mg/m3]’, says Ambassador Pria. ‘All 60 of them. Two years in a row. We don’t know if it was 1,242 [mg/m3] or 1,395 [mg/m3] – we don’t know, because it reached the [three-digit] maximum of 999 … If it was just the weather, why does it happen the day after Diwali, and not the day before? Or a week before? This year yes, it is true we had sandstorms from the east, and cold air that depressed it down … But there is no consciousness that we have to change our lifestyle.’

Another contributor to the smog is diesel lorries, many burning the worst, low-grade agricultural diesel. The major highways of northern India run through Delhi, meaning many trucks are passing through on the way to other places. Such lorries are banned from driving through the city during the daylight hours of 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. The effect of this, however, is the nightly procession of lines of lorries through the city. Professor Khare, who has studied the impact of these trucks, tells me that PM2.5 levels can therefore be even worse at night. ‘They contribute a lot to Delhi’s pollution at night-time,’ he says, adding that there is ‘a policy gap’ that ‘is not benefiting the Delhi atmosphere’ (which again is not a meteorological problem).

Rana Dasgupta, the British-Indian biographer of Delhi, has lived there for the past 17 years, but when I visit his home he is in the process of packing to move to the US. Dasgupta’s 2014 book Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-first Century Delhi paints an unsparing portrait of a city in crisis. His book didn’t cover air pollution, but he admits that were he writing it today it would be a major focus. ‘My suspicion is that it is an extremely elite concern,’ he says. ‘They are outraged that no one is controlling this thing on their behalf. But I suspect for a poorer majority in the city, the experience of being subjected to huge forces that they cannot control is their experience anyway.’ Even among elites, air pollution is an easier conversation to have if you can blame other people or, ideally, other countries. ‘In the boom years, say the late 1990s to around 2006–7,’ says Dasgupta, ‘young people started working in corporate jobs and earning five or ten times what their fathers had earned at the end of their careers, they had all these fancy cars, bought their parents cars, and encouraged their parents to think of consumption as a new thing … People who criticised this were treated with immense hatred … they didn’t want to be told that this engine of wealth creation was in any way morally suspect or harmful to anyone. And I think to some extent this is still the case. You have people living in totally privatised universes, you have these sealed vehicles and sealed homes … So, if the air is getting worse [because of this], it is not a very welcome conversation.’

In March 2017 the environment minister for the state, Anil Madhav Dave, told the Indian Parliament that ‘there are no conclusive data available in the country to establish direct correlation between diseases and air pollution’ and that any health impacts that were to be found were mostly caused by ‘the individual’s food habits, occupational habits, socio-economic status, medical history, immunity, heredity, etc.’ But such denial of the facts is far from unique to India. In a similar way to dealing with addiction, admitting you have a problem is an important step to tackling it. London, Los Angeles, Paris, Mexico City and Beijing all denied their air pollution problem before finally facing up to it, so Delhi is in good company. But it’s a very dangerous stage if it goes on for too long. Delhi’s air pollution is arguably on its way to reaching levels of pollution unknown to a major city in human history. In the words of the Lancet Commission, ‘rapidly growing cities in industrialising countries are severely affected by pollution’ because they ‘concentrate people, energy consumption, construction activity, industry, and traffic on a historically unprecedented scale’. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in Delhi where, despite its early success in promoting CNG, its enthusiasm for the private car above all else proved unstoppable.

‘People are just leaving,’ says Dasgupta. ‘Lots of people I know who have options in other cities or countries, especially people with young children, have decided there is nothing to do here except get out.’ This now includes him. ‘You can insulate yourself from lots of other things, but you can’t insulate yourself from this.’ To underline the point, he asks his daughter, who is playing nearby, how the pollution affects her school days. ‘We have red days, yellow days and green days,’ she tells me. ‘On red days we’re not allowed to go outside. On yellow days we can go out – like today was a yellow day – but we’re not allowed to run around. And green days we can run.’ How common are the red days, I ask? ‘In winter they happen a lot.’ I later learn that it is up to each school whether they issue any such warnings or limitations, and most do not.

Whether it is a case of one step forward, two steps back, or vice versa, remains to be seen. India is committed to cleaning up its energy supply. The Modi government has committed to install 175GW of renewable energy (100GW of this from solar sources) by 2022, more than the total electricity generating capacity of Brazil, achieving 40 per cent cumulative electric power through renewable energy sources by 2030. The days of Delhi’s inner-city coal power stations, like London’s before them, are surely numbered. India’s Energy Minister surprised the world in August 2017 by announcing plans to make all cars electric by 2030, saying from that year, ‘not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country’ – a full 10 years earlier than the UK. Minister for Transport Nitin Gadkari bullishly told a car industry conference, ‘I am going to do this, whether you like it or not.’

At BLK Super Speciality Hospital, Dr Parakh believes: ‘Public awareness is there, but only during this season, November. At this time, every news channel will be talking about air pollution … As soon as this becomes slightly better, the media will forget about it.’ But, I suggest, the true awakening needed is that even the ‘clean air’ season in Delhi is still very bad by international standards? ‘Yes, but that doesn’t happen – you’re right. When it goes into the red zone, everyone asks what is happening, but nobody is doing anything. When it is still high but not alarming, then nobody is interested.’

The Californian waiver

A couple of decades after Los Angeles’s first smog encounter during World War Two, by the 1960s it was a regular sight. In 1967 the California Air Resources Board (CARB) was set up – a state agency specifically tasked with monitoring air quality and regulating vehicle emissions – to fight back against this airborne menace. Three years later, the national Clean Air Act (1970) established the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to do much the same across the country. But what, then, should be done with CARB, which was already up and running? While all other states were effectively barred from setting their own emissions standards and would now have to dance to the EPA’s tune, the decision was made to give California a ‘waiver’. In effect, CARB could keep doing its own thing, as long as its emissions regulations were as good as – or stricter than – the EPA’s national standards. This had two major effects: first, because the geography of California and LA meant it had the worst air quality problems to deal with, California’s regulations have consistently been far stricter than the EPA’s; and second, because California is the biggest US state in terms of GDP, the rest of the US – and indeed the world‖

– have in fact danced to California’s tune. The 1977 Amendments to the Clean Air Act further established a ‘piggyback’ provision allowing other states to adopt California standards instead of the EPA’s if they wanted, which many chose to do.

A New York Times article in 1992 headlined ‘California’s Pied Piper of Clean Air’ described CARB as ‘the nation’s most influential regulatory body’, ahead of the EPA. ‘Anything in this country with a tailpipe, smokestack or vent is likely to be regulated eventually with rules first worked out by the California Air Resources Board.’ We have Californian regulations to thank for the catalytic converter,¶

low-sulphur petrol, PM2.5 standards, uncovering the VW scandal and the emergence of electric vehicles. Almost every step it has taken has involved tough vehicle emissions standards, and even tougher time-bound targets. The most daring and wide-reaching target was the 1990 Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) programme, some 20 years before the rest of the world had even heard of zero-emissions vehicles. The ZEV programme set the target that by 1998, 2 per cent of the vehicles for sale in California had to be zero emissions – a technology that was not commercially available at the time – increasing to 5 per cent by 2001 and 10 per cent by 2003. As of January 2016, approximately 192,000 new ZEVs and TZEVs (transitional-ZEVs, otherwise known as plug-in hybrids) have been sold in California, more than any other market in the world at that time. Ozone levels in Los Angeles are just 40 per cent of what they were in the mid-1970s, despite having twice the number of cars.

‘The regulation of air pollution in the UK and the rest of Europe is childlike, not even childlike, in comparison to what goes on in California,’ says James Thornton, who founded the Natural Resources Defense Council in LA. The ZEV progamme, he says, kick-started the global EV (electric vehicle) industry. ‘There weren’t any electric vehicles [before that] and as a result people started thinking about how to build electric vehicles … When I was there working [in the 1990s] CARB targeted things like dry-cleaning, [which] released a vast amount of chemicals that caused smog, ozone, and they required them to reformulate their industry … shops that did body-spraying of cars with highly volatile compounds in those sprays were reformulated … Industry never does it on its own, so California regulation of air pollution is the world’s best model of regulating air pollution by very intelligent and thorough standard-setting.’

Anthropogenic VOCs (volatile organic compounds) became a major focus in LA, Professor Paulson at UCLA informs me. ‘Ironically, we should have very low VOCs because we don’t have a ton of trees, but we add the VOCs ourselves,’ she says. ‘The VOCs get converted to particles later as secondary organic aerosols, which are a much bigger problem here … because we have brilliant sunshine, lots and lots of photochemistry and not a lot of wind, all these things contribute to making our secondary smog legendary. In a nutshell, what we’ve done here in LA is basically everything we can think of. We have reformulated a lot of our consumer products, so we have barbecue lighter fluid that is formulated to not produce a lot of VOCs. We allow very limited use of oil-based paints, paints need to be low VOC paints … we developed vapour recovery systems for when you are fuelling your vehicle [at a petrol station], do you have that nozzle thing in the UK?’ I don’t think so, I say, unable to picture a nozzle thing. ‘We have this nozzle thing that comes around the tube that the gasoline or diesel comes from, and this system sucks out all of the vapours in your gas tank as you are filling it with liquid, so those vapours don’t go into the air.’ She adds, in summary, ‘Really high NOx and VOC emitters have a hard time here.’

But California is not done yet. The state’s federally approved ozone target, an eight-hour standard of 80ppb ozone, is set for 2023. To get there, NOx will have to be reduced by 70 per cent compared to 2017 levels. And given that 70 per cent of NOx in the state comes from vehicles, there is only one obvious way to achieve it: all petrol and diesel vehicles will have to be replaced.

‘2023 is the target for achieving the health-based standards that were set under the Clean Air Act,’ confirms Mary Nichols. ‘The main thing that has to happen is the introduction of much cleaner vehicles.’ Does this mean, in effect, California is transitioning from an era of cleaner fuel to an era of zero fossil fuels and zero emissions? ‘Yes, correct. That is a fact. We are pushing for zero, both because of smog concerns, and because of the need to cut greenhouse emissions as well – they both point you in that direction.’

In southern California, Sam Atwood at the South Coast Air Quality Management District explains, ‘Everything is going to have to transition and probably one of the toughest challenges for my agency in my region is that we have

very little time to do this … we need to transition [in the] region of 17 million people to zero emissions, everything from vehicles to businesses to goods movement, the whole enchilada. And you say “OK, well if we could have say 50 years to do that, 30 years?” No, our first ozone target is 2023.’ To get there, says Sam, ‘we offer a $7,500 rebate if you purchase a battery electric vehicle and that’s offered state-wide … The biggest bang for your buck is reducing NOx emissions from diesel trucks and other diesel equipment.’ Another incentive scheme aimed at replacing off-road machinery, the $69m–$141 million a year ‘Carl Moyer Program’, has replaced over 61,000 high-emissions vehicles including farm machinery, construction trucks and even trains. The scheme is fully funded by proceeds from the vehicle ‘smog check’ which every car needs to obtain – similar to the MOT in the UK – every two years, or prior to a re-sale.

In 2018, Governor Jerry Brown announced plans to spend $2.5 billion over eight years to add 250,000 electric vehicle charging stations and 200 hydrogen refuelling stations

by 2025. As of January 2015, Californians drive 40 per cent

of all ZEVs on the road in the United States. More than

two million new passenger vehicles were registered in California in 2016, more than France or Spain. Major car companies can’t afford to ignore the Californian market, and once they have remodelled their vehicles to meet its regulations, it makes economic sense for them to sell to other markets too. By 2017, the trajectory of EV sales was finally shooting upwards; battery electric car sales were up 30.4 per cent compared to the previous year – the Chevy Bolt alone shifted 13,487 units.

I ask Mary Nichols if California could also lead the way by shifting regulatory focus beyond PM2.5 towards nano­particles and particulate number, and she doesn’t disappoint there either. ‘During my time in this field, we have moved our focus from total [mass of] particulate matter, to those under 2.5 – and … we were already looking at the ultrafine particles when we changed to PM2.5 standards back in 1997 … Since that time there have been more studies that seem to confirm that the ultrafines are the worst actors.’ So, do we need new regulations and limits standards for ultrafines? ‘We might not abandon [PM] 2.5 in the same way as we didn’t abandon total [mass]. We might add a new screen at the [PM] 1.0 or under 1.0 level. Or … there may be a way to go directly to emissions control strategies that focus on the [ultra] fines, without having to go through the years-long effort of developing a new ambient air quality standard to monitor it … we are increasingly looking at air pollution from a community level, looking at total exposure of individuals … The difference is that instead of having a network of big monitoring stations and pursuing individual pollutants as we do today, shifting our approach to individual exposure may change the way we focus your regulatory activity, so we go much more directly to the source.’

Key to the Californian ‘individual exposure’ approach

is the concept of ‘environmental justice’. For decades, national and international studies have shown that poorer communities are disproportionately affected by air pollution. The link is straightforward – homes built next to busy highways, airports and industrial smoke stacks tend to be cheaper than those next to trees and parks. In recent years, in cities with high public awareness of air pollution and air pollution data, it has even been argued that neighbourhood air quality readings are starting to directly impact house prices. In the US, this also leads to a racial divide. A study in 2006 found that reducing NO2 levels experienced by ethnic minorities down to levels experienced by whites would reduce ischaemic heart disease mortality by around 7,000 deaths per year – a similar impact, said the paper, as three million adults quitting cigarettes. This also means that targeting the areas with the highest concentrations of pollution can have a greater overall health impact, and help the most vulnerable members of communities, in comparison to a blanket PM2.5 or NO2 target that covers a whole city, or even a whole country. ‘We have areas where many parts of a region meet the federal standards, but there will be pockets of pollution that are well above admissable levels,’ says Mary. ‘So, the purpose of [environmental justice] is not just to meet a standard, but actually benefit public health. You want to start focusing your attention on how to achieve the best results for everybody. This is one of the shifts in thinking that is going on now.’ For example, new school sites now cannot be within 500 feet (152 metres) of urban highways.

A 2017 paper on southern California in the journal Environmental Research Letters states that community-targeted emission reductions such as low-emission zones (LEZs) and truck re-routing ‘can reduce environmental injustice while also meeting multiple other air quality management goals’. It again found that mean exposure to PM2.5 from diesel engines was 38 per cent higher for ethnic minorities than for ethnic whites.1 This helps to explain Mary’s reluctance to move from a PM2.5 regulatory standard to a nanoparticles standard: community-based interventions based on environmental justice and levels of exposure (or particulate number) are potentially the best ways of bringing down overall PM2.5 levels too. As Suzanne Paulson at UCLA also puts it,

‘there doesn’t seem to be much question that if you lower the PM2.5 things get better. So as a standard it’s OK really … emissions controls for vehicles are focused on PM2.5 and NOx and CO, but the controls for those have [led to a marked drop] for ultrafine particle emissions as an unintended consequence.’

The environmental justice movement also answers another issue, which I encountered in every city I’ve visited or researched: why should poorer people pay more in tax to help affluent people to buy a nice new electric car? I put this to Mary. ‘People living in the communities that suffer the most from air pollution, in general, are most supportive of action being taken to address their problem,’ she responds. ‘First of all, if I am driving my electric car or zero emissions vehicle through a poor community, or I’m a commercial operator that runs trucks through these communities, I am impacting their health – it is not just the health of the person who buys the vehicle – everybody around them is exposed to their pollution … people who have the worst pollution in their neighbourhood [are] saying, this isn’t acceptable and you have to clean up to address our health problems … the most dramatic illustration of how this can work is in our greenhouse gas reduction, where we direct the proceeds of our cap-and-trade programme with a legal requirement that a third of all the funds that are collected by the state from the auctioning of allowances will be diverted to the communities that have the worst air quality.’

The ‘cap-and-trade’ scheme was signed into state legislature by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2006. With just 450 businesses responsible for about 85 per cent of California’s total greenhouse gas emissions, from 2013 they were given a maximum cap for the amount of pollutants they could emit, starting at 90 per cent of average emissions and declining by 3 per cent annually from 2015 to 2020. If they emit above the cap, they have to buy an ‘allowance’. This differs from a simple system of fines, in that these allowances are tradable, and their price goes up over time, as does the number of regulated companies. The quarterly auction of allowances makes the state a lot of money and reduces emissions. Proceeds of around $900 million a year have been spent on a range of clean air initiatives such as creating parks, planting trees, making low-income family homes energy efficient, grants for electric cars, installing EV charging stations and high-speed rail; and, as Mary said, a quarter of all the money generated by the state’s cap-and-trade is ring-fenced for environmental justice programmes within disadvantaged and low-income communities.

However, California doesn’t have the power to regulate all its emissions. Interstate or international transport such as road haulage, trains, shipping and air travel do not come under state control. And the EPA under the Trump administration is going in precisely the opposite direction to California.

In February 2016, the Attorney General of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt, was a political unknown on the national stage. He was just doing what he loved best, fighting the EPA in court on behalf of his oil and gas buddies. Since taking office in 2010, Pruitt had sued the EPA on no less than 14 previous occasions, each time to relax emissions laws. His early suits included trying to roll back the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which limited the amount of mercury, arsenic and other toxic pollution from power plants. It was put in place by the EPA to prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 asthma attacks. According to an investigation by the New York Times, companies or trade associations in 13 of these cases were also financial contributors to Pruitt’s political causes. In December 2016, the same Scott Pruitt was appointed by the newly elected Trump administration to be the head of the EPA. The fox was now in charge of the chicken coop. The budget for the federal department responsible for enforcing the Clean Air Act was cut by 31 per cent and its workforce by 21 per cent. Specific cuts included the EPA’s federal vehicle and fuel standards and certification programmes and grants to help support state and local air quality programmes.

One year on from Scott Pruitt’s swearing-in ceremony, I asked Mary if CARB have felt the impact from the changes to the EPA. ‘Well,’ she sighs, ‘there’s a general direction of moving backwards or stopping progress on all kinds of environmental regulations, and certainly air is no exception.’ I ask if the Californian Clean Air Act waiver effectively protects her jurisdiction, in regard to automobile emissions? ‘It’s not a blanket waiver that says “you can do whatever

you want to, California”, it is case by case, regulation by regulation.’ Historically, out of hundreds of waivers sought, the EPA has only ever denied California one, during the Bush administration, and even then only briefly. At the time of writing California was yet to submit a waiver request to the Trump-era EPA. ‘We have to try, and we have to presume that the government will follow the law,’ says Mary. ‘If we can demonstrate the need for tighter emissions, and if there’s a demonstration that there is [alternative] technology that can feasibly achieve that, then we are entitled to the waiver.’ James Thornton recalls a similar situation during the Reagan years, when Anne Gorsuch was tasked by the President to ‘bring the EPA to its knees’, but ultimately failed. Whether Pruitt could succeed was ‘an open question. You can’t get rid of the laws, even with this Congress you’re not going to be able to repeal a Clean Air Act or a Clean Water Act.’ We got the answer to whether Pruitt would succeed in July 2018, when he became the latest in an already long list of senior Trump appointees to resign amid scandal allegations. His immediate successor, however, hardly suggested a change in direction: Andrew Wheeler was a former lobbyist for Murray Energy, the coal mining company.

A lot of hope now rests with California. Since the Trump presidency, Californian Governor Jerry Brown has arguably ratcheted up his environmental commitments. Mary Nichols confirms that Brown is pushing for a UK-style commitment to ban diesel and petrol cars. He has extended the state’s cap-and-trade program through to 2030, the same year that the state must hit a 50 per cent renewable energy target. Brown has since announced a 100 per cent renewable target by 2045 and called for the whole United States to go to 100 per cent by 2050. Meanwhile, under the Clean Air Act any

other state can still choose to adopt California’s stringent vehicle emissions standards. Fourteen states currently do so, including Pennsylvania, Connecticut, North Carolina and New York City – referred to as the ‘CARB states’. This means that California’s rules cover 135 million people, more than 40 per cent of the US population. And if the EPA continues its decline, more blue states may join the list. California’s ‘Pied Piper of Clean Air’ role is now arguably more important than ever.

Paris: A journey without cars

I’m standing in the middle of the Place de la Bastille with only nine minutes to go before the ‘Journée sans voiture’ (Car Free Day). It is 10.51 a.m., and the car ban officially starts at 11 a.m. But on this grey, cold and drizzly Sunday in October, there are still a surprising number of cars scurrying around. They surely won’t have long enough to make it out of the central zone before the car ban kicks in? I check my watch. Now they only have eight minutes. I’m both waiting to see what happens at 11 a.m., on what is normally one of Paris’s busiest thoroughfares, and then to meet Charlotte, an air pollution analyst from the Airparif team. She and her colleague are due to arrive by bicycle, and I’m hoping they will be easy to spot.

The city’s first Car Free Day in 2015 saw all but public transport and emergency vehicles banned from the roads, resulting in NO2 levels plummeting by 40 per cent in parts of the city. The success was such that Mayor Anne Hidalgo posted on Twitter: ‘We might envisage days without cars more often … perhaps even once a month.’ Several streets in central Paris subsequently vowed to remain car free on the first Sunday of every month, including the Champs Elysées. The Journée sans voiture was also retained as an annual day, but with bolder ambitions. While the first two years were limited to the city centre, the 2017 day, when I arrive, is set to take effect across the whole of Paris. Christophe Najdovski, the deputy mayor in charge of transport, told the newspaper Le Parisien: ‘The idea … is to show that you can live in the city without having a car … and will allow everyone to rediscover a quieter and less polluted city.’ This was something I had to experience.

It is now 11.10 a.m., and there are still cars on the road, but I have seen some officials in yellow high-vis Journée sans voiture vests stop and remonstrate with a couple of vans. And I needn’t have worried about whether I would spot Charlotte. Also dressed in high-vis, she arrives on a bike pulling a large trailer behind her the size of a mobile coffee shop, covered in blue tarpaulin and plastered with Airparif logos and a giant pollution map of Paris. She lifts the tarpaulin to

show me the impressive amount of kit that has been packed into it, monitoring both NO2 and PM2.5, with a tube poking out the top to suck in the air. Her plan is to cycle it around central Paris all day, taking readings to see the difference in pollution levels compared to non-car-free days. She tells me that the pollution-mobile (my words, not hers) has been used before to show the impact of segregated cycle lanes, and found that the pollution levels were 30 per cent less in a cycle lane compared to cycling on the road among the cars.

After Charlotte cycles off, I plan to rent a Velib – a rented bicycle from the city’s bike hire scheme, and one of the first in Europe when it was launched in 2007 – to set out to meet the people triumphantly reclaiming the streets by bike or on foot. Before the final cars hurry away I take my Egg out and it takes readings in the single figures. A blustery day like today with drizzle blowing through the air is good conditions for clear air anyway. I was expecting the Velibs to be like gold dust today, but the racks at the Place de la Bastille are surprisingly full. I haven’t rented one before, and stare blankly at the instructions on the machine. It’s not nearly as user-friendly as other city bike schemes I have used. I have a ticket with a lot of numbers on it and a personal four-digit code, and the bikes themselves also have numbers. Completely confused as to what number I now need to enter or in which order, after two failed attempts I realise that a gaggle of press photographers have appeared around me taking photos. Needless to say, this isn’t helping. I get increasingly flustered, now just punching numbers in at random, doing my best exasperated Gallic shrug, and wondering how to exit from this situation with a shred of dignity. Another Velib cyclist rides towards me and dismounts. I look up to ask her pleadingly for help with this damn machine, but before I get a chance the photographers shove me out of the way and surround her. I realise it is Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, arriving in La Bastille to mark the start of Car Free Day with a photo shoot. In person, she is Parisian from head-to-toe, with an ability to look elegant even on a bicycle while wearing a bike helmet. Before I’m able to blurt out a better question than how to use the damn Velib machine (although that might not have been such a bad question), she is immediately surrounded by press, security and a TV crew. The PR manager glares at me as he whisks her away.

I return to the Velibs, still none the wiser. I ask the next person – this time not the mayor, but an ordinary guy, and after he gestures with authentic Gallic shrugs and an ‘et voilà!’, I gratefully pull a bike from its rack and start pedalling, eager to experience what a major city is like without cars.

Rather than ‘Car Free Day’, however, it is quickly apparent that it is ‘Fewer Cars Day’. Buses, taxis and private car-hailing services such as Uber still ply the streets, and potentially in greater numbers than usual as, being the only four-wheeled game in town, they can charge a premium. I was expecting streets reclaimed by celebratory cyclists and pedestrians, walking arm-in-arm down the tarmac.**

However, pedestrians are still largely restricted to the pavements, and cycling – while less nerve-racking than on a usual Parisian day – is still the familiar urban exercise of truck and car avoidance. My first Velib experience also continues as smoothly as it started: my first bike has a puncture, and I have to return it. But finally, I do start to encounter the joyous reclamations of the streets that I had hoped to see. Whole families cycle side by side on roads that they wouldn’t typically dare go down; environmental protesters begin to turn up on bikes they’ve turned into ‘cardboard cars’ as an indicator of how much space cars needlessly take up. Most striking is a group of up to 100 gyroscope riders – something I hadn’t encountered before, like motorised unicycles but without the seat, which appeared to have spawned a counter-culture among kids and men dressed largely as gamers, many with customised helmets. One rolls a cigarette in his hands as he travels at speed, barely looking ahead. They carry a ‘fuck you’ attitude that I wholly approve of. The anti-car movement needs some angry, ‘fuck you’ types. And Paris has never been short of those.

I arrive on my Velib in Place de Stalingrad for lunch, hoping to see a large procession that I’ve heard is to end there and gather for a ‘waste-free picnic’. I arrive before the procession and find a celebration is already under way. A large stage has been set up with a rapper, then a chanteur (I later learn they are HK and Mali Karma), and the Car Free Day organisers are dragged up on stage for lots of embarrassing dancing, and to sing a number of environmental protest songs. When the procession arrives, it is made up of ordinary cyclists, several of the ‘cardboard cars’ and even, for reasons I never quite get to the bottom of, a cardboard lighthouse about five metres high, manned by a man dressed as a ship’s captain, smoking a pipe and clacking seashells together to the rhythm of the music. I join in the waste-free lunch (a chickpea stew that tasted similar to the cardboard it was served on) and find myself drawn into the celebratory spirit. This is a recognition of how significant a step a day like today can be: that people could reclaim the streets from cars, which could reclaim the air from traffic emissions, too.

I ring Mariella Eripret, one of the Paris sans voiture citizen group organisers, whom I have arranged to meet. We can barely hear each other over the music. I wonder if she is one of the organisers with green T-shirts and red faces dancing on stage, but fortunately, she isn’t. When we talk, she fills me in on the background. The idea for Paris sans voiture came from a group of citizens, not from City Hall. ‘As a Parisian cyclist, I am very annoyed not only by air pollution but also noise pollution and space taken by cars in the

public space,’ she tells me. ‘We were a few people who met during a festival we organised (Festival des utopies concrètes), and we imagined or dreamed about a real and complete car-free day in Paris. At the beginning, I have to admit that I did not believe it could happen … The mayor took a while to answer. But in the meantime, we got in touch with her deputy mayor [Christophe Najdovski] who totally supported us. Anne Hidalgo was supposed to announce the car-free day on 7 January 2015 but she finally did not because of

the terrorist attack at Charlie Hebdo. We wrote her another letter saying we should not abandon the idea, even in that terrorist context, and that we needed such events more than ever … We want this day to be an opportunity to see and live the city differently, to make people aware of the space taken by cars on the public space, and the pollution they cause.’ And what’s the cardboard lighthouse all about, I ask? ‘I don’t know exactly … People were just invited to join the procession riding any kind of engine, as long as it had

no motor!’

I end the day walking along the Right Bank of the Seine – until last year, one of the busiest, most polluting roads in the city. Last year, Mayor Hidalgo made the decision to close it indefinitely and open it up to walkers and cyclists. Here the celebration continues and this time it is permanent. Children play on climbing walls and wooden obstacle courses. Where there were once lorries belching fumes there are now trees in pots. Even when the drizzle eventually gives way to full-blown rain, there is a tangible happiness on the Right Bank. No one needs a ‘fuck you’ attitude down here, because the cars have been banished for good, with no exemptions. Every day is a ‘journée sans voiture’. And boy, it feels good. The air feels clean. Airparif studied an earlier partial pedestrianisation of the Left Bank of the Seine and found that NO2 levels by that section of the river had dropped by 25 per cent. The NO2 that remains comes from the road a few metres above, where cars can still drive. However, even on the upper road, NO2 was found to be 1–5 per cent lower than before, because there was no longer the combined effect of NO2 mixing in from below.

Tyler Knowlton, a Canadian living in Paris, who works for the air monitor start-up Plume, tells me that further along from the fully closed section of the Right Bank, two lanes of traffic have also been narrowed to one, and ‘there is a double bike lane there now. It’s like “everyone be damned, this is for bikes now” – that’s incredible. My stress level went down by like 20 per cent trying to get to work in the morning … at the weekend in the 15th [arrondissement, or district] on the Left Bank, I used to have to chain my bike to a street sign. Now there is all new bike parking, it is repaved, they put a dedicated bike lane in. All over the city there is all this new cycling infrastructure.’ The city plans to double the number of bike lanes from 700km (434 miles) in 2015 to 1,400km (870 miles) by 2020, including segregated cycle lanes wherever possible.

Just as the growth of cycling blossomed following the introduction of the Velib, the city hoped to do the same with electric cars. Autolib, the city’s electric car-sharing service, with a docking station model like the Velib, was launched in 2011. A fleet of over 4,000 electric cars and 6,000 dedicated charging points and docking stations were prominently positioned across the whole Paris region. The vehicles were available for short-term rental to members of the scheme, exactly like the Velib bikes. On average, each Autolib vehicle was found to replace the need for three private cars – by 2016, it broke above 100,000 annual registered subscribers. One of the key attractions was a guaranteed parking space at the start and end of your journey. Being Paris, where parking is something of a contact sport, many of the grey Autolib cars were covered in bumps and scrapes; far from being some green vanity scheme, these were lived-in cars that carried the scars of regular use.

Autolib came to an end in July 2018 when a budget shortfall led to a falling out between the city authorities and the private company contracted to run it, the Bolloré Group. However, by that point, arguably it had already proven the concept – electric, shared vehicles are very popular amongst urbanites. Autolib soon had competition, too. In June 2016, a fleet of 1,600 ‘Cityscoot’ electric scooters appeared on the streets of Paris. Unlike the Autolibs, these could be left to park anywhere within the central zone – you use an app map to find the nearest one, then hop on. Somewhat worryingly, users don’t even need a driving licence. Nor do they need to recharge the scooter after use. ‘I was a beta tester last year,’ enthuses Knowlton. ‘You can leave it anywhere, just get on. They have a bunch of people that go around with flat-bed trucks and pick up the ones that need recharging. I’ve never not been able to get one.’††

All diesel cars will be banned in Paris from 2025. Given that in 2017, almost half of all cars were still diesel, it sounds unachievable, but the pioneering Autolib scheme and the imitators it spawned give us a glimpse of what that future might look like. There is also a clear, graded pathway in place from the city authorities to phase out diesel. As of January 2017, the oldest, most polluting diesel cars were banned from the city’s streets during the day. All cars, motorbikes and lorries in Paris must now display a coloured, numbered disc called Crit’Air, based on the age of the car and its emissions, ranging from Crit’Air 1 (electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles) down to Crit’Air 6 (older, mostly diesel, vehicles). From July 2016, cars registered before 1997, deemed the cut-off point for Crit’Air 6, were prohibited from entering Paris on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. The carrot offered to those owners getting rid of their cars have included discounts for Autolib, a year of free public transport, financial assistance for businesses, free Velib membership, and even €400 to buy a bicycle. From 1 July 2017, the ban was extended to vehicles bearing the Crit’Air 5 disc, which included diesel vehicles registered before 2001. And so on, each July, until we reach zero diesel cars by 2020. The Crit’Air scheme also works as a viable alternative to the emergency odd/even number-plate scheme used in Paris and many other world cities during peak episodes of heavy smog. Rather than arbitrarily taking half the cars off the road, irrespective of how polluting they are, now the Parisian authorities can implement, for example, such measures as ‘only cars displaying Crit’Air 1 & 2 certificates will be allowed into Paris, until the smog clears’.

The day after Journée sans voiture, Paris is back to normal, and full of cars. At the Airparif offices, I ask Amélie Fritz if they have studied or modelled the impact of Crit’Air? ‘The what?’ she asks, confused. I repeat it. ‘Ah, Crit’Air,’ she says, correcting my terrible French accent. She clicks through her computer to find some files. The first restrictions put in place in 2016 affected ‘around 2 per cent of the car fleet’, she tells me. But by removing this 2 per cent, it reduced air pollution levels by ‘5 per cent of NO2, 3 per cent of PM10 and 4 per cent of PM2.5. The second step from July 2017, Crit’Air 5, is only 3 per cent of vehicles … This 3 per cent of vehicles will reduce NOx by 15 per cent, and 11 per cent of PM2.5. It is’, she says, with a large degree of understatement, ‘potentially quite a good measure.’

That said, Europe has had a road map for reduced emissions before, with the Euro 1–6 car regulations. As the fallout from the VW scandal showed, those milestones were never met on the road. And politicians come and go. There are powerful motorist lobbies in Paris, as in any other city, calling for a repeal of the cycling lanes and road closures. According to the latest Airparif report, more than 1.4 million Parisians are still exposed to levels of pollution that do not comply with the regulations for NO2, with ‘the health of the inhabitants of Paris living along the traffic routes and in the heart of Paris … the most affected’. Paris, perhaps more so than anywhere else, left me with a strong sense of our two possible futures hanging in the balance: it offers glimpses of what zero emissions could look like, but remains largely stuck in the stranglehold of fossil fuel emissions.

The global awakening

Globally, we face the same enemy. The European Union has set a 2050 target of reducing emissions from the transport sector by 95 per cent. To deliver this it means that almost every car, van, bus and lorry on the streets of European cities needs to be zero emissions by 2050. Currently, the only zero emissions vehicles are battery or hydrogen powered. Given the average age of vehicles on the road is 15 years, it also effectively means that no diesel or petrol vehicle can be sold after 2035. Several cities are leading this drive, with Oslo aiming to provide 100 per cent renewable energy-powered public transport by 2020, and Amsterdam by 2025. In October 2017, the mayors of London, Paris, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Quito, Vancouver, Mexico City, Milan, Seattle, Auckland and Cape Town committed their cities to procure only zero emission buses from 2025 and ensure that a major area of their city is zero emission by 2030. There are plans to ban both petrol and diesel cars in India by 2030.

In Germany, where ClientEarth are very active, James Thornton tells me ‘we have had ten air quality cases, [and] we have won all of them at my last count … courts in Stuttgart, the heart of the motor industry, and in Munich, have said that they will ban diesel by court order … judicial behaviour is changing because they understand there is a public health emergency.’ Even in the European capital of coal, Poland, Maciej Rys, the founder of Krakow-based Smogathon, tells me, ‘the government in Poland took some serious steps … From the beginning of 2018 you cannot sell these old tech chimneys or furnaces for your home – you cannot sell them or install them … I think there is a big revolution coming in our whole approach, especially to coal. You see even [coal] miners saying we know this is going to end, even they are convinced that this is not the future.’

We have reached the limit of what can be achieved by incremental improvements in engine technology and combustion efficiency. The Euro 6 standards were the end of that line, and real-world tests show that the car manufacturers just can’t meet them. In October 2017, just before my second daughter was born in an NHS hospital in Oxfordshire, Oxford council announced plans to introduce what has been described as the world’s first ‘Zero Emission Zone’ in Oxford city centre. The proposal would see diesel and petrol vehicles banned from the city centre in phases, starting with a small number of streets in 2020, potentially moving to the whole city centre by 2035. Oxford city Councillor John Tanner said that a ‘step change’ is now needed: ‘All of us who drive or use petrol or diesel vehicles through Oxford are contributing to the city’s toxic air.’ Everything is pointing in the same direction: the end of combustion for energy and transport, and the rise of electrification.

Notes

* Even so, just to make sure, ClientEarth returned to court in February 2018, securing a ruling that the High Court should have ‘effective oversight’ of the UK government’s next air pollution plans. The judge said: ‘The history of this litigation shows that good faith, hard work and sincere promises are not enough … and it seems the court must keep the pressure on to ensure compliance is actually achieved.’