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Part of the externalised costs of internal combustion vehicles is unfortunately the very concentrated air pollution they produce.
Levels of the harmful air pollutant nitrogen dioxide at a [London] city-centre monitoring station are the highest in Europe. Concentrations are even greater than in Beijing, where expatriates have dubbed the Chinese city’s smog the “airpocalypse”.
It is the law of unintended consequences at work. Efforts by the European Union to fight climate change favoured diesel fuel over petrol because it emits less carbon dioxide.
“Successive governments knew more than 10 years ago that diesel was producing all these harmful pollutants, but they myopically ploughed on with their carbon dioxide agenda,”
Tiny particles called PM2.5 probably killed 3,389 people in London in 2010, the government agency Public Health England said last month. Like nitrogen dioxide, they come from diesel combustion. Because the pollutants are found together, it is hard to identify deaths attributable only to nitrogen dioxide, said experts.
London is not alone in having bad air in Europe, where 301 sites breached the EU’s nitrogen dioxide limits in 2012, including seven in the British capital. Paris, Rome, Athens, Madrid, Brussels and Berlin also had places that exceeded the ceiling. The second- and third-worst sites among 1,513 monitoring stations were both in Stuttgart, after London’s Marylebone Road.
http://www.todayonline.com/world/eur...highest-europe
Levels of the harmful air pollutant nitrogen dioxide at a [London] city-centre monitoring station are the highest in Europe. Concentrations are even greater than in Beijing, where expatriates have dubbed the Chinese city’s smog the “airpocalypse”.
It is the law of unintended consequences at work. Efforts by the European Union to fight climate change favoured diesel fuel over petrol because it emits less carbon dioxide.
“Successive governments knew more than 10 years ago that diesel was producing all these harmful pollutants, but they myopically ploughed on with their carbon dioxide agenda,”
Tiny particles called PM2.5 probably killed 3,389 people in London in 2010, the government agency Public Health England said last month. Like nitrogen dioxide, they come from diesel combustion. Because the pollutants are found together, it is hard to identify deaths attributable only to nitrogen dioxide, said experts.
London is not alone in having bad air in Europe, where 301 sites breached the EU’s nitrogen dioxide limits in 2012, including seven in the British capital. Paris, Rome, Athens, Madrid, Brussels and Berlin also had places that exceeded the ceiling. The second- and third-worst sites among 1,513 monitoring stations were both in Stuttgart, after London’s Marylebone Road.
http://www.todayonline.com/world/eur...highest-europe
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