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On Air Pollution and Geo-politics.
Apr. 3rd, 2014 03:59 pmI woke this morning to reports of unusually high levels of air pollution across England. A combination of domestic air pollution, filthy EU air blown over the Channel (1) and sand from the Sahara blown over Spain has caused a spike in airborne pollution. Asthma suffers are advised to stay indoors.
On the far side of Europe, Russian troops complete their annexation of the Crimea and the EU seems somewhat reticent about objecting too strenuously. Perhaps it is the thought that a goodly proportion of our gas comes from Russia and we’d have a hard and expensive time replacing it if we engaged in an escalating series of sanctions and the Russians switched the pipeline off.
We could, if we wanted to give ourselves a bit more room to object to Russia’s foreign policy, lower our current usage of gas. A thing we could do would be to extend the final deadlines for the Large Combustion Plant Directive which limits the running time of old, more heavily polluting power stations and requires them to close by the end of 2015. Then we might be more likely to be more able to burn our own coal instead of Russian gas in the short term. We could use the coal to tide us over whilst we built some more nuclear and renewable power stations and permanently reduced our vulnerability to being cut off from Russian gas.
If we did that we’d not gain the main benefits of the LCPD for a few years, reducing the amount of air pollution emitted by older, dirtier coal and oil-fired power stations. Our air quality would not improve. A few additional people would die of respiratory illness.
On the far side of Europe, Russian troops complete their annexation of the Crimea and the EU seems somewhat reticent about objecting too strenuously. Perhaps it is the thought that a goodly proportion of our gas comes from Russia and we’d have a hard and expensive time replacing it if we engaged in an escalating series of sanctions and the Russians switched the pipeline off.
We could, if we wanted to give ourselves a bit more room to object to Russia’s foreign policy, lower our current usage of gas. A thing we could do would be to extend the final deadlines for the Large Combustion Plant Directive which limits the running time of old, more heavily polluting power stations and requires them to close by the end of 2015. Then we might be more likely to be more able to burn our own coal instead of Russian gas in the short term. We could use the coal to tide us over whilst we built some more nuclear and renewable power stations and permanently reduced our vulnerability to being cut off from Russian gas.
If we did that we’d not gain the main benefits of the LCPD for a few years, reducing the amount of air pollution emitted by older, dirtier coal and oil-fired power stations. Our air quality would not improve. A few additional people would die of respiratory illness.
