You would be forgiven for not knowing, but yesterday was UK Clean Air Day!
As ever with such days, the lobbyists come out of the woodwork demanding ‘action’.
But perhaps, seeing as how they mention ‘improving public understanding’, they might care to remind the public that our air in the UK is the cleanest for decades, and probably much longer:
As a country, we have every right to be proud of the way we have cleaned up our air over the years.
To pretend that tens of thousands are still dying because of air pollution is an insult to our ancestors who had to live in real pollution.
History also records that most of our towns were stinking hellholes long before the Industrial Revolution.
The campaign reels out the usual lie that air pollution causes 36,000 deaths a year in the UK.
There is no evidence for this whatsoever, merely modeled projections that conclude some people may die a few days earlier than they would have otherwise if they had not lived in polluted cities.
But even this does not distinguish between current pollution and the real pollution these people would have been subjected to in the past.
This whole campaign is no more than a smokescreen (pardon the pun!) designed to take away yet more of our freedoms and subject our lives to ever-increasing regulation.
Read rest at Conservative Woman
Prior to fossil fuel power, larger British towns and cities were too often a cesspool of fifth with all those horses needed for motive power urinating and defecating in the streets.
The urination is something I have never seen portrayed in a history documentary. One may see a pat of horse dung being shovelled up in such a show, but that’s only part of the story. When liquid hits a hard surface like a cobbled street at pace, it sprays in all directions.
I wouldn’t call air carrying droplets of horse urine ‘clean.’ If there was a case for wearing a mask, it was back then.