Does air pollution kill 40000 people a year in the UK?
Discussion
gareth_r said:
King Herald said:
I'd like to know why my four year old diesel Mundano only costs 30 notes a year for road fund licence, which indicates it was an environmentally desirable/acceptable car at the time. How has it gone to being a hated murder vehicle in just four years???
A cynic would answer "Because it only costs £30/year.". 
Air pollution by vehicles is generally the result of queueing/congestion which the government isn't in any hurry to tackle due to a)the capital outlay required, and b)loss of revenue from all those idling engines using up taxed fuel while getting nowhere. 
Locally we have a dual carriageway which goes down to a single immediately after a double set of traffic lights. Once there were only queues in the rush hour, now they last most of the morning. A winner!
Locally we have a dual carriageway which goes down to a single immediately after a double set of traffic lights. Once there were only queues in the rush hour, now they last most of the morning. A winner!
proclamations like this s
te tell you all you need to know about why governments and large corporations fund the various ngo's. get the message pushed and accepted first then the resistance to the give us more money bit will see less resistance.makes it easier to tar the naysayers with the "denier" tag.
if this is the case i want every scientist and corporate lobbyist that pushed politicians in the direction of making diesel car purchase flavour of the month jailed for life for crimes against humanity. the sooner these people have accountable skin in the game the sooner we will see this tax generating scaremongering crap disappear.
alternately, if they want people to buy into it why not half the price of petrol ? will that even be a consideration , i highly doubt it.
te tell you all you need to know about why governments and large corporations fund the various ngo's. get the message pushed and accepted first then the resistance to the give us more money bit will see less resistance.makes it easier to tar the naysayers with the "denier" tag.if this is the case i want every scientist and corporate lobbyist that pushed politicians in the direction of making diesel car purchase flavour of the month jailed for life for crimes against humanity. the sooner these people have accountable skin in the game the sooner we will see this tax generating scaremongering crap disappear.
alternately, if they want people to buy into it why not half the price of petrol ? will that even be a consideration , i highly doubt it.
Camoradi said:
"In order to tackle urban pollution, diesel vehicles should be taxed more heavily than petrol vehicles, which should be taxed more heavily than diesel vehicles in order to meet our climate change obligations"
UK government, sometime soon.
.... and when we have spent a fortune on windmills, new cars etc. will we be told when the climate has stopped changing? And when it doesn't stop changing, because it never does, what then? Will we be told "...well it would have changed more if we hadn't done anything..."?UK government, sometime soon.
If there was real proof that diesels were killing 40K people a year, they'd be banned, and rightly so. It is more expedient to hide behind the abject lack of proof and just tax them.
I've said this on other threads - but look at the statistics for COPD which is a stand out disease for "your lungs are buggered". Do we see an increase in COPD diagnosis in London? No - London is at the bottom end of the scale - about the same as Scotland. Do people have shorter lives in London? No - they have some of the longest in the country. Are the diagnosis rates for COPD rising or falling? Falling in all regions of the UK. If you want to address lung disease, then you need to attack deprivation and smoking. The maps seem pretty clear that COPD is linked to poverty rather than rural/urban areas.
If they want to address pollution in London, some suggestions would be:
- remove the speed bumps, thus eliminating pointless requirements to accelerate. If these claims are true, the pollution caused by speed bumps is killing an order of magnitude more people than they save....
- fix the reasons that cars sit in jams all day. My favourite is the A40 out of London - no reason why it should ever be stationary other than an accident, but it frequently is because some cretin messes about with the lights.
I've said this on other threads - but look at the statistics for COPD which is a stand out disease for "your lungs are buggered". Do we see an increase in COPD diagnosis in London? No - London is at the bottom end of the scale - about the same as Scotland. Do people have shorter lives in London? No - they have some of the longest in the country. Are the diagnosis rates for COPD rising or falling? Falling in all regions of the UK. If you want to address lung disease, then you need to attack deprivation and smoking. The maps seem pretty clear that COPD is linked to poverty rather than rural/urban areas.
If they want to address pollution in London, some suggestions would be:
- remove the speed bumps, thus eliminating pointless requirements to accelerate. If these claims are true, the pollution caused by speed bumps is killing an order of magnitude more people than they save....
- fix the reasons that cars sit in jams all day. My favourite is the A40 out of London - no reason why it should ever be stationary other than an accident, but it frequently is because some cretin messes about with the lights.
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