Take Your Breath Away: Smog Kills Thousands

Welcome to London

 Air quality in England and Wales today is already at dangerous levels in many parts and set to get worse today and tomorrow.People with respiratory conditions such as asthma and older people are advised not to involve themselves in any vigorous outdoors activity but preferably should stay indoors, while others are advised to watch for wheezing and sore eyes. The pollution index is expected to rise to as high as 9 out of a possible 10 across southern England in particular.

This is the result of naturally sand clouds, which cross Britain quite frequently and deposit useful minerals for agriculture, mixing with high levels of pollution from cars, industry and other human activities: London has the worst record in Europe for poor air quality but its authorities seem incapable of taking any effective action. This is although some 29,000 early deaths were attributed to air pollution in the UK alone last year (7 million worldwide).

This will only get worse without radical action to change our forms of energy production and use, move from private to public transport and create more space for natural events like the sand to occur without causing devastation to people and planet. Paris was affected badly enough a few weeks ago to briefly but massively reduce car use in the French capital, but Britain, with our dependence on cars and relatively poor and expensive privatised public transport system, sits splendidly complacent in the face of the smog rolling over us. Even seeing, it seems, is not believing for our carbon-addicted policymakers.

Green MEP Keith Taylor, whose south-east constituency is particularly badly affected, issued a statement: "It’s clear that our Government must play a role in pushing for stronger air pollution laws from the European Union, rather than trying to water down the rules we already have.The air in our towns and cities needs to be cleaned up. To do that we need to reduce the amount of traffic and bring in cleaner alternative transport options."

But for now we have a Government more interested in posing in an entirely fake, election-oriented "argument"  about wind turbines between its two craven components while dark clouds shroud our not-so-green-and-pleasant land.

It's enough to take your breath away. Literally.

Dragonfly In Oil - a study in "humanity"

From the Tar Sands of Canada - this is how we power our way of life, our cars, computers, holidays, homes...

Alberta in Canada once boasted one of the most beautiful wildernesses in the world. But then came the exploitation of the Tar Sands, part of the dirty oil drive which, by the appropriately named process of fracking, has made North America energy independent for the first time. The remains of millennia of decay, the matter of the carbon fuel now extracted and burned to power the world's greatest polluters - the human species - spew into our air and silently, invisibly poison our future. 

But earlier, much earlier in the process of extraction and refining, the spills and detritus of drilling and fracking the oil from the virgin soil have already claimed the most delicate of creatures, in the pursuit of profit and human profligacy happily destroying as mere "collateral damage" the precious, living and vibrant children of nature. Forests have been felled, ground stripped of its topsoil and heated water flushed deep down to force millions of barrels of oil out the ground: coating and trapping the once free and beautiful dragonfly in a shroud of black.

"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves  overmuch on account of our victories over nature. For each such victory, nature takes its revenge on us.”

                  Blake & Engels, quoted in The Rise of the Green Left (Derek Wall)

(with thanks to Calvin "Spiralling" Smith for drawing attention to this)