It’s a tough time to be someone who’s recently given up smoking. Despite feeling healthier and having the benefit of quitting before 22, [insert a loose statistic about being able to fully heal your lungs if you quit before this age] I can’t help but feel defeated in knowing that I’ll never quite be breathing entirely safe air. And unless I follow my urban-overwhelm-induced desire to flee to the countryside, I doubt this will change anytime soon.
We are now at a pressingly important point in time to question whether the trajectory of pure air in the UK is beginning to falter, or regress. It may even be that the current data and consensus of our air has always been a superficial representation of the quality of public health, particularly for those residing in urban areas. The inspiration for this moan came after inhaling one too many bus fumes, but even without peeling back the pseudo-environmentalism of Britain’s left-wing constituencies and politicians, there is a greater decay of our air quality underway, and an accompanying rise of pollution-related health ailments sneaking their way past much of the public’s attention.
Perhaps the most alarming research to kick this year off came from an IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) study which estimated that 200,000 cases of adenocarcinoma (the most prevalent of the four of types of lung cancer) were associated with exposure to air pollution in 2022. Alongside this, the IARC highlighted that lung cancer in never-smokers is also occurring almost exclusively as adenocarcinoma.
Whilst mega-industrial nations like China far exceed the UK’s rates of adenocarcinoma caused by toxic air, we still are notably worse than both the US and Canada. Over a 1000 cases of adenocarcinoma in 2022 were attributable to air pollution in the UK, not smoking.
Furthermore, existing literature has consistently linked longer term cognitive deficits and disorders with exposure to air pollution, but recent evidence published in the Nature Communications journal now shows that even the most temporary inhalation of particle matter (solids and liquids present in the air as a result of pollution) can affect emotional processing, attention, and fatigue for up to 4 hours after subjection.
In the current global political landscape, it seems statistics are bound to worsen as time progresses. Far-right parties, like Germany’s AfD, have consistently argued human activity is not tied to climate change. This baseless conspiracy is similarly held by Donald Trump, expressed in his reelected enthusiasm to ‘Drill Baby Drill’.
Such economic-driven criticism unfortunately puts pressure on even left and centrist parties. Labour’s fetishim and directionless sense of growth includes the backing of a third Heathrow runway development, a proposed removal of restrictions on road and house building in green belt areas, and in 2023 Starmer even publicly criticised Sadiq Khan’s dedication to expand ULEZ, suggesting it affected byelection results.
On a surface level, the electric infrastructure rollout is undeniably at an inconsistent rate with vehicle penalties and restrictions; understandably then a sight of individual anger when complications arise for working-class individuals dependent on using the road. But the above political approaches are nevertheless baffling given that one study found Bradford’s clean air zones (some of the most impressive and ‘harsh’ in the country) to have saved the NHS an estimated £30,000 each year. Positive returns of public money and stronger public health could surely be used as a selling point for many political parties. The economic prioritisation now directly carried out by Starmer and held by many of his constituencies is therefore not only inhumane and selfish, but myopic, and impatient.
Here I could take a quick dig at Brighton where I am writing from, an ichnographically liberal and green city. Leadership in the past 15 years has been shared between The Green Party and Labour, with the latter prevailing today. Conversely, the city has shown minimal effort to undo its heavily car-centric infrastructure: traffic remains diverted through all of the largest residential districts, as well as along all of the sea front. With summer just around the corner, a new wave of day-trippers will soon come to sunbathe with a side of motor fumes.
The now privately-owned Brighton & Hove Buses has begun filtering out their old stock with more renewable options, but as for the council, their clean air zones were last updated in 2016 with much of their efforts only coming to life through the notorious 20mph speed limits in the city’s denser areas. But, with stop start traffic, this hasn’t helped much either.
There has been a recent proposal to try overhaul the cities’ infrastructure, but the only fruits of this pledge I’ve seen so far are adverts on the back of buses telling you to ride them, cycle, or walk (instead of driving). I’m sure this message is absorbed well by the driver of the car behind, who is able to overtake the bus and then follow an identical journey to it, uninterrupted.
Brighton’s EarthSense real-time air quality map will often indicate air quality (particularly smaller PM2.5 particles) to be worse than what is expected in the UK, occasionally at levels deemed by the AQI to be dangerous or unhealthy. For a relatively small and lesser-populated city, this shouldn’t be the case.
In the past 2 decades, tackling air pollution in this country has been one of the biggest oversights by those in power. And as shown only in the first quarter of this years’ research, the cracks will show soon enough. It is therefore no wonder that many young people may take an existentialist and hedonistic outlook on their smoking and vaping habits. One of the only things keeping me from returning to cigarettes is my dedication to exercise. I still feel that my generation may struggle to make 60, and now, going off the conditions around me, I am increasingly convinced that myself and my peers could one day be experiencing the city in a way likeable to 1950s London.