Challenging the air quality discourse - people create pollution not technology

The London Smog of 1952 and subsequent health effects brought about a public outcry which triggered the generation and implementation of the UK’s Clean Air Act of 1956. This act and subsequent updates has been credited with ending the ‘pea-souper’ conditions synonymous with industrial and domestic coal burning. In recent years in the UK, the emergence of major smog events in urban areas due to road transport emissions, the growing volume of epidemiological evidence on the health effects of air pollution, the threat of fines by the European Commission towards Member states and the high profile court cases taken forward by ClientEarth against HM Government1has once again raise the media and political profile of air pollution but the same public outcry that was evident after the London Smog has not been seen. This story is replicated around the world, where major air pollution incidents are not (yet) resulting in wide scale social action – and consequent political changes – to our approach to tackling air pollution.