Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
which could no longer be considered as an
'
inevitable
'
consequence of urban-
industrial life.
The outbreak of war in 1939, however, and the need for rapid industrial pro-
duction, saw public and political interest in smoke abatement diminish. It was
London
gures caused some
4,000 deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular disorders (and perhaps as many as
12,000 deaths according to recent research), that proved to be the catalyst for the
introduction of stringent legislation to control air pollution in Britain. Following
this tragedy, which demonstrated conclusively that polluted air could be just as
deadly as polluted water supplies, the public and the press supported the passage of
the Clean Air Act of 1956, which for the
'
s
'
Great Smog
'
of 1952, which according to of
cial
rst time regulated both domestic and
industrial smoke emissions. Widely considered by historians to be an important
milestone in environmental protection, the legislation included powers to establish
'
in towns and cities, and householders and industrialists were
required to burn cleaner fuel to meet their energy needs.
35
Local ordinances in
American cities such as St. Louis and Pittsburgh had given the authorities the right
to control the type of fuel consumed by industry prior to London
smokeless zones
'
'
s
'
killer smog
'
,
reducing smoke signi
cantly. Following this well-publicised disaster, and the
Donora smog of October 1948 which had killed 20 people, concerns about health
saw federal air pollution control acts passed in the United States in 1955, 1963 and
1967. But not until the Clean Air Act of 1970 were national air quality standards set
for the
s associations and
needing to rebuild its shattered industries, the government subsidised Ruhr coal
production in order to boost economic growth. The
rst time. In post-war Germany, lacking in
uential citizen
'
rst national German legislation
to combat air pollution had to wait until the Federal Emissions Control Act of 1974,
which sought reductions in emissions through the use of Stand der Technik or the
'
of abatement. As was the case in the nineteenth century,
this meant using abatement technology installed at a cost that took the economic
circumstances of a particular
best practicable means
'
rm into account.
36
Nonetheless, by the late 1960s
and 1970s, the skies were clearing over the cities of the
rst industrial nations; but it
had taken more than a century to solve the smoke problem.
In early twentieth-century Japan, the industrial Hanshin region between Kyoto,
Kobe and Osaka experienced roughly the same smoke pollution levels as western
European and American manufacturing centres. But after the passage of national
smoke control legislation in 1962, with regulations being further tightened in 1970,
city air in Japan also improved in quality. But smoke pollution continued to be a
major problem in other parts of the world, particularly in the cities of the Soviet
Union, eastern Europe and China where industrialisation was still heavily depen-
dent on coal. Before the collapse of the USSR (1989
-
1991), the commitment of
—
communist countries to economic growth
to match or even out-produce the
35
Davis (
2002
) and Thorsheim (
2004
).
36
Tarr and Zimring (
1997
), Stradling (
1999
), Davis (
2002
) and Morag-Levine (
2003
).
