Good old Georges. Never fails to miss the point. I love this:

The most carcinogenic
compound ever detected – 3-nitrobenzanthrone – is produced by heavily
loaded diesel engines. Like the other cancer-causing molecules they
emit, it is released in very small quantities, and no one yet knows
what effect it might have.

"Most carcinogenic?" "No one knows the effect?" Slightly difficult to be both don’t you think?

It is true to say that
our air, like that of most parts of the rich world, is much cleaner
than it used to be. Since the great smog of 1952 forced the government
to legislate, since coal gave way to gas and factories fitted filters
to their chimneys, acute pollution crises of the kind which once killed
thousands in a couple of days have not recurred. (Our nostalgia for the
London peasouper, like the uproar over the disappearance of the
Routemaster bus, betrays one of our national weaknesses: a romantic
attachment to pollution.) Between 1992 and 2000, traffic fumes fell
steeply. But in 2000 the decline in the most dangerous pollutant –
small particles of soot – came to a halt. Since then the levels have
held more or less steady (with a spike in the hot summer of 2003). The
British government is in breach of European rules, and the European
commission is in breach of any serious effort to do something about it.
So 39,000 lives are shortened every year.

Here’s what he’s missing. Cost. Cleaning up the first 10 or 20% of pollution is pretty easy….there are those who would claim that it is actually directly profitable. 90% can be halted at not much cost. But that last 10% ( Actually 9% with the last 1% taking an order or two of magnitude more money) is hugely expensive. And we have, as we know, limited resources. So cleaning up that last part of the pollution may actually not make sense at all. There is even, given opportunity costs, the possibility that by cleaning up that last 10% the money diverted from other uses will mean that more than 39,000 lives are shortened. Another way of putting this is that this is not, unfortunately, a perfect world and we have to make choices.

In the laboratory, the
converter in a modern car conforming to the latest regulations appears
to have an efficiency of more than 99%. In the real world this falls to
72-75%. It looks as if the manufacturers are designing their cars to
respond to the peculiarities of the government test, rather than to
reduce emissions on the road.

Now there’s a surprise, eh? People engineer to the test just as they teach to the exam.

To judge by the smoke
that comes out of their rear ends they seem to run on burning tyres
rather than diesel, but the council’s environmental health department,
engaged in lively competition with the planning department to establish
the outer limits of uselessness, refuses to return my calls, so I have
no idea why they are still allowed to operate.

Poor Georges. Even local councils are ignoring him now.