Pollution control and lessons for greenhouse emissions Some informal reflections

John Kemp 25 July 2019

Britain’s Clean Air Act became law in July 1956 – less than four years after the Great Smog of London had killed an estimated 4,000 people in December 1952.

The act prohibited the emission of dark smoke from industrial furnaces and authorised local authorities to establish smoke control areas where only smokeless fuels could be used by households.

It is often cited as an example of how a disaster can galvanise public opinion and force policymakers to respond decisively, a possible case study for efforts to tackle greenhouse emissions.

But the act was the culmination of more than a century of campaigning and legislative efforts to deal with the smoke pollution choking London and the northern cities at the heart of the industrial revolution.

The history of smoke control legislation strongly suggests that the principle obstacles to controlling greenhouse gas emissions are political and social rather than technical and economic.

Identifying the problem and possible solutions will not be enough, on their own, to spur legislative action. Instead it will take decades to prepare public opinion to accept change.

Pollution control technologies and less-polluting alternatives take time to mature and become acceptable to the public and policymakers.

Even then, change is likely to require a catastrophe involving significant deaths to act as a “tipping point” for lawmakers. Such tipping points are often arbitrary and difficult to identify in advance.

In retrospect, however, the costs of greenhouse gas control, like pollution control, may turn out to be smaller and less disruptive than feared beforehand.

DYING FROM SMOKE

In the case of smoke pollution, the costs, including soot-blackened buildings, acid rain that killed urban trees, and drudgery of extra hours every week laundering and scrubbing, had been known since the mid nineteenth century.

And the adverse impact on health, including deaths from lung diseases and lack of sunlight, had been known for even longer, since at least the 1660s; by the 1880s, the soaring death toll had been accurately quantified.

“Pestilential smoak so fatally seizes on the lungs of the inhabitants [of London], that the cough and the consumption spares no man,” the diarist and gardener John Evelyn wrote in 1659.

As early as 1662, cloth merchant John Graunt had noted London’s mortality rate was much higher than surrounding country areas, based on an early statistical analysis of local death registers, and attributed it in part to the polluted air.

By the 1840s, statistical analysis showed pulmonary diseases had become the leading cause of mortality, accounting for 30 percent of deaths in Manchester, and the link had been drawn to smoke pollution.

“Why do the vast proportion of the inhabitants of London, and other dense towns, die of diseases of the lung?” asked the journalist and author Charles Dickens in his magazine “Household Words” in 1854.

By the 1870s, pulmonary disease rates had surged, and bronchitis and related diseases had overtaken tuberculosis, typhoid and typhus to become the leading killer in urban England.

In 1883, respiratory diseases were killing 4,400 people per million inhabitants each year in smoky counties of London and Lancashire, compared with just 2,800 per million per year in rural counties of southern England.

Smoke was particularly lethal in low-lying areas and river valleys, such as Manchester and London, when combined with windless and very cold conditions such as commonly occurred in the winter months.

The resulting surge in coal-burning coupled with atmospheric temperature inversions trapped smoke close to the ground and produced choking combinations of smoke and fog that became known as smogs.

Victorian and Edwardian pollution experts had identified the link between temperature inversions, smog and the subsequent spike in deaths, especially among the elderly, infants and the infirm.

Episodes of smog were regularly followed by a jump in deaths, as contemporary medical officers and pollution campaigners noted.

In a single fortnight in January-February 1880, London’s death rate surged from 27 to 48 per thousand due to the effects of smoky fog and cold, and there were almost 3,000 deaths above the average for the time of year.

One prolonged smoke-laden fog in Glasgow in November 1909 caused a near-doubling of the city’s usual death rate and was blamed for more than 500 excess deaths, mostly from bronchitis, pneumonia and pleurisy.

DOGGED CAMPAIGNS

In response, anti-smoke campaign groups were formed, newspaper editorials warned of the risks, and legislators introduced bills to control the smoke nuisance, but practical action was limited.

Reacting to the growing number of industrial factories employing steam engines in the early nineteenth century, legislators established select committees and introduced bills to regulate smoke emissions.

The Steam Engine Furnace Act of 1821 gave courts the power to order modifications to furnaces employed in the working of steam engines “expedient for preventing the nuisance in future”.

Three decades later, the Smoke Nuisance Abatement (Metropolis) Act of 1853 required every furnace and steam boat operated in London to consume or burn its own smoke, with fines for offenders.

Smoke control clauses were also included in general sanitary legislation in 1858, 1866 and 1875, which also dealt with sewerage and refuse collection, but all these pointedly exempted domestic fires.

Numerous other smoke control bills were introduced only to wither amid opposition from manufacturing and free trade interests in parliament.

With dogged persistence, William Mackinnon MP introduced ten smoke control bills into the House of Commons in the 1840s and Lord Stratheden and Campbell introduced ten more into the House of Lords between 1884 and 1892, none of which reached the statute book.

After the First World War, the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act of 1926 was passed but made only minor improvements on the Public Health Act of 1875, and further efforts languished until the Clean Air Act of 1956.

LIMITED LEGISLATION

Legislation failed to stem the problem of increasingly frequent and severe smogs because the controls on industrial furnaces were weakened by too many loopholes and domestic fires were exempted entirely.

The technology needed to reduce smoke emissions from both industry and homes was well understood but its introduction was opposed on both cost and social grounds.

Manufacturers cited the threat to their competitiveness at a time when Germany and the United States were starting to challenge Britain’s economic and military supremacy.

Efforts to convince industrialists that a smokeless furnace was also a more fuel-efficient and therefore more economical furnace largely failed.

And efforts to link smoke control with coal conservation, the preservation of finite national resources and national security were similarly unsuccessful.

Instead, smoking chimneys came to be associated with prosperity – since the only time the chimneys stopped was during an industrial depression or a strike.

Smokelessness was linked in the public mind with hard times, poverty and deprivation.

Some contemporaries argued against smoke control by casting doubt on the link between smoke and pulmonary diseases or argued that the smoke-filled acid air had antiseptic properties and positive health benefits.

In the home, owners, journalists and lawmakers united to oppose the replacement of open coal-fires with more efficient and smokeless closed stoves let alone the new gas or electric heaters.

The virtues of Britain’s coal fires (a cheery flickering flame and lots of ventilation via the open chimney) were unfavourably compared with the warmer, more fuel-efficient but miserable stoves common in the United States and Europe.

Closed stoves made Americans and Europeans sallow and sickly, so it was thought, compared to their healthy English counterparts with their open fires and draughts.

In this context, no senior policymaker dared tighten pollution controls on industry or propose even modest controls on domestic fires.

READYING OPINION

By the 1920s and 1930s, town gas, manufactured from coal, was common for domestic lighting and was increasingly replacing coal for domestic cooking.

Electricity supplies were also widespread in commercial buildings and increasingly in homes.

Local gas and electric companies marketed their services and appliances as a cleaner and more convenient alternative to coal, but they remained significantly more expensive limiting uptake.

Gas and electricity increasingly dominated domestic lighting and cooking, but coal retained its dominance for domestic heating through the 1950s.

By the 1950s, many of the preconditions for a switch away from coal had been put in place, including public awareness of the costs of pollution and the increasing availability and affordability of cleaner alternatives.

The Great Smog of 1952, with its widely publicised death toll, represented a tipping point. In retrospect, however, there was nothing inevitable about the subsequent rapid legislation.

“In 1952, the [smog] crystallised public opinion in the perplexing way such incidents do. It is true that there were better and cheaper means for abating smoke in 1952 than there were in 1880, but it would be a gross over- simplification to attribute the impact of the 1952 smog, compared with the lack of impact of scores of earlier fogs, to a change in technical and economic circumstances alone. The overriding circumstance was the ripening of public opinion,” (“The politics of clean air”, Ashby and Anderson, 1981, emphasis added).

Even after the smog, government ministers initially resisted pressure for new legislation, arguing that existing provisions were adequate, and new measures would be expensive.

“I am not satisfied that further general legislation is needed at present,” Harold Macmillan, then minister of housing and local government and later prime minister, told the House of Commons in January 1953.

“We do what we can but, of course, the honourable Gentleman must realise the enormous number of broad economic considerations which have to be taken into account.”

Iain Macleod, the minister of health, responded to questions about the smog by complaining: “Really, you know, anyone would think fog had only started in London since I became minister.”

In July 1953, the government did, however, set up a Committee on Air Pollution under the chairmanship of Sir Hugh Beaver to “examine the nature, causes and effects of air pollution and the efficacy of present preventive measures; and to consider what further preventive measures are practicable”.

The Beaver Committee issued an interim report in November 1953 and a final report in November 1954. The recommendations were not particularly novel, but they were ambitious.

The core recommendation was that the existing patchwork of laws should be replaced by a single nationwide Clean Air Act and that for the first time it should apply to smoke from domestic sources as well as industry.

“We wish to state our emphatic belief that air pollution on the scale with which we are familiar in this country today is a social and economic evil which should no longer be tolerated, and that it needs to be combated with the same conviction and energy as were applied one hundred years ago in securing pure water. We are convinced that given the will it can be implemented. To do this will require a national effort and will entail costs and sacrifices,” the committee wrote.

Even then, the prospects for legislation remained uncertain. The government accepted the committee’s recommendations in principle but was not committed to legislating.

TIPPING POINT

Two developments pushed the government to act.

First, the City of London, representing powerful and well-connected financial interests, successfully promoted legislation in parliament giving it power to declare a local smokeless zone – the City of London (Various Powers) Act of 1954.

Newspapers and lawmakers wondered if the City could have clean air, why not the rest of the metropolis and the cities of northern England?

Second, a flamboyant Conservative member of parliament, Gerald Nabarro, introduced a private members’ bill to enact the Beaver Committee’s recommendations in February 1955.

Nabarro told the House of Commons the bill was “Beaver, nearly the whole of Beaver, and practically nothing but Beaver”.

Nabarro’s bill was enthusiastically received but he withdrew it when the government pledged to introduce its own legislation after consulting with local authorities.

Honouring its promise, the government introduced its own Clean Air Bill in July 1955 and it became law twelve months later in July 1956.

Even then, progress remained slow and uneven. There were shortages of smokeless fuels in the 1960s which caused some local authorities to act slowly. Some parts of London were not covered by smoke-control areas until 1980 and in the case of Manchester not until 1990.

LESSONS

The history of smoke control legislation suggests several lessons for contemporary efforts to limit the emission of greenhouse gases:

• Efforts to control pollution often take multiple decades to reach a successful outcome.

• Identifying a pollution problem and solutions are not enough to prompt legislative change.

• Obstacles to pollution control are usually political and social rather than technical and economic.

• Pollution control technologies and less-polluting alternatives need time to mature and become acceptable.

• Public opinion must be prepared to accept change and anti-pollution campaigns can take years to reach fruition.

• Legislative change is often spurred by a catastrophic event with a high death toll but tipping points are hard to identify in advance and not every catastrophe leads to legislation.

• Legislative changes can take several decades to become fully effective as both industries and individuals need time to adapt fully.

• Pollution control generally turns out to be less expensive and problematic in retrospect than feared at the time.

Further reading: A Character of England (Evelyn, 1659) Fumifugium, or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (Evelyn, 1661) Natural and Political Observations … Made upon the Bills of Mortality (Graunt, 1662) Smoke or No Smoke (Dickens/Household Words, 1854) The Smoke Problem of Great Cities (Shaw and Owens, 1925) The Politics of Clean Air (Ashby and Anderson, 1981) The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times (Brimblecombe, 1987) Burning to Serve: Selling Gas in Competitive Markets (Goodall, 1999) The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Mosley, 2008) Clearing the Air: Can the 1956 Clean Air Act Inform New Legislation? (Mosley, 2017)

And on the United States: The Deadly Donora Smog of 1948 Spurred Environmental Protection – But Have We Forgotten the Lesson? (Boissoneault, 2018) The Donora Smog Revisited: 70 Years After the Event That Inspired the Clean Air Act (Jacobs et al, 2018)