PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS TO 2052

摘要

Fifty years on from the Great London Smog of 1952 we live in a radically different world in our understanding of air pollution science and policy. While smogs still, at times, plague the developing countries, classic smogs of the kind which that episode exemplified have, it seems, retreated to the history books of the developed world. Yet if the changes are profound, so too are the continuities. While the policy framework of the Clean Air Acts may long have fallen into desuetude, later generations of policy makers have still found themselves unconsciously following some of the templates it set. Although the years following the Smog saw one of its proximate causes - the power stations and other large combustion plant - removed from British cities to ostensibly safer areas where its impacts were diminished, the second half of the 20th century also saw the combustion engine, now miniaturised in the motor car, take over the same city streets. In this final section we try to pull together some of the changes and continuities discussed by the preceding contributors, and attempt to distil from them what seem likely to be the dominant themes of the next half century. In such an exercise the uncertainties can crowd out the conclusions in which one can feel confidence, and the questions swamp the answers, but three issues in particular need to be addressed: 1. how far is air pollution still a problem and likely to remain so? 2. how far might the sources of air pollution that have marked the last fifty years - domestic heating, industry and motor vehicles - be further mitigated and removed? and 3. what implications do the answers to these questions have for the framework of governance and policy which air quality will in the future require?