Via Off- Guardian
Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.
1. Lockdowns, clean air and saving lives
Not a big story this week, just snuck into the papers without much fanfare, is a report claiming that lockdown saved lives by increasing the air quality in cities.
I mean, it does make any sense, because even if people were driving less, delivery trucks were driving more, and public transport was still running, and planes were still flying, and police vehicles and ambulances and fire engines. Garbage trucks and recycling vans too.
Plus all the essential workers – meaning grocery store workers, gas station attendants, delivery drivers, healthcare workers, police, craftsmen, firefighters – well they all still had to commute to work.
Given all that, it’s hard to see how much the air quality could have improved.
Nevertheless, the report says it did by up to 60%, and that as a result over 800 lives were saved…across 47 of Europe’s biggest cities, concluding:
The information can be important to design effective policies to tackle the problem of pollution in our cities.”
It doesn’t take a genius to decode that sentence.
Now, some of you might be saying that 17 lives per city per year is a number so small as to be insignificant and not worthy of news coverage, let alone impacting public policy…but when your endgame is justifying future “climate lockdowns” to “save the planet”, you need every tiny crumb of propaganda support you can find.
Continue reading “This Week in the New Normal #21”
