Chimneys

The paradox of environmentalism: the more we try to clean, it seems, the dirtier we get.

For hundreds of years, every building in England and indeed, in every country, had a fireplace in every room to heat it and multiple flues running up through massive chimney arrays like the one in the photo.

The romance of the roaring hearth, that visual centerpiece of countless Christmas cards and Victorian novels, ignored the reality that each of those flues was belching oceans of toxic soot and pollutants into the air.

Until The Great Smog of 1952 killed thousands of people in London (12,000 by some estimates, with another 100,000 or more made sick) and signaled the beginning of the end for the coal industry.

Those massive multiple chimneys are now just architecturally interesting albeit beautifully romantic relics of the past.

But Europe has now identified a new threat: diesel engines.

50% of new cars sold in Europe are now powered by diesel engines, in the belief that they use less fuel than gasoline engines and produce fewer pollutants.

As VW so clearly demonstrated, those may both be false beliefs.

What IS true is that diesel engines, while producing fewer of some noxious gases, produce more NO2 and more of what the scientists call “particulate matter.”

That’s soot to you and me.

Same stuff all those coal fireplaces produced 60 years ago.

Same stuff that caused the Great Smog.

Same stuff that killed all those people.

As a result, the Mayors of Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City have decided to ban diesel vehicles altogether from their cities by 2025, with many other major cities, including London, contemplating following suit, in an eerie reprise of the original English Clean Air Act of 1954 that sought to eliminate the burning of coal in homes and businesses.

Seems all those antiquated Georgian and Victorian brick and mortar chimneys were not eliminated, just replaced by millions of shiny modern stainless steel mobile chimneys masquerading as the exhaust systems on our cars.

La plus qui change, la plus c’est la même chose.