Seventy one years ago, on this day, December 5, 1952…
The potentially deadly nature of urban smoke had been demonstrated some years earlier during London’s historic “Black Fog” of December 5-9, 1952. A temperature inversion trapped the city’s smoke close to the ground. On the first day it was still a white fog, but so extraordinarily dense that cars and buses moved slower than a walk, and the opera had to be cancelled when fog seeped into the theatre and made it impossible for the singers to see the conductor. By the last day, the fog had turned black, visibility was limited to a mere eleven inches, and the hospitals were full of Londoners perishing from the smoke. Many of the 4,000 or so people killed by this episode never made it to the hospital but died on the streets; fifty bodies were removed from one small city park. In 1956, after nearly seven hundred years of complaints about the coal smoke in London, Parliament finally banned the burning of soft coal in the central city, and the air immediately improved.
Page 167-8 Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese. (c/w Web of Fear!)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 312ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that air quality was dreadful. People had been dropping dead in peasoupers, but this was far worse, with a death toll of around four thousand. Finally, four years later, we get the Clean Air Act because of it despite continued resistance,
What we learn is that there can be multiple disasters, but you need a lot of people to die before anything will get done.
But interestingly, 57 years later to the day, there is another form of pollution in London, mental pollution, i.e. “hopey-pollution.”
So the context is this. At the end of 2008, the main legislative goal had been agreed, a Climate Change Act and this was almost entirely due to the work of Friends of the Earth, bless them. They did really good work there. Then what do you do for an encore? And the problem is that even getting that much agreement was tricky. And you need to do something that has got low entry costs that everyone can agree that might apparently help the process along. And some bright spark came up with the idea of a march and the earliest publicity said “March in December”, haha.
And it was then changed to “The Wave.” This is not really the fault of the individuals having to work within a system that contains and constrains everything.
And that means that we have to undertake these ritualised repertoires, because what else is there?
But I remember a conversation with a very frustrated advocate of marching.
And I said, “do we need social movements to fight climate change?”
“Yes” she said
“Do marches build social movements?”
“No” she conceded, but was still fuming that I wasn’t interested in marching.
The end.
Here we are unwilling and unable to innovate to do the granular work because it’s just not near enough to our wheelhouse.
So 57 years apart, London is subjected to two deadly consequences of its industrial heritage…