Nitrogen: it's 78% of our planet's atmosphere and one of the chemical elements crucial for functioning soil and plant life. A derivative group, 'oxides of nitrogen' almost sounds like they could feature on a wine label blurb. Unfortunately, one distillation (well, binary compound to be exact) of nitrogen and oxygen involves not a pleasant loosening of spirits and laughter in good company as complex flavours evolve upon one's tongue, but an atmospheric accumulation poisoning the air that we breathe. Not at all lovable, in the name of some of us humans getting a taste of personal freedom behind a steering wheel, NO2 comes up pretty short in the communal conviviality stakes.
LET'S CREATE A BIT OF ATMOS
In case one needs reminding these days, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is a member of the nitrogen oxides (NOx) family – NO, NO2, the greenhouse gas N2O, and N2O5. It's used to make nitric acid for fertilisers and explosives: once in our atmosphere it leads to acid rain. Along with carbon dioxide (CO2), its main presence in our daily lives is a result of us burning dense carbon-based fuels – think coal, oil, petrol, diesel, gas, biomass. Perhaps you can't detect any taste of NO2 in the back of your throat, but if you've got some city vista in line of sight, you might recognise it by its reddish-brown complexion, a layer glowering in the somewhat distant sky. Lamentably, anyone looking over your way will see the same shade glowering back at them from a stratum located somewhere directly above your head. Rain dilutes its concentration, but only temporarily; after a day the toxic haze rating is right back up again. It'd make a violet shrink.
Turning my own face to the sun through the smog, I often recall permaculture giant Bill Mollison commenting about how Europe was one big cloud of pollution, making it a pretty deleterious living place. This is what he was talking about...
How do our mere mortal bodies respond to this blanketing embrace? Let’s just say, as these particular nitrogen oxides enter our bloodstream through the lungs, doing irreparable damage to cells and tissues, they're not doing us any favours. Such emissions increase rates of asthma, respiratory illnesses, strokes, and Alzheimers disease, along with impairing our judgement and even making us stupider (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/24/air-pollution-cognitive-improvement-environment?CMP=share_btn_tw).
LEGACY TECHNOLOGY
Deadly effective, about 80 years ago in the days before catalytic converters, exhaust fumes chock-full of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and NO2 were one of the gaseous mixes the Nazis first used to murder people. That was before they realised that hooking up a tube to the exhaust pipe of a vehicle then firing up its engine to deliver toxic fumes down said tube into an enclosed space in the back wasn’t the most efficient or cost-effective way of killing people. Over 40 years ago when I was about 11 years old, it was exactly that nevertheless reliable method my beloved tennis coach used to expel his life in the hallowed privacy of his own car. Twenty years ago one of my dearest friends also tested its slow but lethal efficacy. Life can be hard: we can't only blame Nazis, cars and car drivers for that. (In fact, the mobile 'gas van' was invented in the Soviet Union by Isay Berg and first used by Soviet secret police.)Before the finger-pointing continues, however, in the face of these brutal truths, I must at least admit my own environmental liability. I forwent car ownership over 25 years ago and thenceforth largely dedicated my mobility to bicycles, pedestrianism and public transport, particularly trains. Despite that, and putting thirteen long-distance and about two-dozen shorter-haul flights aside, for the past sixteen years my central Berlin Altbau apartment’s heating system has been a serious ingredient in the CO
2-NO2 cocktail. No, not a car, but another relic from the past...
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| Introducing one elderly German driver of climate change, der Kachelofen (in green, on the right, a small stack of coal in black, just to its left) |
Though generally in my Prenzlauer Berg Kiez, where its notorious breeding masses are stacked into luxurious renovated flats with impersonal radiator heating, making large contributions to national emissions via sprog-production, we're a couple of decades on from the olden days of deathly, stinking coal fogs. Gentrification, city modernization subsidies, and some clean-air legislation have all helped. But let's not get too complacent: at time of writing Germany's facing a dozen or so EU environmental lawsuits and will miss its 2020 emissions targets, transport sector emissions are basically the same as in 1990, and Berlin is one of Europe's worst-polluted capitals.
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| If you so wish, you can read more about it here, there are some appalling statistics graphically-represented in some excellent graphs http://www.exberliner.com/features/politics/bad-breath-the-problem-with-berliner-luft/ |
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| Imagine this street with playing kids, edible gardens adjacent proper cycle, e-bike and scooter infrastructure, and circa one third of the cars - in the form of an exclusively shared electric fleet. It's easy if you try |
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| February 28, 2018 |
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| March 6, 2018 |
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| March 28, 2018 |
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| April 5, 2018 |
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| September 19, 2018 |
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| October 31, 2018 |
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| November 8, 2018 |
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| Jan 2, 2019, the figures in red for Jan1, after the annual war of fireworks event |
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| Welcome, spring. May 10, 2019 |
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| Welcome, summer. June 7, 2019 and the first +30° days of the season kick in |
2 are deadly shite. Indeed, that genie spirit is well escaped out of the bottle: we probably should have gotten rid of cars with dirty fuel-burning internal combustion engines yesterday. Or even better, about a hundred and thirty three and a half years ago yesterday in January 1886, when Karl Friedrich Benz had his patent granted on the first one. Yes, perhaps a terrible thing we can blame the Germans for; a century and a third on, their massive car industry is still going strong. 'Strangely' enough, even though we see PM10 and NO2 levels are published, the country's government (I say theirs: despite 17 years in Berlin I still don't get to vote) doesn’t publish transparent, meaningful PM2.5 data, so we can't truly know exactly how badly that pernicious shite is pricking at our lungs.
THE POLITICS OF THOSE NOT PARTICULAR TO FUDGE
Instead of government bodies making PM2.5 readings available daily, after a good long look online the only trace of published measurements I found was a single, yearly average figure for each on a list of measuring stations somewhere near your Deutschland neighbourhood, published on the Umweltbundesamt (Ministry of the Environment) website. My upstairs neighbour insisted PM2.5 readings were published, and yes, he's right, they are, but just a single yearly average figure? Let's call that opaque bullshit. Why on earth doesn't the German government publish useful figures so we can see the risk before venturing outdoors?It's not just the Umweltbundesamt info that's lax. As the earlier-cited Guardian article mentions, German vehicle-manufacturing company Volkswagen deliberately developed software to fuzz emissions tests, meaning their vehicles alone were haemorrhaging nitrogen oxides into the air at levels 40 times the legal limit. At the time of writing, the German government has still done pretty much nothing against this historical jewel of a company. The only case in court was brought by share-holders concerned about the cover-up's impact on their investment. Could the German government be in bed with the car industry? Thousands upon thousands of jobs do make things tricky when voters are intimated. But as you know, I'm free of that relationship.
I was first alerted to Germany's woefully non-transparent emissions-data omission in a casual encounter at a University of the Phoenix feminist economics ritual in late 2017. As a room full of people who'd temporarily liberated themselves from their mobiles retrieved them again (except me, a fixed line-only type), by chance/incidental joke I met a man cunningly waiting till the telephonic tower of technology diminished, leaving just one phone on the chair – his. An expatriate German long ago off-shored to Japan, he works at an environmental monitoring agency there. Disgusted with his native country’s murky stance on PM2.5, it was he who told me the government a.) didn’t really publish the information, and b.) if it was there anywhere, they made it really difficult to find. “Even Turkey publishes PM2.5 data,” he said. (And that country’s pretty much a dictatorship these days, in case you need reminding.) An artist friend later sent me a link to the locations of various city measuring stations: none of them, so far as I could tell, located on any of Berlin's major city-centre arterial roads. People bike, walk on, and live their lives adjacent to these roads. I guess, to the German government, that’s no biggie.
So why is this important? We can see daily PM10 data: in 2018 and 2019, along with NO2 these were frequently sitting in the high orange or red-lining ‘Dangerous to human health’ levels. But the PM10 measure is more about atmospheric dust, including dust from crushing, grinding (e.g. for the construction industry), and what's stirred up by cars on roads. Small particulates are what PM2.5 is all about, and it's these ones that penetrate the lungs and harm them. Caused by all kinds of combustion, small particulates are created almost exclusively by human actions. In recent times in Beijing, capital of the People’s Republic of China (another country known for its totalitarian tendencies), where air pollution data is/was also not made public, its citizens could at least turn to data on the local USA Embassy’s website when the pea-souper outside their windows in the morning made them question whether to don a protective mask or not, or wonder if it was even safe to exit the house. Of course, Berlin is a lot less polluted than Beijing, but the German government is just as guilty of hazing. From the lack of published information the only thing clear is that they don’t want us to know, even though, at one point in 2018, one media headline quotation screamed “Air pollution is killing Germans every day!” Thank goodness I’m a foreigner.
AN UNHEALTHY AFFAIR WITH AUTOS
So strong is the German car industry, that on February 27th 2018, when the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig made its ruling on banning diesel engine vehicles, it ruled that in the future, on some stretches of road in Germany, some diesel vehicles might be able to be banned. It's not exactly tough love: Germans have long held nationalistic pride in their cars. "Ein VW!" "Noch ein!" ("A VW!" "Another!") Two enthusiastic car-spotters on lower Prenzlauer Allee, Berlin, aged approximately seven and five.At the start of October 2018 a Berlin court decided it would ban some diesel vehicles from eleven (Count 'em! It won't take long) high-traffic density streets in the city. Aside from tokenism and the question of how it'll be monitored, it's only going to move the problem somewhere else. A stalemate to add to the city's traffic jams.
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| A poll run on the day a Berlin judge decided it would more or less still be OK to keep fa(h)rting diesel emissions into the foul-smelling wind, basically, over 43000 people said the car companies should pay for retrofitting diesel vehicles |
2-neutral high-speed ICE train headed southwest, various chapters from Germany's auto-friendly history were visible along our route. Early in the journey we passed through Wolfsburg, home to VW since 1938, formerly catchily known as 'Stadt des KdF-Wagens' (City of the Kraft durch Freude – 'Strength through Joy' – car). The city was purpose built for workers manufacturing cars, part of Adolf Hitler's dream that every German citizen could have an auto. (For this we can blame an Austrian.) WWII hijacked things, and as the factory segued into making military vehicles, the first slaves to cars at Stadt des KDF-Wagens were slave labourers from concentration camps. Of course these days Volkswagen is no longer so notorious for having been founded by the German Labour Front (the Deutsche Arbeitsfront or DAF), the National Socialist's trade union organisation, but instead for faking diesel exhaust emission tests – as per the 'Dieselgate' scandal revealed 2015 in the USA.
Occasionally on that March 2018 trip, those train lines also slunk past tree-shielded Baggerseen (literally, 'digger lakes'), excavated during the same National Socialist era in order to construct the autobahns. On 1 September 1999, my first proper day on German soil, I first wallowed in a spring-fed mud pool, then swam in one of those lakes. It was marvellous, but for VW it'll be far more difficult to wash itself clean. The Germans sure did dig some nice big holes for themselves. Take Matthias Müller, for example, the former CEO of VW, who that very same month said, "I am convinced that diesel is experiencing a renaissance". He was ousted a month later, just one day short of April 2018's 'black' Friday 13th. So it goes.
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| Didn't actually swim in this one, nor was it on my train route, but 'Autobahnsee Augsburg' truly was excavated during 1936-37 to obtain gravel for motorway construction PHOTO: Mailtosap (Sascha Pöschl) from Wikimedia Commons |
SLOW TO POWER UP
On September 10, 2018, the day a trial – brought to court by investors – began in the higher regional court in Braunschweig against VW to decide if the company should have informed shareholders that they were using extremely dodgy technology to falsify emissions tests, I wandered up Berlin's hectic car-jammed Freidrichstraße and popped into VW's Stadtmitte showcase store. In an attempt at appearing progressive, various mock-ups of purported electric car models of the future were on display. Visible from the footpath, a snazzy red one slowly revolved on a platform to lure you in. Another was without a steering wheel, 'drivers' supposed to be able to control its direction with the wave of a hand. (Ponder what happens if you make an inadvertent gesture, or deliberately give another motorist the middle finger...) A central mini-lounge with a virtual reality set-up had a single person queue. And there were various static displays boasting statistics about electric cars, mainly sourced from a STERN magazine article. Once upon a time, the story went, in the early 20th century (before the oil industry got busy), there were three times more electric vehicles registered than any other kind. It was almost happily ever after.In September 2018 the only VW electric vehicle in the showroom with a remote chance of appearing on our streets any time soon was scooter prototype, the 'Cityskater'. (The propaganda said 2018, it finally debuted as "production ready" alongside stablemate the 'Streetmate' at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2019, but still had no indicators on actualisation.) I jumped on the prototype to have a go, complete with all my hidden baggage.
TO GO E, OR NOT TO GO E: WHETHER 'TIS NOBLER TO DRINK FROM ANOTHER POISONED CHALICE
All those years ago when I gave up driving it was because 1. cars are space-consuming, evil polluting machines with an insatiable appetite for your money, which in return do nothing except continuously decrease in value from their day of purchase, and 2. driving can be stressful, taking as you do your own life and the lives of others into your hands every time you do it, no matter how tired, ill, stressed, argumentative, head-achey, moody, intoxicated, mobile phone or child-diverted, et cetera, you are. I wasn't surprised to learn that this test-ride electric scooter was little different stress-wise, as I rapidly transformed into an adrenaline-riddled monster. We humans first tried scooters 100 years ago: after 20 years they (not we) were being referred to as a "traffic menace" https://mashable.com/2015/06/15/1916-suffragette-scooter/?europe=true#2Ed3KlHegZqp |
| It's real: See how much fun I'm having |
As a pedestrian, do you actually want this much speedy shit on your footpath alongside the already existing hazards of non-motorized scooters and the really fucking dangerous 'entitled' illegal cyclists who expect you to get out of their way? No, you do not. As a good cyclist who rides legally in the cycle lane, do you want this speedy shit there with you? Depends how good the existing infrastructure is: in Berlin, in places where cycle-dedicated infrastructure does exist, it's still not yet adequate for the ever-growing number of cyclists, so again the answer is "No". And if you are blind, elderly, visually, mentally or mobility impaired, deaf, a young child or an aging dog, do you want to give up your footpath safe zone to these speedy beasts? Nein. As a motorist, do you want this not quite as speedy shit as you on the road, or even give up a car lane to them? Once again, the answer's most probably a big fat negative. E-bikes present similar issues. So where are these small electric vehicles going to ride? There ain't no infrastructure for them, no matter how supposedly effing 'eco' they are.
In another fortuitous past meeting (in 2018 in the diverse society of social media) I was led to inside dirt from someone living in a city in the USA, where fleets of shared lease e-scooters had recently been rolled out. My source said they'd quickly met opposition, and indeed, the first random article I found verified his tale https://la.curbed.com/2018/2/14/17010034/bird-electric-scooters-transit-venice-santa-monica. Number one issue? Safety.
Researching further, I discovered that in places where they'd been launched, including in my country of origin, Aotearoa New Zealand, not only were they cluttering up footpaths around public transit stations (along with the over-supply/scourge of shared lease bikes), but also that accident and emergency departments had reported a massive spike in e-scooter-related accidents. As in, for example, e-scooterists getting hit by cars, pedestrians getting hit by e-scooterists. In Paris there'll be a €135 fine if you're caught riding one on their tiny footpaths, and most fortunately, at the beginning of May, Berlin's Senat voted against German transport minister Andreas Scheuer's misguided vision to allow them onto local footpaths. Given that cyclists riding illegally on footpaths here is already barely policed, it'll be interesting to see whether transgressing e-scooterists will be, especially as meaningful fines could be a great solution to the city's financial woes, and could be used to directly fund improvements to infrastructure. Between 2001-2017, accidents in which Berlin's cyclists injured pedestrians increased seven percent, with cyclists involved in every fifth pedestrian death. And then there's e-scooter 'self-harm': Head trauma injuries to people e-scootering without helmets, or otherwise injured in falls, variously cutting themselves, spraining something, or fracturing or dislocating bones; accidents caused by things such as drunkenness, inexperience, or scooter wheels hitting small obstacles on the ground at speed. Think, 'uneven paving stones'. Think, 'BAM!' (Still don't believe me? Read on... https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/09/us-emergency-rooms-say-people-are-getting-really-hurt-on-electric-scooters/?fbclid=IwAR2owa2joH-JGzEdP486210DaiR2-e8Nf8374Y1vnN4IDmPb60WIqxGyvDg)
This is all even before we get onto the issue of the ecological footprint of the batteries – and that goes for e-cars too. But once again, that's another story. Don't even get me started on the huge and ever-present danger of Smombies.
ALL ABOUT INFRASTRUCTURE
But wait, back to evil polluting trucks and cars. In 2018 in Berlin, deaths of 11 cyclists and 19 pedestrians occurred due to road accidents – nationwide, cyclist deaths were up 15 percent on 2017, 20 percent of them involving e-bike riders. E-scooters are slated for permission to hit Berlin's roads in 2019's summer: given existing cycle stats and e-scooter experiences elsewhere, alongside the woeful lack of infrastructure it's fairly guaranteed they will be hitting them. In an online DW.com article (dated 02.04.19) Siegfried Brockmann of UDV (Unfallforschung der Versicherer: 'Insurers Accident Research'), said: "You would expect infrastructure would get ahead of the new developments, and not merely follow them, but we are far from that." In recent years several people from my personal circle of friends have come in close contact with cyclist deaths. One rode past a fresh incident near Potsdamer Platz where a woman riding straight ahead had been hit by a right-turning truck. Dead. Another friend, working in a high-rise overlooking a major intersection near Alexander Platz, had a bird's eye view of unsuccessful attempts to save the life of a male cyclist in his late 40s who'd been riding straight ahead when run over by a large transport truck – again, one making a right turn – in mid September 2018.
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| A 'white bike' vigil and demonstration put on by the German Cycling Association, at the intersection of Mollstraße and Otto-Braun-Straße to honor the September 2018 victim and to bring attention to safety issues regarding traffic lights, laws and bicycles PHOTO: Samuel Dylan Clayton |
At the very least, in terms of memorials and recorded cause of death, these tragic and avoidable cyclist fatalities are extremely visible. The air pollution-caused deaths – according to new modelling results released early this year, about 790,000 in Europe in 2015, and an estimated 8.8 million annually worldwide – are far less so. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190312075933.htm) What is transparently clear from these new figures, is that combustion engine car and truck drivers are fully signed up documented agents of the Grim Reaper. The deadly scythe they bear in their hands is a steering wheel.
We need better infrastructure. Converting existing car lanes into proper, dedicated cycle, e-bike and e-scooter lanes will reduce fatalities. Reducing space in cities for cars will disincentivise private car use. Reducing car numbers will reduce air pollution. Which will also save lives. In the episode of 'Boston Calling' broadcast on the BBC World Service on January 9, 2019, economist Michael Greenstone spoke about a University of Chicago study showing that on average, air pollution takes about two years off individual life expectancy. He says it's "the single greatest risk to human health on earth." You can listen here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06xmy59 (3 minutes audio) His working group is establishing a new metric, the Air Quality Life Index.
IS ALL WE NEED THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE? CHOOSE WISELY
2 production cycle, and boasting misleading slogans such as "Rein elektrisch!" ('Purely electric!') Imagine yourself gliding along in your very own voice-controlled vehicle upon those all-too-smirched-by-history Autobahns! Forget about the environmental footprint of your dirty e-car battery, and that there's probably not nearly enough grid capacity if everyone plugged in at once to charge, or that Germany's coal-generated power charging them won't be phased out till 2038! Perhaps you can do so by chanting their meaningless but catchy slogan "Now you can!"
No, I can't. Not only because that car (whether theirs or any other manufacturer's, which I shall continue to forgo in favour of a bike, tram or train) is voice-controlled, and chanting in the third-person may therefore be neither safe, nor digitally secure. But also, I couldn't, because on that very day I'd just come there fresh from one of the Greta Thunberg-inspiried 'Fridays for future' marches; a march held two days before Germany's European Union election day. It was an election which ultimately delivered a huge move away from the denialist, out-of-touch politics of the country's ruling coalition, and a huge shift toward greater Green party representation in the EU parliament. In spite of my Aotearoa New Zealand passport denying me the right to vote here, I could at least add my foot-falls and voice to those of 15,000 other locals calling for government that will create a better, truly cleaner, and more hopeful future. One placard, pertinent in a country where attending school is compulsory/not attending is punishable, read "We're stopping lessons so we can teach you one". My favourite was "Rettet die Wahlen", or, 'Save the elections', a play on the same-sounding German word for whale, Wal.
As human populations continue flocking into cities like Berlin, making them ever larger, noisier and more polluting, it would seem infinitely wise to ban private car ownership and get stuck into supporting mass public transit. In 2019 it's well over time, to prove by example that we Homo sapiens truly are sapient. We have a choice. It's a choice we have even if we don't get to vote. If we make the correct choices, most of us will get to live better-quality lives.
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| On Berlin's Friedrichstraße on May 24 2019, the driver of an almost certainly diesel-powered concrete mixer couldn't even wait 5 minutes to give way to all these people calling for a cleaner future |
2 tax, the end of dirty-fuel subsidies, and for all energy to come from renewables by 2034. Our extremely acoustically satisfying chanting quenched a deeply spiritual thirst for better quality of life. Not only that, it created a great atmosphere.
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| 'Stop climate catastrophe': YES WE CAN! |
