Haze. Pea Soup.... let's just call it Pollution.

This last week has been unpleasant so far as the weather is concerned. It is the time of year that Indonesian farmers burn fields to make ready for new planting to take place in a few weeks time. The foliage has dried out so it is much easier to simply burn the scrubby bits left over from last year than manually prepare the ground. So they burn. They don't have to do this and in fact there are laws forbidding this practice, but it still happens and nobody takes action. It's not new news out here but it is in the West. This is what the BBC has to say about it.

Penang is highlighted. The wind here is negligible for the next few days so we will be suffering from this haze for a while yet

It has been going on forever and this is the time of year that it all takes place. For Penang, the areas that most affect us are in Sumatra and with the South West monsoon season here until Christmas, the SW winds that prevail are simply pushing this ghastly messy.... haze all over us. It wasn't anywhere like this last year from memory; apparently it is really bad this year.  Even Bloomberg is paying attention.

I remember growing up the fogs or rather pea soupers in the towns in England. Dense fogs that would hang around for days. For those of you that do not know about these, here is Wikipedia's comment. These fogs were brought about by the coal burning that everyone did in those days (and people wonder why coal has become bit by bit an untouchable fossil fuel) and it wasn't until the 1950's that policy action actually did anything about it. I remember our shirt collars being coated in grime and coughing continuously and the phlegm. Yuk, it was black. Respiratory diseases were prevalent everywhere. I had whooping cough when I was really young and coughs and colds all the time later on.  Pneumonia, TB were everywhere. Mind you every adult still smoked like chimneys.

The tipping point was the pea souper of 1952 which is shown here at Piccadilly Circus. You wouldn't know it was but you can see Eros to the left.

The important takeaway from the above is that regrettably it took 'policy action' to do anything about the pea soupers in England.... aka government intervention by law. I recently read an interview with a very prominent engineer who ran BP for many years (here is the full interview transcript) whose view on the world was from a very engineering viewpoint, of course, but the context was that companies would not do anything until policy makers make them. The technology to fix things is all there but it is not being used because companies don't have to.  Here's an edited excerpt:

JOHN BROWNE: Well ...oil or wood or cutting down forests, but also giving people a very different modern way. So... we’ve created a problem and I’ve been on this point for almost a quarter century now saying... it’s the oil and gas industries that’s created this problem and we need to fix it. And the way to fix it is not to stop engineering, is to apply more engineering to solving the problem...And actually, in this area, I would say that we have already all the engineering processes to stop pumping ... CO2 into the atmosphere and actually even to clean up some of the CO2. The problem is that the ...engineered products are too expensive until they are all rolled out in massive scale because …This is where policy comes in. So in other words, policy has to push these …new engineered products to the point where they become more economical. You don’t have to invent, we need to apply and this is where engineering is very good because as you apply more and more, so the unit cost comes down. We know that for sure. So you need a policy lever... the biggest policy lever you need is a price on carbon. Carbon taxes...have got to be priced high enough so that people can and will actually do something to get it out of the system.

The argument that fixes cost money simply don't wash. This was the argument the car industry used in the 1960's but the lead pollution laws were passed and the issue went away. The car industry is now running pell mell to be the first to produce mass market electric cars.

So all of this is both avoidable and fixable. Granted the developing nations don't want to hear developed nations who polluted away years ago sanctimoniously tell them what to do. But the alternative is pretty desolate.

This week versus normal times