Cleaner air: broken promises

An adult person takes around 20,000 breaths every single day. Our body constantly needs to breathe to be able to perform its vital functions. This is why clean air and emissions should be a major concern for all of us.

In 2013, Labour promised cleaner air through a fancy and costly campaign. In 2017, when a snap election was called, Labour went on to claim that Joseph Muscat had kept his word and provided us with clean air. All the irresponsible talk about the ‘Cancer Factory’ had been forgotten and we were supposed to be thankful for having a power station that runs on gas.

Labour has, on purpose, omitted from all its propaganda the fact that the BWSC power station, on its own, reduced emission by 20 per cent – which fell from 2,028 to 1,644 CO2 equivalent kilotons as confirmed by national statistics. The interconnector, planned by a Nationalist administration, continued to reduce emissions by 60 per cent. One has to ask what did Labour actually do to reduce emissions.

Unfortunately, figures published by the European Statistics Agency – Eurostat – show that Malta’s carbon dioxide emissions rose by an estimated 12.8 per cent in the last three years, which means that Malta registered the second highest increase in CO2 emissions in Europe. Data published by the European Environment Agency tells us that the air quality in Malta is one of the worst in Europe. It is estimated that, every year, around 600 people die prematurely as a direct result of air pollution – a rise of 300 people compared to statistics published by the same agency in 2016. This data was published at the same time as, in the European Parliament, we were setting new targets to reduce emissions from cars, vans, trucks and lorries.

It is also an acknowledged fact that the main contributor to this deterioration of the air that we breathe is the exhaust generated by road vehicles. We probably did not need Eurostat or the EEA to tell us this stark truth because we experience it first hand, day-in, day-out.  The ever-growing number of cars and heavy vehicles on our roads – which is on the rise due to the increase in the population that the government has triggered without long-term planning – is pumping tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere. To make matters even worse, most of the time our vehicles are getting stuck in traffic jams, thus turning our roads into mega factories producing exhaust which we then inhale, whether we like it or not.

And there does not seem to be an end to it. With the population growing by unprecedented numbers, and with a public transport system that is not robust enough, the situation can only get worse. Whilst the Opposition is pushing for a public debate on a mass transport system, the government has been busy spending €700,000 over a year in public relations to cover up this disastrous track record.

The truth is that we are living in a country that is being run without a serious plan, and which is adjusting to the changing environment as we go along. So, if we want to create wealth, we go on a building spree, and if we don’t have enough workers, we bring in some more. And if all this results in traffic jams, then we widen the roads and re-position the bottlenecks.

A serious plan would see that the country has a modern and efficient transport system, which should have been designed in parallel to the population expansion. A serious plan will also set milestones for the introduction of electric cars on a large scale, which will see the reduction of fossil-fuel emissions.

Is it not ironic that while on the one hand Muscat tells us that he wants to see Malta taking the lead in the move towards electric vehicles, on the other we are approving more and more fuel stations on ODZ land? If anything, I would have thought that with the advent of electric cars, we would have needed fewer fuel stations, not more.

Is it not ironic that Muscat tells us that, for a metro system to be viable, we need to expand our population even further, when we are all witnessing a choking situation? But it seems that some people have a different kind of logic that maybe we will understand one day.

Air pollution is no joke. Maybe we cannot see the danger because it is not always visible to the eye. We might even be tempted to think that our air is clean enough because we live on an island. But the figures do not lie, and unless we take action now, we will be paying a very high price in the future. Now we need to set targets for the rapid reduction of emissions – from both vehicles and other sources, such as maritime fuels and industrial activity.

We also need to think long-term and begin working on a plan that will see a carbon neutral Europe by 2045. We need to see how to reap benefits from programmes such as InvestEU to develop a mass transport system. This is our pledge so that the generations to come will enjoy a good quality of life rather than inheriting a sick country.