There were some 2.5 million vehicles on our roads in the early 1950s. Today, there are around 40 million.
Only my more elderly readers can answer this question based on their historical experience and knowledge of life - which atmosphere would you be happier to have entering your lungs, the air back then or or the air of today?
Let me lead.
I remember the filth and the smog masks. I compare that to today's meteorological forecasts which, day after day, insist that predicted atmospheric pollution is low. They are right.
The 2.5 million vehicles of he 50s, along with: the steam trains; smoke belching power stations; industrial filth; and soot emissions from almost every chimney; foul diesel emissions from lorries and buses created an unbelievable degree of foul, unbreathable air.
The Clean Air Acts did their job - starting in 1956. Our vehicles, factories, power plants and railways etc, today issue forth only a tiny fraction of what we saw back then.
That we should struggle towards an even cleaner environment is not unreasonable but it should not have become a demigod to be worshipped by our modern, quasi-scientific Philistines.
Our air is clean to a degree that would have seemed impossible on all of those smog-filled days.
Our fuels, gas, oil and coal have all been cleaned up and are fit for purpose. in 1955, the air we breathed was literally killing tens of thousands - and arguably, hundreds of thousands. The air was made even worse still by the multitudes of smokers.
And yet, globally, there is a huge glut of filth still entering the global atmosphere. Much comes from India but the bulk - and I have witnessed it with my own eyes travelling the wasteland between Beijing and Tianjin in China - comes from power stations which burn coal much as we used to in those darkened days.
What are these Stop Oil protesters doing? Effectively preventing the pretty clean use of these terrific resources which surround these islands and lie beneath our soil. For the sake of pity, WHY are they not demonstrating in China, huh?
They know full well that the energy needed in a modern world cannot be produced - even by depositing three quarters of the world into poverty as trillions are thrown at sustainables which cannot complete the job.
Their folly would not seem quite so stoopid if they were to switch to supporting nuclear power. The common sense deficit brings forth sums which simply make zero arithmetical sense.
