London Strong-Arms Drivers To Go Electric

is taking things a step further. Air pollution has fallen there, so the city is trying not just to keep down the number of cars, but enforcing steep fees on gasoline and diesel vehicles to encourage people to ditch them for electric. We'll hear all about that in a few minutes. First, I asked Eric Roston, Bloomberg Sustainability editor, to give us an overall air pollution update. Cars and factories, farms. They're

generally cleaner than they were a few decades ago. So are we moving in the right direction or starting to slide back? Eric Rostin, thanks for being here, Thanks for having me. Eric. You spent a lot of time thinking about air pollution, and it's kind of different now than it was a hundred years ago. So let me just ask you the most basic question, what is air pollution? It might be easiest to start with the parts of air pollution that we're the same hundred years ago, because

there's not a lot of it. There's desert dust. Dust from northwest Africa can actually not only pollute the African consonant, but is taken by winds over to North America and we get a little bit of that, obviously not as bad as the continent itself does. Another thing is wildfires. Wildfires.

There have always been wildfires. They're getting more damaging and more frequent, but they kick up an enormous amount of smoke and ash, and those can cause the cardiovascular problems that are such a problem with modern air pollution that we're talking about strokes and heart disease and lung cancer and respiratory infections. What's happened in the last century is we built billions of machines that make the air dirty. The overwhelming amount of this kind of air pollution is

are very tiny particles. The scientists call it particulate matter two point five or PM two point five, and the two point five just means these are little tiny pieces of of pollution smaller than two point five micrograms and they get caught in our lungs and our noses, and a little dose may not be that harmful, but over time this is a public health threat that kills about

four and a half million people prematurely every year. Then PM two point five, it would be nice to say, well, it's just this substance, but it's a lot of different substances. When we burn things, that kicks up all kinds of imperfect products of combustion. There's a lot of impurities in the stuff we burn in coal, in gasoline, and that leads to all kinds of other kinds of air pollution,

like nitrogen air pollution. There's an oxygen based pollutant called ozone, which while it's when it's up in the stratosphere, it protects the Earth from the Sun's ultra violet radiation. Closer to ground, ozone is a dangerous and un harmful polluting When it gets really hot, you'll hear public health agencies issue like an ozone day emergency, and that's that's where that comes from. Transportation is actually only about twelve percent

of the mortality that comes from air pollution. It also comes from all these other things, mostly power plants and wildfires, desert dust, and all sorts of other machines we've brought into the world world. So I mean, that's a whole lot of stuff. And I guess the question is what is the way that policy experts and scientists look at like the totality of pollution, because as you say, if you just take out one little part of it, you're

not really making much of a dent. What is the way that you try to figure out, all right, how do you lower it to the point where that huge number of deaths it becomes meaningfully less. The good news there is it already has in rich nations that have had pollution the longest, so like air pollution levels have been falling in rich countries, and like we know how

to regulate it. Within the last twenty years alone in the you know, in the US there has been declines in PM two point five level, the associated levels of ozone and nitrogen pollution, So we know how to do it. And you know, like with PM two point five, the scientists say, like, no amount of this stuff is okay, and of the world lives in with polluted air. So

there's a long way to go. But just the tools of car efficiency of switching power plants from coal to gas, or even better than that these days, from any fossil fuel to renewable energy. These are all things that just save millions and millions of lives. And it's very important to emphasize that the communities that are losing lives are communities that have generally been underserved by government safety and public health protections. So these are poor communities. These are

in many places communities of color. So attacking air pollution today also means helping underserved communities actually come out from under holy disproportionate risks that have been suffering under for for decades. We've been talking about how air pollution obviously takes the quality of the air and therefore what we're

breathing in in. But you write about how scientists are now seeing other problems associated with air pollution having to do with how it affects the climate conventionally, like going back to like you know, the beginning of the whole air pollution debate in the middle of the last century. It's more a local problem. It's a problem for cities.

It's a problem for communities. One thing that they've been sort of slower to pick up on is that the air pollution is also not great for the climate, because like, particularly in highly polluted northern cities, they get a lot of snow, and even beyond that, just like the Arctic winds from the south will blow soot up to glaciers,

up to Arctic ice and it'll precipitate there. And when you have like black chemicals sitting on white snow, the darkness of those particulates attracts heat and melts snow and ice faster than it otherwise would. And then the other thing that has taken signed is a long time to really pinpoint, is that a lot of the particular batter are sulfur based chemicals that once you put them up in the air, they tend to get stuck up there,

and they actually they reflect sunlight. We've put enough pollution into the atmosphere to heat the world already by like maybe one point four degrees. The world has only heated up one point one degree celsius in the last two

hundred years. And the reason is that all the sulfur pollution that comes out of cars and power plants goes up there and hangs out and actually gives us a little bit of a I don't hesitate to call it a bonus, but part of the pollution from a climate perspective is actually, you know, doing us a favor in terms of heating. This is, of course, the very same chemicals that we spent the eighties and nineties trying to

get rid of because it causes acid rain. One way that a lot of governments are trying to bring down air pollution levels is by pushing people to abandon gasoline and diesel powered vehicles and move towards electric vehicles. How big a deal is that transition when it comes to overall air pollution levels. It's one of the most fundamentally positive things we can do. As sad as it is. The reason we're in this push towards e v s

and cleaner transportation, actually isn't air pollution. You know, you would hope, all things being equal, that we would have found out half a century ago that these machines contribute to premature death. We would say, oh, well, we don't want anybody to die prematurely, so we're gonna swap these

right out with clean machines. We didn't do that, And what we did was let the cars and the power plants and the airplanes and the aggric culture all add up until we increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than fifty over what it was fifty years ago. That's raising global temperatures in a dangerous way. Now we're in a position where it's dangerous if we don't stop burning fossil fuels, and that's driving the push towards e v s, and as a side benefit, will

kill fewer people because they'll be less air pollution. The critical caveat with electric cars is you're limiting tailpipe pollutions from them, So any electric car is going to be much more pleasant to stand around if it's idling. But at the same time, the energy is coming from the electrical grid, and so the quality of the actual climate gains from transportation is wholly dependent on your local power source.

So if you have an electric car and a local power source, like I think, it's still less than having a gasoline car in the long run. But the goal here is to swap out fossil fuels more. With Eric Rosston in just a bit when we come back, will head to London to hear how bad cities experiment with high car fees is going now that Eric Rosston has healthfully given us plenty of reason to worry. Let's talk about what can be done. Bloomberg City Lab correspondent fergus

O Sullivan is here with me now from London. Fergus O Sullivan, thanks so much for joining me today, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. You've written it's just really fascinating story about how London has dramatically reduced its air pollution in a really short time. Can you describe what it was like and what they did. London is actually the city where the first person ever to have pollution lists

as a cause of death lived. So it's a place that has suffered from really really terrible nitrogen oxide pollution. It can be a pretty unhealthy place to live. So to give an example of how bad it is, Oxford Street, London's main shopping street. It usually exceeds it's safe pollution levels for the year in the first week of January, the first week of the year they blow through their annual limit. Yes, or they have a certain amount of peaks that they're allowed and they just go peak to

peak to peak to peak to peak. And so the government the City of London decided to take a pretty dramatic step to do something about that. What did they do. They've had some pretty groundbreaking anti pollution measures here since way back in two thousand and three, and that's when the Central London Congestion Charge was introduced. It's currently fifteen

pounds a day. That's at eighteen and a half dollars roughly that you have to pay if you want to drive in Central London for every car except for battery electric and plug in hybrids. So in the most congested part of the city, you want to drive there, you've got to pay up. You've gotta pay up, yes, substantially, and that's been in a place for nineteen years and

that was extremely effective. The thing with that is it was intended to stop the average Joe really driving into central London, to stop private drivers, and their numbers have

completely did drop. But then you had this upswing in Uber and Bolt, these private hire cabs and online shopping spiked delivery van levels, so actually the traffic then rose up, so people themselves weren't driving in, but once they got there, they were still taking taxis and ubers to get around exactly, and people concreasingly stopped going to the shops and waiting for the shops to come for them via delivery lan and so ultimately a few years ago it reached the

same level, but it took about, you know, ten fifteen years to each that level. They introduced something a little more stringent called the Ultra Low Emission Zone. That's only on the most polluting cars, so all cars built before two thousand and five that run on gas and all diesel vehicles of any type before and for that you have to pay twelve pounds fifty a day. That's about fifteen dollars fifty. Is that on top of the congestion already in place. That's on top of the congestion charge.

So if you want to drive into that zone now you have to pay seven pounds fifty a day. That's about thirty four dollars. So it's very very large amount. But the actually Ultra Low Emission Zone is currently twice the size of the congestion charge shown. So it covers all of in in London and in probably August of this year it's going to cover the entirety of Greater London. So exactly how big is this zone? You said it's larger, what is it encompassed? If you're in London. How big

the zone for ultraal low emissions. It covers about three point eight million Londoners homes, so it's substantial. It's about half so if if you think of London as being within the M twenty five Beltway, it's about half that area currently in the of the big road that circles Lining exactly. But this summer the zone is going to be extended all the way up pretty much out to that beltway. It's not exactly the same border, but it's

very very close. So it sounds like the Ultra Low emission zone has a different goal than the first one, which was to discourage people from driving. This one seems more at trying to get people to buy electric cars so that they can't drive in most of London without incurring a fee. Yes, this is substantially intended to push a model shift, and one of the things that is

relevant with looking back at the congestion charge. Remember I said that it was good at deterring private vehicles, but increasingly it's the commercial fleet that it is a big issue. So it's also substantially about encouraging large scale haulers and people like Uber to switch their vehicles over to to something much cleaner, and it seems to be having that effect. How has it been working out? The numbers are still small, but they are also at the same time quite spectacular.

So looking at Uber for example, about thirteen percent of their journeys in London are by electric vehicle now, but that's triple what they were that was in the second quarter of two. But that's triple what they were running in the first quarter of one. So ready it's gone up three times. It's about five times what the average is in North American cities. So yes, there has been quite a flip, and that seems to be ongoing. And what about diesel, because diesel is really dirty as compared

to just a regular guest line car. In terms of the amount of diesel vehicles coming into Inner London, you know, it was spectacular. Forty four thousand fewer diesel vehicles every day entered the zone after it was introduced compared to the week's proceeding, So it's almost like flipping a switch. One week later, there's forty four thousand fewer of these vehicles every day. So the goal here, of course is to not just decrease congestion, but to lower pollution. Is

that working. Yes, it has reduced pollution. They believe that in the first six months it reduced proportion of harmful pollutants in inner London by and in central London by forty. And this is over which period of time, over the first six months of the ulas being introduced. So over the six months since the Ultra Low Emission Zone, air pollution in central London has dropped tw yes and forty in the city corps. But it makes sense when you

think about it, because it's like flicking the switch. One day they can drive in the next day it's commercially unviable to them. Suddenly the pollution isn't there. So it shows that you can really deliver things very quickly. How has the public responded to this, it's pretty big stick without a whole lot of carrot. Well, yes, it is a pretty big stick and not a whole lot of carrot. But then, not to be too sensationalist about it. Not dying of from air pollution is a pretty juicy carrot

if you ask me. And I think people's understanding of the genuine dangers has grown. Also worth bearing in mind that before these charges, London was a terrible place to drive and a profoundly inconvenient place to drive. And this is not a widespread out North American city where you can just you know, drive through a city like a hot knife through butter. I'm in my forties, I don't have a license, and I have never had the need to, and I've always lived in London and it's just not convenient.

So I think a lot of people feel that way. It's always been a headache. It's just like making it yet more complicated. You're right that European countries might not be quick to embrace London as a medel, but the US is more likely to adapt a version of London's approach. Why do you say that, Well, I just think that there is there are more overlaps between British and American civic cultures, if you like, then there are between America

and continentally European civic cultures. So I think this kind of more less a fair somewhat market driven approach is something that would probably face some pushback in America, but it's a model that they will people will understand, and it kind of fits with the culture, the idea of like, well, we don't want you to do this, but if you're really going to do it, you have to pay because you know you are getting something you have to pay back in And I think that kind of contract with

the public is something that the American citizens will probably find more familiar than they're simply like someone's telling me, I can't drive my car here after the break our electric cars the answer to pollution in big cities Burgas we've been talking about how London's plan has increased the number of electric vehicles down the road, are there other incentives more generally to get people that make the switch from gasoline cars in terms of reductions in the cost

of e V so that makes easier people to buy them. There are some incentives offered by national government. What that's reflected in, however, is actually lower prices at points of sale. So those subsidies are given to the manufacturers and it just means that the prices are kept relatively low. Our associate producers and of Sudiki ask drivers in London if the ultra low emission fees will make them more likely to buy an electric car. Here's what they had to say.

I guess i'd be competitive get in at week or yes, at one point in my life. But yeah, that's not an option right now because we're just too expensive. I'm starting to think about in the future that possibly I could get a like an electrical vehicle might be better. Um, and I've seen them expand on the streets a lot more. I would I would have to judge a lot more

aspects about it, not just the lower mission zones. As for the expansion of the zone, I think it is a little bit too early to be pursuing that, seen as if you look on any street in London you see very few ultra low admission vehicles at present, and I think that the policy of expansion of the zone should have been rolled out more slowly. It's something that impacts my own considerations when I'm looking at purchasing a

vehicle within the next few months. One thing I wanted to ask you about, though, is when you introduce many electric vehicles into a city, you need to have a lot of charging stations. How has London downe that? How are US city is going to very quickly increase the number of charging stations so all these cars can keep running well. There has been substanchi investment in charging stations and a growing network of them. I would say that that is arguably a further hurdle that isn't going to

need to be overcome. Currently it's not just a question of finding a charging station, but finding a charge provider that your vehicle has a filiated to. I believe that some changes are in the pipeline so that any charging station is used visible by any electric vehicle. But currently, yes, it can be inconvenient, So it's getting better, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily it's optimum levels yet. Fergus and Sullivan, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.

My pleasure. Thank you. Let's bring back Bloomberg Sustained Ability Editor Eric Roston. Eric, we've been talking about how if you want people to buy electric cars, you need a lot more places to charge them to make it convenient, and that means making more electricity, which itself isn't always that clean. So let's say you live in an area where your power comes from the coal plan. There's not as many as there used to be, but they're still around. Does buying an e V put you in the plus

side of the ledger? There? Some of the researchs does indicate that even if you buy an EV and you're on a coal fired power grid, that the gains overall are still net positive from a climate perspective. This is a really really messy problem we have. I don't know how many hundreds of millions or billions of cars in the world, how many tens of millions of discrete power grids there are. But it's not going to happen overnight. So some parts of the system are going to get

ahead of the other parts of the system. And you know, if you want an electric car, buy an electric car. If you don't want an electric car, don't buy an electric car. But the fact is that every five years that go by, there's going to be more electric vehicles and less fossil fuels, And so the calculation for any individual, you know, it is always going to be, well, what's

the safest, most fun car that I can afford. But the fact is is that as evs become cheaper, more people will buy them, and as fossil fuels are squeezed out of the energy system, less and less of it will power e vs. So it's a very difficult question to answer on a on an individual level, but on the system level, things are moving in the right direction.

Do evs have their own sort of problems with contributing ti polution, Like if we start seeing a rise in e vs where they sort of overtake gasoline powered vehicles, what are the downsides of doing that? The downsides are in the vast amount of precious minerals that you need to build electric cars. You need like batteries and other components require elements that we don't have a century of

experience in mining at scale. So mining is just one of the most invasive extractive things that people do, and it's hard. You know, we need a lot more lithium than we ever had before. There's scarcity, and that's why you've seen prices rise so much. The same with cobalt. Mining is invasive and it has real environmental impacts. There's also end of life issues, like we're gonna need to mine old old cars. Nobody wants anymore for their lithium and cobalt and other things things, and so you see

it happening, but at a very fast clip. We need to gin up industrial systems that can both produce these minerals without wrecking local communities and local ecosystems in the place where the minerals are found, and we also need end of life systems for for consumer products that will take defunct car batteries and other kinds of batteries and get those materials out and get them back into the supply chain. Eric Roston, thanks so much for talking to

me today. Thanks for having me. You can read more from Eric Roston and fergus O Sullivan on Bloomberg dot com. Here's a quick p s A. It's a new year and you might be thinking about making some changes in your life. Our colleagues at the Bloomberg podcast Zero have a special episode all about changing jobs, specifically people who quit their jobs to go to work fighting climate change. You I'll hear the stories of a restaurant critic, geophysicist,

even an international war crimes attorney. They all left their previous careers behind to try to slow the warming of the world. Check it out. The podcast is called Zero, the episode How to Quit your job for the Climate. Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take the Daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app,

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Have a great weekend. M h um um um um m m