The node is dead
Long live the node!
Along with the regal state opening of Parliament this week and local council elections (more later), the other headline-splashing news is that our venerable Brixton Breathe London Community node has been replaced!
A couple of months ago we noticed some unexpectedly high readings from our node (which, interestingly, can sometimes be caused by spiders nesting in the sensor). So after speaking to the Breathe London team, we were sent a new sensor. A bit of time passed as we got all the right paperwork together to lean a ladder against a lamppost (approximately four months), but last weekend we did just that: Louise’s feet played a key part in securing the ladder and Sacha ventured upwards to replace the node.
And… that was it. You can see the new data from our node at our air-aware.org site. There’s a tiny gap in the data while the node was changed over. Just before the changeover, there was another of the spikes in particulate matter that we’ve been spotting. The idea now is to see if they keep occurring with the new monitor.
We’ve also noticed there is a new Breathe London node opposite International House (ironically, quite close to where we’d originally planned to install our node back in 2023 but suffered from the vagueries of planning permission combined with sensible street furniture to mount it on). That one also shows spikes in particulate matter at similar times to our decommissioned monitor, so our suspicion is that these are real peaks.
Chuck out the environment
This week was the state opening of Parliament by Charles III. He has a long history of environmental opinions which made us even more disappointed that his speech contained very little policies to address environmental concerns*. There was a welcome statement about decoupling the price of electricity from that of gas (gas power stations fill in capacity gaps from renewable electricity sources, hence a link between the two prices), which would help with the uptake of fossil-free heating such as heat pumps.
There were a great number of things missing: a commitment to a comprehensive “Clean Air Act” that would have empowered local authorities to tackle pollution, specific legislation to ban or heavily restrict domestic wood-burning, measures to clear the most polluting diesel vehicles from roads, binding WHO Air Quality Targets, nor new legislation for monitoring and improving indoor air quality in buildings. We signed Mums for Lungs’ letter but it seems that campaign will live to see another day.
From national to local
Another big event this week was of course local council elections. Our local council, Lambeth, has been a Labour stronghold for the past 20 years until last week, when the Green Party increased their number of seats from 2 to 29. While they have the most seats, the Green Party does not have overall control and so we hope that cross-party alignment over air quality matters can be reached and the progress made to date does not stall. We will be watching closely!
*We realise it’s not up to him, but we’re still disappointed by a painful lack of commitment to the biggest environmental threat to human health.