Tyres kill

For decades now I've been saying that, when looking at complex social and environmental problems, we should reward solutions rather than try to guess the source of the problem then tax or regulate that. Current news gives another example as to why we might do better to act on my suggestion. By focusing exclusively on exhaust emissions, we are ignoring what is quite likely to be a much more dangerous source of vehicular pollution:

Emissions Analytics theorised that, based on 1.5kgs of mass being lost per tyre over a 30,000-mile life, a car emits 200 milligrams of tyre particulate matter every kilometre. At that level, tyre emissions would be 22 times higher than the permitted levels in current exhaust gas regulations, which are 4.5mg/km.

In testing, it stacked the odds up in case practice yielded immeasurably low results. Low quality tyres, high speeds, intense cornering, high load in the car and a poor surface quality, were intended to help produce a measurable result. The results were shocking – 5.8 grams per kilometre lost. That’s 29 times the hypothesised result, and more than 1,000-times the allowed particulate emissions from an exhaust pipe. Tyre emissions 1,000 times WORSE than exhausts, Ethan Jupp, 1 February (or 2 January)

Governments have form with this: their singular obsession with greenhouse gas emissions led them to encourage diesel engines, which emit higher levels than petrol of pollutants other than CO2 that probably cause more illness and death.

So what am I suggesting? That governments, instead of trying to identify causes of complex problems (a moving target anyway), target favourable outcomes and reward the people who reach them. When it comes to air pollution, then, rather than try (and fail) to identify the worst culprits, and regulate those, government should have targeted an air pollution goal, and motivated people to achieve it. Government would then have stepped out of the tricky, divisive and futile role of trying to stipulate how that goal could be best achieved, and who is best placed to achieve it. Government is too monolithic, too unwieldy and too fixed in its ways to come up with the diverse, adaptive approaches that we need to solve complex social and environmental problems.

A Social Policy Bond regime aiming at reducing air pollution, or environmental depredations in general, could be the answer. Such a regime would reward the achievement of our environmental goals, without specifying how those goals shall be achieved nor who shall achieve them. To see how the Social Policy Bond concept can be applied to environmental problems see here.

Targeting air pollution as a whole, rather than its more visible but less lethal components, would be an improvement over current policy. But perhaps an even better approach would be to target a range of broad indicators of health: see my essay here.