Excessive diesel car usage cause severe atmospheric hazard in Paris

Paris has been hit by the worst kind of atmospheric pollution in seven years with unseasonably warm, windless days and cold clear nights which has covered Northern France with a sheet of warm air.

All public transport has been declared free until Sunday in Paris, Rouen and Caen Even the Velib. Short-term-hire bikes which fathered the Boris Bikes in London have been declared free to minimize public transport in France.

Long usage of diesel-powered car in France and minuscule particles of pollution have all contributed in accumulating pollution in France. 60 per cent of Paris is dependent on diesel cars as in the 1960s, French government and industry made a strategic decision that diesel engines were less polluting and would gradually supersede petrol. Big car companies Renault and Peugeot-Citroen invested heavily in diesel engines. Diesel fuel was taxed less heavily than petrol and it continues to do so.

The level of official “pollution alert” – 80 microgrammes of tiny particles for every cubic metre of air – has been exceeded each day since Wednesday in 30 départements (counties) across northern France.

Visibility is all time low and how the bikers will be able to detect their path in the road is hard to fathom. In Paris it is near summer weather with daffodils gleaming, in the Tuileries gardens. Women were wearing summer dresses. The sky has turned a smudgy grey and the Eiffel Tower, and the skyscrapers in the La Défense office ghetto west of the city had been wrapped in yellow haze.

France has been aware for nearly two decades about its mistake on diesel engines being more polluting. But Successive governments have not issued anything against the French car-makers asking them to do away from diesel engines or to increase taxes on the diesel fuel used by two out of three motorists.

EU is dealing strongly with France as the growing atmospheric pollution has caused 40,000 premature  deaths and the government has to break free of the motorists’ lobbies, to give the people of France a better environment.