Toxic air and toxic politicians

Last weekend, Parisians voted to triple parking fees for SUVs in a bid to remove some of the city's more polluting vehicles. It's just one of many policy ideas that are being tested out in European cities to clean up the air we breathe — but how bad is the problem really, and can we really fix it? This week we ring up Oliver Lord from the Clean Cities Campaign to find out. We're also talking about the exhausting antics of Viktor Orbán and some juicy Italian art theft allegations.

This week's Inspiration Station offerings: 'Mrs Mohr Goes Missing' by Maryla Szymiczkowa, and The European Tree of the Year 2024.

You can find a video of Vittorio Sgarbi's eyebrow-raising interview on the best account on Twitter, Crazy Ass Moments in Italian Politics.

Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/europeanspodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠leaving us a review⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or giving us five stars on Spotify.

Many thanks to our friends at Outside/In for featuring our Oatly mini-series recently. You can find their show ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.

00:22 Coming soon, a podcast entirely about disturbing European children's songs

03:32 Good Week: Ukraine's €50 billion aid deal

12:01 Bad Week: From culture minister to art thief?

37:44 The Inspiration Station: Mrs Mohr Goes Missing and The European Tree of The Year 2024

40:49 Happy Ending: Hooray for the HPV vaccine

Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak

Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak

Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Threads⁠⁠⁠ |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠hello@europeanspodcast.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION - 00’22”

KATY: Hi, Dominic.

DOMINIC: Hi, Katy.

K: So. you know how last week on the podcast I asked listeners to write in with examples of disturbing children's songs and their native languages?

D: Yeah.

K: Boy, did they deliver? I think we could turn The Europeans into a podcast that is just about creepy European children's songs. Turns out it's a rich niche.

D: Move over Eurovision, make way for the European Creepy Children's Song Contest. My favourite was from a Croatian listener who wrote in with a story about a really disturbing sounding song from her childhood called ‘Bila Mama Kukunka’. And it's about a family walking by the Nile whose kid gets snatched by a crocodile. And then the parents negotiate with the crocodile so that the crocodile doesn't eat their baby.

K: It's about a hostage crisis.

D: Yeah, sounds awful.

[SOUND CLIP]

K: My favourite one came from Hungary. It's called ‘Katalinka szállj el’, or ‘Fly away, ladybug’. 

D: Sounds delightful. 

K: It SOUNDS lovely. It's one of several still popular children's songs that make references to the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, so, you know, a few hundred years ago. Zita wrote in to describe how the song goes through several ways in which the Turks are going to torture this ladybug. And apparently it ends with the words, ‘Go now, the Turks are almost here, they will shoot you dead.’ 

[SOUND CLIP]

Zita writes: ‘This song is usually sung to babies and toddlers and accompanied by playfully imitating the various torture methods with the baby’. 

D: Goodness.

K: It’s lovely.

D: Racist AND torturous. 

K: Honestly, these emails are making me laugh so hard just because they’re just so deranged. Thank you listeners, I'm enjoying these immensely, keep them coming. Hello [at] europeanspodcast.com. But aside from creepy children’s songs, what are we talking about this week, Dominic?

D: Well, last weekend, there was a referendum in your hometown of Paris I believe, Katy.

K: There was.

D: To triple parking costs for SUVs in the city. The referendum was part of the Parisian mayor's plan to improve the air quality of this dirty city, and it got us thinking about air quality more broadly in Europe's cities. And sorry to break it to all you European city-dwellers out there, but it turns out a lot of us are living in cities with very poor quality air. According to the Clean Cities Campaign, 300,000 Europeans die each year due to air pollution, which is an extraordinary number.

K: That's a figure so depressing it feels like we should make a children's song about it.

D: Bleak. So this week, we're calling up one of those clean city campaigners, Oliver Lord, to find out why it is so bad and what can be done to improve our air quality. That's coming up later on in the show. But first, Katy and I are going to hand out the hotly contested accolades of Good Week and Bad Week.

03’32” - GOOD WEEK 

D: Who are you handing Good Week to this week?

K: I'm gonna give a good week to the EU for managing to agree on a deal to send 50 billion euros in aid to Ukraine, in spite of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, behaving like a colossal idiot-head until the very last minute and threatening to veto the whole thing. 

D: I like your use of diplomatic language there. 

K: I don't know if that's allowed. Oh, well, I've said it now. 

D: I imagine we'll talk a bit more about Idiot Head in a minute. But this is money that really matters for the Ukrainian government, right? 

K: Yeah, for sure. So this is not money for weapons for the war, the EU's funding to help the Ukrainian military fight back against Russia has been coming out of a separate pot. This money is for keeping the country running in a more normal kind of way. It's for paying Ukrainian teachers, keeping hospitals open, paying people's pensions. And those kinds of things are getting more and more difficult for the Ukrainian government to do as this brutal and very expensive war drags on. The other bit of context is that there is this big question mark hanging over the extent of US support for Ukraine, especially as the likelihood of a second Trump presidency seems to be growing into a more and more real prospect. Yikes. 

D: Woop woop.

K: So given all of that, yeah, it's really really good news that this money is finally going to be heading to Ukraine. The government says it's expecting to get the first payment next month.

D: And why was Orbán vetoing this aid in the first place? Is it just to, like, please Putin?

K: Well yeah, I mean this is one of the big things. It is not a secret that Orbán is Vladimir Putin's best friend within the EU. They were literally photographed shaking hands last year. And Orbán has been very eager to maintain a close economic relationship between Hungary and Russia, especially when it comes to buying Russian gas and oil. And as part of this fairly Russia-friendly position, Orbán has repeatedly done stuff to undermine the EU's unified position of helping Ukraine. He has refused to allow weapons for Ukraine to be transported across Hungary’s border, he has repeatedly spoken out against EU sanctions on Russia. But this isn't just about Orbán’s closeness with Putin. As always, Viktor Orbán is playing a strategic game and he's trying to extract something that he wants. And the thing that he wants in this case is the billions of euros of EU funding for Hungary that has been frozen because of all the ways in which Orbán has steadily worked to dismantle Hungarian democracy since he came to office: undermining the independence of the courts, subjecting minorities like the LGBTQ community to horrible discrimination, just to name a couple of things. More than 30 billion euros of EU funding to Hungary was frozen in 2022, and this was seen as a really big deal at the time. It really felt like this moment when the EU was finally saying, “No, you will not get away with this. The EU is a union of democracies, and you can't keep taking its money if you're going to turn your country into something that looks more and more like a dictatorship.” Orbán was naturally furious about this huge amount of money that his government needs being taken away from his budget. And since then, his difficult relationship with the EU has become even more difficult. And that is largely because he can use this threat of vetoing things as a bargaining chip to try and get this money unfrozen. So this 50 billion aid deal for Ukraine, Orbán had actually vetoed it already back in December. And he was open at the time about the fact that he was doing it to try and get Hungary’s money released. He told Hungarian state radio at the time, you know, “This is a great opportunity for Hungary to assert itself and get what it deserves.”

D: And did he do that? Did he manage to persuade the EU to give him what he wanted? 

K: No. So just to be clear, that is not what's happened here. He hasn't dropped his veto because the EU have just said, “Okay, we give in, you can have all of the money that's been frozen.” And EU leaders have been really keen to stress that they haven't released the funds, this is Orbán backing down of his own accord. And that is why I want to give Good Week to the EU really, because let's face it, I mean this system that we have, where individual governments can veto big joint decisions – it does give Orbán outsized power to get what he wants. But in this case, the rest of the EU has actually been playing pretty tough with him. Over the past couple of weeks, there's been quite a lot of unnamed European diplomats dropping hints in the media that they were thinking about triggering this thing called Article 7, which would mean kicking Hungary out of the EU voting process. So, quite an extreme thing to do. And there's also this weird article that you might have seen in the Financial Times a few days ago, about this supposedly secret plan to tank Hungary's economy if Orbán didn't back down on the Ukraine deal. Which looks like it might have been strategically leaked to lay on the pressure, ut who can tell. So yeah, the EU has definitely been coming back at Orbán’s threats with its own threats. But there does also seem to have been this more kind of friendly charm offensive happening in parallel, this effort to make Orbán feel flattered and listened to. And two leaders in particular seem to have been key in getting Orbán to change his mind. One of them was Emmanuel Macron, the French President seems to have been doing his usual thing of spending lots of time wining and dining a fellow leader and trying to convince them to come around to everyone else's position. It doesn't always work when Macron does this – you'll probably remember all of that time he spent hanging out with Putin before the war, which came to nothing. But I do think it's a quality that we'll miss in Macron when he's gone, this effort that he puts into getting everyone on the same page. The other leader who seems to have played a key role in getting Orbán to come around is the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is of course probably the most prominent far-right leader in Europe right now. But weirdly, in this situation that seems to have played in the EU's favour. Politico and some other Brussels news outlets have been quoting anonymous diplomats saying that actually, the fact that Meloni has quite similar politics to Orbán, that really helped her to convince him to play ball. So Meloni’s also had a pretty good week, it has to be said. She's come out of this looking like a serious power broker.

D: I thought the EU did compromise on some things. 

K: Yes, well, officially Orbán did manage to extract some changes to the Ukraine deal so that he could walk away looking like he'd won something. But they're pretty small things. I mean, he said that he wanted the right to veto this aid deal every following year for the next four years. He hasn't achieved that. There might be a review of the aid deal in two years’ time, but it might not even happen. He also won this reference in the deal to Hungary's frozen funding. It says that the EU has to be fair and impartial in the way that it assesses whether or not Hungary is in breach of the rule of law and should therefore have its funding frozen. And the Hungarian government does seem to be pleased about having that restated explicitly. But really, Orban doesn't seem to have accomplished all that much.

D: So not that great a week for Orbán, then. 

K: Not a great week for Orbán, and I do think this was genuinely a good week for managing to stop him from getting in the way of the EU presenting a united front on Ukraine. But as usual, there's another way of looking at these things. And you could argue that ultimately, it's not been a bad week for Orbán because he succeeded, yet again, in making this whole thing about him. Like, he managed to drag all of these European leaders back to Brussels to vote on this aid deal that would have been approved a month ago if it wasn't for him. And everyone had to spend time listening to him and flattering him. Like, I think there was this really palpable sense of, “We're all wasting our time because of your posturing and game playing.” So definitely a good week for the EU. But also, I think, ultimately, not a terrible week for Mr. Idiot Head.

D: Yeah. And also, I mean, I saw a lot of people on Twitter saying, “Oh, Orbán rolling over again, like he always does.” But then immediately, like just mere days later, he was continuing to be the final country to block Sweden joining NATO and his MPs boycotted a session in the Hungarian Parliament called by the opposition parties to ratify Sweden's membership of NATO. So he goes from one veto to another and I don't know how much we can really celebrate it.

K: There's no end to his game-playing. 

D: Yeah.

K: It must be exhausting being Viktor Orbán. 

D: Oh, I think he gets a thrill, I think he gets a kick out of being the person that everyone's trying to persuade all the time. Classic narcissist.

K: Classic narcissist! Who has had a bad week?

BAD WEEK - 12”01”

D: I'm giving bad week to Vittorio Sgarbi, an Italian kunior culture minister who resigned this week following accusations that he owns a piece of stolen art and illegally exported another masterpiece. 

K: Naughty naughty, I don't know anything about this story, I'm excited for you to fill me in. 

D: Yeah, it's quite a naughty thing for a culture minister to be accused of. But it's not the first time Sgarbi has been caught up in a public scandal. He went viral just last year actually, for getting into a fistfight with a writer on live TV.

K: Oh, my goodness! 

D: He is 71 years old. He's a famous art critic, a television personality and a former pal of Silvio Berlusconi. He's held many political positions, and this resignation is by no means the first time he's had to step away from a political position before his term is up. Notably, he was removed as mayor of Salemi in 2012, for failing to acknowledge mafia interferences in his cabinet. He's a very big character who seems very free to say whatever pops into his head, however strange that thought may be – I'll come back to that in a bit. But first, I'll tell you a bit more about these specific allegations, shall I?

K: Please. 

D: Well, the allegations first emerged in a television programme from the Italian broadcaster RAI, it's an investigative TV show called Report. And the allegations are now being further investigated by prosecutors. They centre around a 17th century painting by Rutilio Manetti, depicting the capture of St. Peter. This painting was reported as stolen from a castle in 2013. And the allegation isn't only that he owns this stolen painting, but also that he was involved in altering the painting in order to create confusion around the painting’s provenance.

K: Oooh, dodgy. 

D: So there's actually a candle that's appeared in the top corner of this painting, which the TV investigators say wasn't originally there. 

K: So the idea is to say like, “Oh, this is, you know, it's not a copy, but it's maybe like a different study of the same painting”, or something like that? 

D: Yeah, so actually, what he says is that the painting that was stolen from the castle was not the original – that's a copy, and he owns the original with the candle. And that he found that in a villa that he was restoring for his mother more than 20 years ago. 

K: Okay. 

D: So yeah, and there's further suspicion because the owner of the castle where the painting was stolen from said on the TV show that Sgarbi’s friend visited her castle before the painting was stolen, and showed a lot of interest in this specific painting. And, like, was inquiring about it and asking, “Oh, would it be possible to buy this off you?” And another piece of suspicious information is the fact that another friend of Sgarbi’s took a painting of the capture of St Peter to a restorer with very similar damage that the painting would have had after it was cut out of its frame in the castle, which is how it was stolen. So the allegations are piling up around this painting. And that's without even going into the other separate allegation, which is around the illegal exporting of a painting worth around 5 million euros by the French artist Valentin de Boulogne. Sgarbi also denies these allegations.

K: But he did still resign as junior culture minister.

D: Yes. Now, this is interesting. He did resign after resisting the initial calls since the TV show aired to resign. But he claims he's resigning for a completely different matter. He's resigning because of an investigation around something else. The other investigation was from an antitrust authority, and it's around a conflict of interest ruling due to him giving an art lecture series. So he's being accused of breaking ministerial codes for accepting money for non-ministerial duties. So he's found a much more bureaucratic reason for resigning than being investigated for stolen art.

K: It's a lot more boring, isn't it?

D: It's a lot more boring. And I think in his mind, it keeps his reputation intact, because he can argue that he's resigning to preserve his freedom to carry on giving art lectures. It's a kind of cleaner narrative.

K: As an esteemed expert, rather than as a naughty thief man.

D: Yeah, exactly. But I actually haven't even got to the most extraordinary part of the story, which is the totally bonkers interview he gave to the TV investigative journalists at Rai. There are so many extraordinary quotes from this interview when he was confronted with the allegations, but I'll give you a few of them. He said to the journalists on camera, among other things: “I hope you have a car accident and drive to your death.”

K: Woah! 

[SOUND CLIP]

D: Excuse the bad language coming up. “Stop screwing with me, you shithead.” 

K: Shithead, that's what I should have called Orbán.

D: It is, yeah. “Now I'll pull my dick out so you can air it on Report. 

K: Oh.

D: And he started unzipping his trousers.

K: This man was a minister? 

D: Yes. 

K: Okay. 

D: He then said, “I hope you broadcast everything.” So quite extreme, but perhaps unsurprising that he wasn't like backed up by the senior culture minister. His resignation has been accepted by Italy's far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who was away in Tokyo when the news came in to strengthen the strategic partnership between Italy and Japan. But yeah, bad week for Vittorio Sgarbi. And I wouldn't be surprised if Meloni is also pleased that he's gone actually.

K: That interview appearance really has the ring of somebody that is not planning to ever come back to politics, doesn't it?

D: Yeah, well, but it's Italian politics. So like, maybe it hasn't even touched the surface of unacceptable politician behaviour. I really recommend you check out one of my favourite Twitter accounts, Crazy Ass Moments in Italian Politics – 

K: Great account.

D: it's a really good account, you can see the whole video of this bonkers interview.

K: Can't wait.

* * * 

K: We are, as ever, very grateful to the listeners who send a little bit of money our way each month so that we can keep making this podcast. And this week a big juicy thank you goes to the following people for signing up: Barbara and Luis, Amba, Inez, Regan, Maia, Marta, Doug, and Sergio for increasing his donations.

D: Thank you all so much. If you also value what we're doing then please consider donating at patreon.com/europeanspodcast. You can donate from as little as two smackers a month.

K: Time for a quick ad from our friends at Outside/In.

[SOUND CLIP]

INTERVIEW WITH OLIVER LORD - 20’05”

D: So I hear you're amongst the 6% of Parisians who decided to go out and vote in this weekend's referendum. 

K: Yeah, a bit of a disappointing turnout, it has to be said.

D: Yeah. 

K: There's been a couple of these local referendums in Paris over the past year or so, and I cannot say they've been a wild democratic success. But for me, voting in France is quite exciting, because I've only been a French voting citizen for a couple of years. So I was very proud to drop my little envelope in the box and hear the election person say, “A voté !” She’s voted! Still gives me a little thrill. 

D: So weird that they do that. 

K: It's kind of unnecessary, but it's nice. It gives it a sense of occasion. But what was this referendum about? Well, the people of Paris – or 6% of them, anyway – we're voting on whether or not we should massively increase the parking charges for people who drive SUV cars, SUVs being sports utility vehicles, these bigger, heavier and more polluting cars that have become super popular, actually, in recent years. I didn't know this before the referendum, but apparently 40% of new cars sold in France today are SUVs. Crazy, no? 

D: Crazy. 

K: So yeah, the size of the average car passing through Paris has got higher thanks to the popularity of SUVs. Some of them are not actually that big, but some of them are absolute beasts, not much smaller than the tractors that have been blocking the roads of late. But yeah, 55% of people voted to triple the parking fees for SUVs, which have bigger engines and are more polluting. So this will hopefully result in fewer SUV owners driving into town and fewer people who commute into Paris by car every day, buying them in the first place. So I've been thinking a lot in the run-up to this referendum about these kinds of policies and about how we can use policies to make the air cleaner in our cities. You know, I love living in the city. But especially now that I'm a parent, and I am subjecting my baby to breathing in this air every day, it's really on my mind, like how can we fix this? So this week, we wanted to talk to someone about how we fix this. How can we use policies to get cleaner air for our cities? And producer Wojciech knew of the perfect people to ask about this, the Clean Cities Campaign. They're a group who campaign for cleaner city transport across Europe. And we spoke to their UK campaign chief Oliver Lord.

K: Oli, thank you so much for joining us.

OLIVER: Very welcome. Nice to meet you.

K: Nice to have you here. We just had a vote here in Paris over the weekend on whether to make the owners of SUVs pay loads of money for parking in a bid to deter them from coming here in the first place. It's maybe a stupid question to start with, but how much of the blame for the rubbish air quality in many of our cities is due to cars? Like, presumably cars aren't the only factor, but are they the main culprits of the horrible air I’m breathing here in Paris? 

O: Yeah, well, you're definitely not breathing very nice air in Paris, and in fact, most of the major cities across Europe. Many of them actually still breach legal limits that were meant to be met back in 2010, believe it or not. So here where I am in London, we're still breaching it; Paris is monstrous. And Milan as well is another big culprit. There's obviously a lot of science to throw at this, you know, it kind of depends on the type of pollutant you're talking about. So, broadly speaking, in the cities, especially, there's like two that we’re really bothered about. One's called nitrogen dioxide, which is this transparent gas. And then there's particulate matter, which in a nutshell is like really tiny particles that are so small that they can get into your bloodstream. And there's different sources of that pollution. Ultimately, you can kind of boil a lot of it down to, “Let's just stop burning things.” And that, you know, relates very much to the combustion engine that we see so prominent in how we get around. So the short answer is yes, cars are roughly, half the problem might be coming from road transport or cars. But it really does depend also where you are in the city as well. 

D: So this dirty city air that I'm breathing in, what kind of damage is actually doing to our health?

O: It's nasty stuff, really, I mean, the health evidence over the past decade has just mounted and mounted, to the extent now scientists are saying it could pretty much affect every organ in our body. There have been scientific reports looking at children, for example, growing up in the East End of London, and their smaller lungs, their lungs are stunted when you compare them to test cases elsewhere. And then there's also the elderly. So you know, it is effectively shortening the lives of people because it's causing a myriad of diseases and illnesses that effectively take people out, unfortunately.

K: Yeah, I find that quite hard to hear as a new parent who has just brought a person into the world and I'm now subjecting them to the air here.

O: Yeah, I can imagine it's tough. And you know, a starting point if you've got a young child or indeed if you're going through pregnancy is just to avoid some of the busiest roads in these cities.

D: So let's talk about how we can fix this. With the Clean Cities Campaign, you developed some steps for achieving better air quality in cities. Could you tell us some of the things that cities could be doing to clean up their air?

O: When we look across Europe, we as a campaign have been seeing the growing trend for low emission zones in cities. In fact, we estimate there'll be roughly about 500 of them in the next couple of years, which is quite remarkable. And these are basically schemes put in place by city leaders to discourage the use of older, more polluting vehicles. They're especially targeted towards diesel cars as well, because we've gotten a real rut of having encouraged diesel for quite a considerable amount of time, and then subsequently finding out how dangerous it is to our health. Although at the time, we were pushing it from a climate perspective, because you do burn less fuel through diesel combustion. And I would also point to cities that are rolling out electric buses, as well. We’re seeing huge rollout now of those in cities across Europe, because they make a huge gain for the climate, and they make huge gains for our health. And I would also throw in just helping people to be able to cycle and walk around their cities, much more than we ever have done before, making it safe, convenient. At the same time, then, you get cleaner air, and it kind of starts to be in a self-fulfilling prophecy of cleaner air, more people cycle, more people enjoy it, everyone's healthier, you know?

K: Can I just ask you to expand on the low emission zones a bit? Like, how does that work? Is it about making those cars pay more to be in the middle of the city?

O: Yeah, that's exactly right. It kind of depends on which city you're in. So for example, in London, there's actually a couple of tiers of like, what you'd have to pay, like kind of the polluter pays principle. So because you're driving a more dirty car, you're gonna have to pay towards the social and economic costs of that. And then in other cities, they kind of go a bit more hardline, and they're kind of like, “None of these cars are allowed.” And you'd have to pay quite a significant fine if you caught in the zone. And they've gradually got bigger over time and the standards have gradually got tighter, to the extent that in fact, in Amsterdam, Dominic, eventually they're talking about a zero emission zone. So you can only actually drive vehicles that don't have any combustion engines at all.

D: Yeah, it's a big debate. We'll see if that happens. It probably will eventually, it'll have to.

K: I mean, we've seen in Paris previously the huge difference that local politicians can make to life in a city by changing their transport policies, and the infrastructure around Paris. So for example, down by the River Seine, there used to be this huge, horrible road and the mayor turned it into what is now this lovely pedestrian area where people get to walk and run and hang out and play music instead of breathing in car fumes. Do you have a particular favourite example of a specific city policy that's been bought in and made that city feel a lot cleaner and more enjoyable?

O: Well, I'm afraid you've just kind of taken it from me. I do love that, I do love going along the Seine. And it's just inspirational, isn't it, that like, we built all these urban motorways in the 1960s. And there was quite a bit of pushback, frankly, because I think things would have been even a lot worse. And the, you know, if we think about that example, in Paris, it started off effectively as a trial with like, car-free days. And thet sort of looked to New York. And that's another one for me, the summer streets principle they have there, when they start to close down parts of Broadway and stuff, and people can cycle and walk around without any cars. That kind of inspired Paris and Paris potentially inspired New York as well. And then most recently, I think of Budapest, and what is known as the Chain Bridge, which was a very old bridge in the city that kind of unites the two parts of the city. And it had to be closed for sort of engineering work and all that sort of stuff. But there was a huge campaign just to basically keep it shut, ou know, “This is the place that everyone wants to be and loves – why do we have all this traffic funnelling along it?” I'd recommend Googling that one as a case study, because I'm hoping that we'll take some inspiration from Budapest, here in London. because we've got the same issue in London now. London's bridges are falling down, and we're having to do something about it. And you know, frankly there isn't a blank cheque to fix them all. So we're gonna have to think about some other routes.

K: It is really crazy when you go down to the Seine now you see the old road markings. And it's just so unbelievable. Like, one of the most beautiful places in the city, we were just giving up to cars. It feels like madness now.

O: I hope they keep it as a reminder, to be honest. Like, you walk along there, you see the bit of history underneath your feet. 

D: To celebrate 750 years of Amsterdam, they're going to be turning the big ring road, they're going to be shutting it down for Amsterdam's birthday completely and having parties on the ring road.

K: Love that.

D: Maybe that's one that we could try and persuade to happen. 

O: That sounds great, when’s the birthday? 

D: That's in October 2050. 

K: Oh, so quite –  

D: No, 2025, sorry! 2025.

O: I’ll have a look, because I’ve got to send that round our network, definitely.

D: You've talked in the past about how air pollution disproportionately affects the less economically privileged. Why is that the case? And what can we do about that? 

O: Well, I suppose to some extent, historically, people of lower incomes are more likely to live in more polluted areas, the housing is cheaper, that would be an example. I'm sorry to talk about London a bit, it’s just where I am. But if you think about the makeup of the city, the, generally speaking more affluent parts of the city were in the west, and it's partly because of the way the wind blows. And actually all the pollution would blow across the city to the east, and no one really wanted to be there as much. And they put a lot of the industry there. And the same plays out in other cities such as Paris and Berlin. The previous charity I was working at did some research, not only about the income of households, but also the colour of your skin, frankly. So we looked at where people of colour are more likely to live in the city. And it turns out that compared to areas where white people are most likely to live, that they're breathing about a third more of this dangerous pollutant that I was talking about earlier, nitrogen dioxide. And then there's also, we have to think about who's the most vulnerable when it comes to air pollution as well. And it's children. And it's the elderly. And I would put those in this sort of social injustice bracket, because the kids and the elderly are not the ones that are kind of causing all this pollution in the first place, and they have very little say, in the matter, as well, you know? I’m afraid Katy, your kid couldn’t go out and vote in the Paris referendum last night, but I'm sure they'd love to.

K: Yeah, and it was quite interesting, there was quite a sharp east-west divide in terms of, the west of Paris voted very pro-car, and over here in the more polluted east, people were much more in favour of making the SUVs pay loads of money for parking. I mean, in theory, the sale of cars with any kind of internal combustion engine – so, cars that run on fossil fuels – they are supposed to be entirely banned in Europe by 2035. That is only a decade away. Are you hopeful that that can actually happen?

O: I am confident it will happen. I think we also just need to make sure we address all the issues that come with it, you know. People are talking about “range anxiety”, you know – “I need like a battery, that's going to take me 400 miles, or I need a charger on my doorstep”. We need to try and de-myth that as well. You know, most people are gonna have to charge their car maybe every couple of weeks. But unless we get actions such as that we're seeing in the cities like Paris or London and Milan, you know – and Amsterdam, actually, it’s one of the leaders here – talking about where they want their cities to be in the future, then I think that will help drive the market as well. 

K: It is quite easy to feel helpless when it comes to fixing a problem like air pollution that is largely in the hands of these people who make our policies. I mean, for listeners who are eager to do something and make a difference, what practical advice can you offer in terms of stuff they can do, as individuals?

O: I will start with: buy a bike. It's a great investment, I don't think you can go wrong. And you'd be surprised at how easy is to kind of get back on the saddle if you if you learned as a kid. But start in the park, get used to it and then just creep out and go to the local shop. And before you know it you're cycling to work, like I started to do about 10 years ago. And I haven't really looked back, partly because you’re saving a lot of money in the process, and you’re also not having to go to the gym as much. I would also say if you're a car owner and driver then looking back on your like receipts from last year, just start to add up how much money you're spending on that car, and maybe play some scenarios out in terms of like, “Well if I didn't have the car last year, but I used their local car rental service when I did that long trip, and I actually take the bus and I've bought a bike and and all this stuff” – just think about how much money it might actually be able to save. And I would also say. please, please, please, if your local council or councillor is doing something decent in your neighbourhood, you know, they’re planting a tree, they might just be putting in a new bus stop, who knows? Pop them a quick email and say thanks very much. Because I can tell you from having worked in the public sector before, there's not a great deal of feedback when it comes to like some of the positive feedback that people feel but don't often express themselves as much as perhaps a minority of people who have got a very loud voice when something happens and they don't like it.

D: That's such nice advice. You're right, we should give more positive feedback to people who are doing good local things.

K: Every time we get an email from someone saying, “Nice podcast, I enjoyed that!” we nearly cry. And it's never occurred to me to send one of those to a politician.

O: There you go, that’s your challenge. That’s your challenge.

K: I'm gonna do it, Oli, thank you.

D: I'm gonna hunt for one too.

* * * 

K: Thanks so much to Oli for joining us. I was particularly interested to hear him talk about this new-ish policy of low emission zones in cities, this idea of making it more expensive for more polluting cars to come into town. Seems like a good idea, no? 

D: Yes, I think it's a great idea, I’m totally behind low emission zones. But as you are hinting at, I've had some personal beef with London's low emission zone. My family recently received two fines for driving around London with our Dutch car – that is compliant to the Ultra Low Emission Zone. But we received fines in total for 7000 euros.

K: What did your father-in-law say when he got that letter?

D: Well, as I think as you can understand, there’s quite a lot of anxiety and stress for quite a long time when you receive a fine for 7000 euros.

K: Knowing that you don't deserve that fine, right? 

D: Well, at the time, we didn't know, we were a bit confused because it's – the information is so vague. And the letter we received, I actually thought it was phishing, when I first got it because, it was like… Weirdly, it had the Transport for London logo, but it didn't say Transport for London anywhere. And it was telling us to pay money to an account in Germany. So it was really weird. We eventually worked out our car was definitely compliant, as we had worked out when we were driving around. But we were being fined because we hadn't registered our car into Transport for London's system, which is something you should do two weeks before driving to London, if you have a European car. That's a public service announcement for everyone. But 7000 euros is a huge fine for not having registered your car in something that wasn't really clear we had to register in. And yeah, it caused a huge amount of stress. And it's become quite a big news story, because it's being reported by The Guardian that hundreds of thousands of EU-based vehicles have been fined like this. And that with fining these people and getting all these vehicles’ addresses, there may have been an enormous data protection breach. So Transport for London and the debt collectors, Euro Parking Collection, might be in some trouble. And they're being accused of treating European drivers in London as cash cows. Anyway, I thought it was worth mentioning as a reminder that yes, this is a great policy idea for air quality, and I'm really behind it. But policymakers need to be careful how they implement these policies and don't make it so that it's going to ruin people's lives. Because we spent weeks being stressed about this and not knowing whether our appeal was going to work. The fines were eventually dropped, but I bet some people paid, because their letter was quite threatening. And that makes me so sad and angry that they would use this policy, which has such good and important reasons behind it, and not use it responsibly. So yeah, make sure you register your car with Transport for London before driving there, if you're driving from Europe. And Transport for London, please do better.

K: Get it together, Transport for London!

THE INSPIRATION STATION - 37’44” 

D: Time to roll into the inspiration station and hear about some cultural goodies from Europe. What would you like to share this week, Katy?

K: I'm going to continue with last week's trend of Polish recommendations and give you another one. This recommendation comes from dAVIDE and it's for novel this time, “Mrs Mohr Goes Missing” by Maryla Szymiczkowa. Interestingly, Szymiczkowa is not a real author. She is the pen name of two gay men who write crime novels together, a married couple. And we actually interviewed half of this couple on the podcast a few years ago, Jacek Dehnel. 

D: Oh yeah! 

K: Yeah! But it wasn't really an interview about his books. We did ask a question about what it's like to write jointly with your husband. But the interview was mostly about LGBT rights in Poland. So I'm very happy, a good few years later, to feature a recommendation for one of Jacek’s books, because Davide happens to have really enjoyed it recently. He goes too far as to say he is obsessed with it, in fact. Davide says: “Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing” is a classic murder mystery novel set in end-of-19th-century Poland. The sleuth is a haughty woman belonging to the middle class, and it is so refreshing and new in that she is not instantly likeable. She struggles with her ambitions and purpose in life as a childless woman in such a traditional society. And eventually, she succeeds and finds satisfaction. The setting felt differentm I'm not very familiar with Polish history, and it's all the more interesting as Prussia back then included parts of today's Ukraine.” I've heard nothing but good things about these murder mysteries. And there's also a second novel in the series available in English. So thank you so much Davide for the reminder to put these back on my reading list. The first one is called “Mrs Mohr Goes Missing”.

D: Sounds great. 

K: What have you been enjoying? 

D: Well, I don't know if this counts as culture, but I'm gonna go with it anyway. I've been enjoying some coverage of the single most important election that takes place in 2024, the Turopean Tree Of The Year Award.

K: Oh, I love this every year. So have they actually finished voting yet? 

D: No. Voting is now open in the election and stays open until February the 22nd. I haven't voted yet but I'm considering endorsing the candidate from Latvia, the Kaņepju oak, which is the second largest oak in the Baltics, and it's still going strong despite having been split in half by lightning at one point. 

K: Love a survival story. 

D: I really recommend you head to treeoftheyear.org and browse through the superb selection of tree finalists and vote.

K: I'm just on the website now, and it says: “The European Tree of the Year is back in 2024 with new rules.” And I'm wondering this is a reference to the controversy a couple of years ago where there was like, all these allegations of rigging in the election.

D: It was rigged!

K: Yes, scandalous!

HAPPY ENDING - 40’49”

D: My happy ending this week comes from Scotland, where the public health department revealed some amazing results from a study into their vaccination programme against HPV, or the human papilloma virus. The vaccination programme has been running in schools across Scotland since 2008. And this study announces that nobody who was fully vaccinated against HPV virus in Scotland has gone on to develop cervical cancer, not a single one. 

K: That's amazing. 

D: HPV is one of those viruses that is so common that the vast majority of sexually active people who aren't vaccinated will get the virus at some point. And the success of this vaccination programme is a reminder to anyone who has children to please encourage your children to be vaccinated for HPV if it is offered in the part of the world you live in. In many parts of Europe, boys can now also be vaccinated. HPV can also lead to cancers of the throat, neck or penis. Anyway, great further proof that the HPV vaccine is a game changer and could hopefully eventually make cervical cancer a very rare disease. 

K: Yay! 

D: Well, that's all we've got time for this week. Thank you to our producers, Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak.

K: Wojciech was also responsible for a very interesting thread that we posted about translating this very podcast using artificial intelligence. Go check it out. It's on Twitter and Threads. Speaking of which, I would like to thank the generous people who have come and hung out with me on Threads so that I'm no longer alone. There are about four of us now!

D: Woop. 

K: Interestingly Francesca, who’s listening from Italy, she told me that Threads has already been and gone in Italy. Like, it was a thing but it's over already. 

D: Oh, really? You missed the boat. 

K: Come back Italians. It won't be a party without you.

D: You can also find us on Instagram where we've been pretending to be influencers the last few weeks. I'm not sure we're fooling anyone, but come and decide for yourselves. Our handle is@europeanspodcast.

K: We'll be back next week. Have a good one. 

D: Bye!

K: Do widzenia!