Evening Standard comment: Let’s keep winning the pollution fight | Where’s the jobs plan?

London is suffering from hot, sleepless nights, sweaty days and the prospect of a drenching in thunderstorms.

The heatwave has been long and extreme but there are compensations. A glance at the website of the London Air Quality Network shows that the city’s pollution levels are lower than they would have been in baking weather like this before emissions controls began to have an effect.

The clarity of the early days of lockdown — a time when cities around the planet found themselves freed from smog — has gone as traffic has returned.

But pollution today in London from nitrogen dioxide — the harmful, invisible chemical compound created when fuels such as diesel are burned — is still forecast to be low.

The battle to improve the city’s air quality isn’t over — but ground has been gained.

That’s also true in the national and global fight on carbon emissions. In 1991 Britain emitted a peak of just over 600 million tonne equivalents of carbon dioxide. Last year, despite more travel, more people and a bigger economy, the figure was just over 350. We don’t have data for 2020, but lockdown will have sent the number plunging.

Technology is helping win the fight. Windfarms have replaced coal mines. Modern jet planes are more efficient than the glorious but dirty 747s which have now been pulled from the skies. Electric cars are becoming a familiar sight.

But can this progress be sustained? There are depressing signs that Britain has shifted from public transport to car use.

The roads are almost as busy as they were before Covid, while clean trains are often empty.

Londoners are cycling a lot more but they are driving, too. It’s understandable — and it’s what, until recently, the Government called on people to do.

But for the long-term good we need to find greener ways to travel. Otherwise progress in improving air quality and carbon emissions will go into reverse — and the last thing we need now is more bad news.

Where’s the jobs plan?

Some things you can’t predict. Others you can. A massive rise in unemployment as the coronavirus catastrophe hits is one of the things we know is coming.

After all, jobs are already going fast and that’s before the end of the furlough scheme this autumn.

So it’s shocking how little is being done to prepare for this. At the start of lockdown the Government was nimble and creative, keeping businesses alive and people in work.

But we don’t hear as much now from the Chancellor, who seems to have cut back on his artful photo opportunities. The Prime Minister has gone to Herefordshire today to be seen wearing a hard hat on a construction site, but that isn’t going to help anyone.

Where’s the policy substance? Where’s the creativity to make talk of apprenticeships for every young person who wants one a reality? What’s being done to support more part-time working until economic demand returns? Why don’t we support a new generation of volunteering, to keep people occupied if jobs can’t be found?

The test of a government is how it copes with national disaster. This is a test the Prime Minister cannot afford to fail.

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