There shouldn’t be any argument about the need to clean up the air we breathe. Smoke, soot and very small particulates kill people, mainly by causing severe respiratory problems. The World Health Organisation suggests they are responsible for one in eight early deaths.

Coal and oil have together killed far more people than any other form of energy, and they have been allowed to get away with the damage they cause for far too long. If they were horse meat, or even out of date food, there would be a public outcry.

The Clean Air Acts in the Sixties in the UK, and in much of Europe, certainly reduced the problem and improved visibility, but only for a while. It wasn’t long before the benefits of not burning coal, wood and household waste on open fires were lost as conditions changed.

The population has doubled since then, and with it the demand for more electricity, mainly from coal and gas-fired power stations. Car ownership increased five times, with many of them diesel, as were the majority of lorries that took over from rail transport.

The result of these energy changes is that even Western Europe has made little progress in improving air quality, despite EU legislation which is currently taking the UK and ten other countries to court for not trying hard enough.

Just a few weeks ago car driving in polluted Paris involved odd number license plates one day, and evens the next, to reduce the impact. It’s no wonder, therefore, that other parts of the world are finding the struggle even more demanding.

Despite valiant efforts, with compressed natural gas being mandatory for public transport in many Asian cities, so producing fewer carbon particles and 40 per cent less CO2 than diesel, it seems to be a losing battle.

The vast increase in road transport, and the demand for more electricity, from coal fired power stations, for air conditioning and cooling computer server farms, as well as the manufacturing growth caused by demand in the west, has proved overwhelming.

Away from the cities, wood fires for cooking and the clearing of forests for timber, food growing and oil palm plantations, means that much of South East Asia is regularly blanketed in dense smoke with serious economic and health results.

Cleaning up global air could have interesting implications for the rate of climate change. Arctic sea ice and Greenland glaciers melt faster because of all the black carbon specks, but this is more than offset by the aerosols reflecting back incoming heat and keeping us from heating up too rapidly.

What a choice! We can either cough ourselves to death, or die of heat exhaustion.