A new European Environmental Agency report about pollution levels in 2012 just came in. And this may interest my fellow country residents:

Luxembourg is Europe’s ozone pollution beast of 2012!

From the 11 countries that breached air pollution limits, it is Luxembourg that was among the worst, exceeding the ceiling for non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC) as the only European country, and exceeding the mono-nitrogen oxides(NOx) threshold by more than 50%.

NMVOC is a measure for indoor air pollution or smog, while NOx is a compound that arises due combustion (e.g. a measure of pollution through traffic). Both NMVOC and NOx react together nicely to form ozone, and you can check out this post to know what they do to you. And I can tell you: You won’t like what you will find…

However, the good news is that this breach of the regulatory limits occurred only in Luxembourg city. Then again, the bad news are that one-out-of-five of Luxembourg’s residents live in Luxembourg city, and there are roughly 360,000 cross-border workers daily, a large part of them also work in Luxembourg city.

So the solution is obvious: Make driving into Luxembourg city more expensive. This increases incentives to take the train from train stations close-by.The question is: Who really wants that? Is the public transport system up to the task? And when are we going to see a useful and clear response from the politicians that are supposed to deal with this issue?