It is something of an incongruous situation when a country that has switched over to imported energy through an interconnector to the European grid and which has transformed its generation from heavy fuel oil to natural gas to have still recorded the European Union’s highest increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

It may be strange but that is exactly what happened in Malta over the course of last year, when CO2 emissions rose by a staggering 12.8 per cent.

Something is clearly not adding up. Imported energy such as that through the interconnector has no direct effect on the emissions figures in the importing country, only on the country that generates and exports the electricity.

Coupled with that, the use of natural gas for local energy production should have seen Malta’s emissions levels decrease dramatically.

One possibility is that the government has been using the now Chinese-owned BWSC power plant more than we know. Before the new LNG-fuelled power plant had been commissioned, it was reported that Enemalta had made liberal use of the BWSC plant, even though it had once upon a time been dubbed a ‘cancer and asthma factory’ by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.

It has also been postulated that it is the ever-dramatic increase in automobiles that has led to the increase in pollution. Cue last Friday’s figures from the National Statistics Office that on average 33 new vehicles are being added to the country’s fleet every day.

But it is not only the amount of cars on the road that seem to be the problem, but also the amount of time that those cars are spent idling in traffic jams and in slow moving traffic, which increases exhaust exponentially.

In the meantime, doctors have said that patients suffering from respiratory ailments are on a constant increase, while studies on respiratory ailments and their incidence in Malta are very few and far between.

Writing in our sister daily newspaper this week, former Prime Minister Alfred Sant bemoaned the fact that information about the incidence of asthma in Malta is hard to come by. He said that all the information he could find was a report from the 1960s, a report from two to three years ago saying that the incidence of asthma was 2.5 times higher than in Sicily, and an international study ranking countries on the incidence of asthma.

This issue, especially considering Malta’s shocking increase in CO2 emissions, certainly warrants looking into but despite a number of reports on the issue, over the last week there has been no reaction from the authorities whatsoever. That is curious considering the fact that Malta has outstripped all its European peers last year in Co2 emissions increases.

Perhaps the government is reticent to admit that the traffic congestion problem plaguing the country is more than a mere ‘perception’ as the minister formerly in charge of roads, Joe Mizzi, had famously said.

Medical practitioners have also suggested to this newspaper that the figures on respiratory ailments that are being reported are actually far lower than the reality of the situation.

With so many areas of the country suffering dangerous levels of PM10 pollution by traffic emissions, which settles in the bronchi and lungs and causes a range of health problems, answers about the situation are now of national importance. 

Those answers are required from the environment minister and/or the Environment and Resources Authority. We have no choice but to breathe the air around us and the people have every right to demand that that air is clean.

After all, it would be a great pity if the anti-pollution measures provided by natural gas, the only tangible upside to the new power station, and the interconnector were to be foiled simply because so much of the country is stuck in traffic so much of the time.