Some time in late September, the Minister of Ecology, Serhiy Kurykin, made an astounding announcement: he was turning down the use of the official car allocated to him because car-based pollution levels had become so bad in Kyiv. Instead, Mr. Kurykin said, he had made a decision to walk everywhere and urged his colleagues in the Cabinet to do likewise.
It’s not known if there were any takers.
It’s not known, either, whether Mr. Kurykin himself is still pounding the pavements to work and to all his work-related meetings every day, either. The Ministry does not allow direct telephone access to its boss.
The Minister's announcement was not accompanied by any statistics, so it seemed worth finding out what numbers might drive a man in his position to walk when he could ride.
First we called the Ecology Ministry. No answer. We tried calling again and this time we were given the number of the department that deals with car pollution. We called. The person who was responsible wasn’t in that day, try tomorrow.
Meanwhile, we tried checking out a few relevant websites, just in case someone had decided that this was interesting enough for people to know. Back in the seventies, after all, you could read the daily pollution index every day, in every Canadian and American paper.
We tried the Ministry’s page at www.kmu.gov.ua. Nothing there. In fact, there were no statistics at all on this site.
We tried www.elvisti.com, a popular news portal. Nothing there.
We tried www.undp.org and www.un.org. After all, the UN has multi-million dollar projects devoted to the environment. Nothing there, either. When we talked to the UN’s information officer, Dmytro Vasyliev, he explained that their programs only tracked major environmental disasters such as floods in Zakarpattia.
We called the All-Ukrainian Ecology League and spoke with Natalia Naumenko. She was very friendly and helpful, but she recommended the Ecology Ministry because it would take her office at least four days to sort out the information and they could only start the following week.
We decided not to call DerzhKomStat, the State Statistics Committee, because they provide statistics only on a commercial basis.
We finally got through to Natalia Trofymenko, the chief specialist at the Ecology Ministry, who proved to be very cooperative. She explained that the Ministry’s statistics came from DerzhKomStat and they could provide the numbers to interested parties.
So we trotted down to her office where she gave us this very nice table. For free.
Exhaust from vehicular traffic, ’000 t
1991 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Kyiv 172.2 92.1 73.8 69.8 57.0 55.1 54.7 52.3 137.8
Ukraine 5,543.9 2,706.7 2,146.0 1,796.5 1,578.5 1,433.0 1,884.5 1,747.0 1,949.2
Source: DerzhKomStat, the State Statistics Committee
A few questions come to mind on reviewing this table.
For starters, what happened to 1992?
Next, there is a dramatic plunge in both national and Kyiv numbers from 1991 to 1993. Vehicular traffic was fairly modest to begin with under the Soviet Union, with the typical rush hour looking somewhat like 05:00 Sunday morning in New York. While traffic may have shrunk somewhat during that period, it surely was not at such a striking rate. Diesel buses, trucks and cars continued to clunk through most metropolitan areas pretty much as they did before – Kamazes, Volgas, Ladas, Zhygulis, Zaporozhets - the usual suspects.
Moreover, the nationwide decline is clearly not based significantly on the decline in Kyiv, but on a decline right across the country. What might account for a nearly 50% drop over just two years, both in Kyiv and in the country?
Looking at the entire period, there is a nationwide decline until 1997, a significant upsurge of over 31% in 1998, a slight dip that may reflect the financial crisis that hit the country that fall, and another upsurge in 2000. Curiously, in the capital of Kyiv, the decline is constant until 2000, when pollution suddenly just about tripled.
While a good chunk – about 68% – of the 2000 national upsurge is explained by the parallel rise in Kyiv, the 10-year decline is not covered by shrinking exhaust rates in the capital.
It’s safe to say the data in this table is almost completely counter-intuitive.
The picture says there was a downsurge in exhaust for over six years nationwide and – even less logically – for over eight years in the nation’s capital. The truth is that more and more cars have appeared on the roads of Kyiv, to the point that downtown streets are now choked for much of the workday.
How can it be that traffic steadily increased over the same period that exhaust numbers relentlessly went down?
Could there be other factors at play? Some possible reasons do come to mind. (a) Many of the cars that have appeared on Ukraine’s roads since 1991 are foreign models that generally do not run on diesel fuel and have strong pollution controls in place, especially American brands. (b) Many older soviet models have been retired or simply fallen apart over the last decade. Lacking pollution controls and often not effectively maintained by their impoverished owners, they probably generated the most pollution. (c) Newer domestic cars have been better designed and no longer run on diesel. (d) Unlikely, but maybe domestic gasoline has been better refined to pollute less…
But then, what happened in 2000? Did a lot of mothballed dirt monsters suddenly hit the roads of the capital? Has DerzhKomStat changed its reporting methodology? Or has the Ministry of Ecology improved pollution data gathering? Could the early figures actually include all forms of air pollution, so that the 50% drop actually reflects the shutdown of countless factories within the first years after independence?
Stay tuned as we continue the hunt for Grey September. •
–from the notebooks of Pan O.
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