TY - JOUR AU - Clay,Karen AU - Troesken,Werner TI - Did Frederick Brodie Discover the World's First Environmental Kuznets Curve? Coal Smoke and the Rise and Fall of the London Fog JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15669 PY - 2010 Y2 - January 2010 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15669 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15669.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Karen Clay Heinz College Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Tel: 412/268-4197 Fax: 412/268-7357 E-Mail: kclay@andrew.cmu.edu Werner Troesken Department of Economics University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Tel: 412/648-2823 Fax: 412/648-9074 E-Mail: troesken@pitt.edu M1 - published as Karen Clay, Werner Troesken. "Did Frederick Brodie Discover the World's First Environmental Kuznets Curve? Coal Smoke and the Rise and Fall of the London Fog," in Gary D. Libecap and Richard H. Steckel, editors, "The Economics of Climate Change: Adaptations Past and Present" University of Chicago Press (2011) M3 - presented at "Climate Change: Past and Present Conference", May 30-31, 2009 AB - In a paper presented to the Royal Meteorological Society, Brodie (1905) presented a data series that presaged the modern Environmental Kuznets Curve: in the decades leading up to 1890, the number of foggy days in London rose steadily, but after 1891, the fogs began to subside. Brodie attributed the rise and fall of the London fog to variation in emissions of coal smoke, arguing that before 1890 Londoners burned excessive amounts of soft coal, while in the years following, a series of legal, demographic, and technological changes mitigated the production of coal smoke. This paper asks two questions. First, are Brodie’s underlying data trustworthy? Do other, independent sources of evidence same patterns Brodie identified? Was London’s atmosphere becoming more polluted and foggy for most of the nineteenth century, only to improve around 1890? Second, if so, is Brodie’s interpretation of the data correct? Can the changes in London’s atmosphere be attributed to changes in the production of coal smoke, or were they the result of some broader meteorological phenomenon. The evidence we present here is consistent Brodie’s data and interpretation. ER -