When I lived in Southern California back in the late 1990s, my apartment was about a mile from a major oil refinery and at least once a week you would walk outside and the sky would be a gooey kind of purple, smell like a car engine that was overheating, and would deposit a fine powder on my car. Not surprisingly, kids born in that neighborhood had higher-than-average rates of respiratory problems—of course, all of this was anecdotal, as no official studies had ever been conducted (as far as I know; I did not live there long, for a wide variety of reasons). Now, from MIT, comes a new study that looks at emissions from cars, trucks, planes, and power plants in the United Kingdom.

The researchers analyzed data from 2005, the most recent year for which information is available. They found that among the various sources of emissions in the country, car and truck exhaust was the single greatest contributor to premature death, affecting some 3,300 people per year. By comparison, the researchers note, fewer than 3,000 Britons died in road accidents in 2005.

And, of course, air pollution does not respect borders, so:

The researchers found that emissions originating elsewhere in Europe cause an additional 6,000 early deaths in the U.K. annually; U.K. emissions that migrate outside the country, in turn, cause 3,100 premature deaths per year in other European Union nations. In some areas on the periphery of the U.K. — such as northern Scotland — almost all air pollution comes from the rest of Europe...

The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology.