We seem to be getting a lot of "wake up calls" but no one ever seems to answer the god damn phone.
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Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
61–70 of 103 posts
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
See for yourself. Propublica plotted a "cancer map" of elevated cancer risks, and you can see how it drops off as you go away from certain points. https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
Interesting. One question totally non-sequiter to the toxicity conversation, but why do people that use maps orient the image in a direction other than North being up so that they have to add a label to the image indicating the direction of North?
For local navigation (e.g. your phone screen, laying a map on a table, etc) it's generally considered best practice to orient the map so that North is North. For abstract purposes North is up is the standard. I can't think of a good reason to do otherwise unless you're trying to illustrate a point specifically about local navigation (e.g. orienting a map so that the headwaters of a navigable river are at the top).
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where I live residential neighborhoods have 4-way stops at every intersection so preferably everyone would be braking all the time, yes. They obviously are not and cruising through stop signs (and sometimes killing children!) is the norm. If EVs encourage this driving style that is another strong point in favor of "electric cars can't solve the problem of cars."
>They obviously are not and cruising through stop signs (and sometimes killing children!) is the norm. If EVs encourage this driving style that is another strong point in favor of "electric cars can't solve the problem of cars." You reap what you sow. A grid of 4-way stops where the traffic flow is not appropriate for them is a textbook perfect way to train drivers to habitually roll stop signs. I swear sometimes it…
I mean, the real issue is that American traffic engineering is usually loathe to put anything other than a 4-way stop. Americans do not properly yield at yield signs, roundabouts take too much room, and we haven’t figured out how to routinely build speed bumps or raised crosswalks for less than six figures.
Also, it is a stretch to call some of that planning “learning” or “science.” As a general example, parking regulations for uses tend to be arbitrary, oversized and wildly out of date; most US retail parking lots are not full even on major shopping days like Black Friday before the advent of online, and now online is making all that space even more wasted.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other thing people don’t often talk of is PM2.5 inside their home while cooking. Lot of people have poor ventilation or insufficient air movement capacity in their kitchens.
Unfortunately, this is not simple to rectify. My previous house was expensive and difficult to retrofit to have an externally vented range hood, and I'm renting now, where basically nothing has externally vented range hoods, and looking to buy a place that does. This is a hard non-negotiable requirement for my next house, but the pickings are very slim. This is a severe issue (in the US anyway), and it's difficult to…
I mean, one solution would be to minimize or eliminate the ignition of fossil fuels in the kitchen itself. Electric and induction stoves exist.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#65I wanted to find an account of what the biggest sources of PM2.5 are in the US. This article discusses traffic fumes (24% of PM2.5), but I was surprised to learn that by far, the largest source of PM2.5 - 45% - is “unspecified sources of human origin.” Where does that stuff come from? Well, it’s created in the atmosphere via secondary reactions between agricultural NH3 emissions, SO2 and NOx emissions from shipping a…
The other thing people don’t often talk of is PM2.5 inside their home while cooking. Lot of people have poor ventilation or insufficient air movement capacity in their kitchens.
The typical American kitchen doesn't exhaust cooking fumes out of the house - the rangehood (typically part of the microwave) just sucks the fumes up and blows them over the head of the cooker, distributing food particles and steam around the entire house (perfect for mold growth!).
It blew my mind seeing this as an Australian, where externally venting fans are standard.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, this is not simple to rectify. My previous house was expensive and difficult to retrofit to have an externally vented range hood, and I'm renting now, where basically nothing has externally vented range hoods, and looking to buy a place that does. This is a hard non-negotiable requirement for my next house, but the pickings are very slim. This is a severe issue (in the US anyway), and it's difficult to…
I mean, one solution would be to minimize or eliminate the ignition of fossil fuels in the kitchen itself. Electric and induction stoves exist.
While it's true that gas stoves are a significant source of kitchen fumes, they are not the only source, just the act of cooking food produces fumes. As an example, when searing meats, significant amounts of fumes are released, as is also the case when bringing anything beyond the boiling point, steam is given off, and steam can contain other particulates. Just using an electric stove (which I use currently in my rental) alone does not solve the issue, and is not even that large of a reduction. Most of the fumes from cooking are from the act of cooking, not from the heat source.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, this is not simple to rectify. My previous house was expensive and difficult to retrofit to have an externally vented range hood, and I'm renting now, where basically nothing has externally vented range hoods, and looking to buy a place that does. This is a hard non-negotiable requirement for my next house, but the pickings are very slim. This is a severe issue (in the US anyway), and it's difficult to…
I mean, one solution would be to minimize or eliminate the ignition of fossil fuels in the kitchen itself. Electric and induction stoves exist.
I have an induction cook plate and the AQI indoors still goes in the hundreds when cooking on it. It takes about fifteen to thirty minutes of the air purifiers running at full blast to get down to single digits AQI.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to see the numbers on this to quantify it. Because the places where EVs still do use brake pads is when they come to full stops at lights and stop signs, which tend to be far closer to people.
Brakes aren't necessary to stop an EV nor to hold a car at a stop on an incline. The only time a Tesla needs to use brake pads are for emergency stops and for the parking brake.
That may be the case for a Tesla (never driven one) but the ride-share Smart EVs we have around Paris absolutely need brakes to come to a stand-still. They will decelerate fairly quickly to 20-25 kmph, but after that, the deceleration rate slows down, and it actually will never stop by itself.
For some reason I can't understand, they tried to imitate ICE automatics that don't stand still if you don't have your foot on the brake pedal.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other thing people don’t often talk of is PM2.5 inside their home while cooking. Lot of people have poor ventilation or insufficient air movement capacity in their kitchens.
The typical American kitchen doesn't exhaust cooking fumes out of the house - the rangehood (typically part of the microwave) just sucks the fumes up and blows them over the head of the cooker, distributing food particles and steam around the entire house (perfect for mold growth!). It blew my mind seeing this as an Australian, where externally venting fans are standard.
You're not quite wrong nor quite right.... I've lived in the USA all my life, in perhaps 20 or so different houses or apartments over the years, in half a dozen states through both the northeast and midsouth and in my experience.... both ways are common in the USA, unfortunately. I'm not sure why, but I agree kitchen vent fans that don't actually vent outside are terrible
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#70Will wearing N95 masks when near busy roads help at all?
Yes. When I lived in a drafty street level apartment in SF on Oak St (busy artery) I would have to wipe my inside window sills 1-2x a week of the brake dust and black rubber particles that would accumulate
Similar things happen in the country, but it's dust from gravel roads, and/or from farming (discers, plows, combines, and so on). House can be 100 meters from the road and you still get tons of gravel road dust. Though, perhaps, that's not as bad for you as brake dust. In some corn towns it "snows" crap from the processing plants for part of the year. Can't imagine that's good for the lungs.