Yeah, it would be much better if we focused on actually curing and treating it... at least in terms of whether we need to redesign our entire society.
Also put another way:
Oh yay.. more anti-car/mobility propaganda.
Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
91–100 of 103 posts
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#92Climate change propaganda. I know this, because I am in the healthcare industry. No breakthrough happens by changing environments, only by figuring out interventions.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#93Yeah, it would be much better if we focused on actually curing and treating it... at least in terms of whether we need to redesign our entire society. Also put another way: Oh yay.. more anti-car/mobility propaganda.
That's exactly what it is. :)
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how important the raw amount of emissions is. Density should decrease at a cubic rate of distance, so being close to a small source of emissions might be worse than being somewhat far from a heavier source.
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/
No post body was provided.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#95Earlier 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…
The last place I lived-in had a hood over the electric stove/oven. The exhaust-port included a steel-mesh grease-filter before the fan. Then the exhaust entered a zinc-coated-tin (?) duct about 6 inches in diameter and 10 feet long. It travelled straight above a row of cupboards to a side-wall and to the outdoors ... exiting through a louvered vent.
I suspect such a setup doesn't have to cost much. In return I enjoyed many years of cooking, summer and winter, without mostly without the odors & humidity.
I missed it as soon as I moved here ... although the vent is up-through-the-roof vertical, it's very ineffective ... and I can no longer cook most things I once took for granted.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
And I've seen them which vent into the wall!
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#97Is it really the cars that are the problem - or just a high concentration of particles in the air from having so many people and things jammed in a tight space? Dense cities themselves are the real problem. I have started carrying portable air sensors around (they are surprisingly cheap and measure a wide variety of things from particles to VOCs and CO2) and simply not being in or near a large city dramatically impro…
Remember when the pandemic first started and literally no one was on the roads? I hiked up into the mountains of LA. You could see to long beach and even catalina clear as can be, 50 mile visibility. It stayed like that until traffic started kicking back up again. The same dense city, the only difference was people weren't driving to work and the air was noticeably clearer both to the naked eye, and on purple air.
EVs will help some but honestly these days, a lot of particulate pollution cars put out comes from sources like the tires and brake dust. EVs are heavier vehicles overall and would produce more of both for a given class of vehicle. The best thing to do would be to improve service quality of bus transit in order to move more people with fewer vehicles; giving busses signal preemtion and their own lanes would go a long way to make them more convenient than cars for more people. Bike lane networks would also help people feel more confident riding a bike in cities to more places. Not enough people take the lane while biking, certainly.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roundabouts don’t have to take up more room than a stop-signed junction. We call them mini-roundabouts, and they’re often just painted on the ground and slightly raised so that you can still drive over them.
Unfortunately, US civil engineering is very dogmatic, so if it isn’t approved by AASHTO it won’t be done. The civil engineers also like absurdly wide turn radii to accommodate 53 feet trailers and large fire trucks even in residential streets, so you end up with comically wide roads even for dead end suburban streets. https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/suburban-street-2779407.jpg
I agree it's stupid but can you imagine how HNers would react if a trailer so much dragged an outside dual on their shrubbery. The hand wringing would probably start a fire.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't view any of these as a problem in the least. And sorry if it comes across as as a strong critique, I don't mean any of it personally, but have heard people say these same things but never from people that actually bicycle with their family. We do all sorts of things that increase property value, why is it suddenly only a problem when bikes are involved? And the problem is only because we do a little amount of…
Okay. It appears that you haven't read what I wrote. I'll try just one more time: > And sorry if it comes across as as a strong critique, I don't mean any of it personally, but have heard people say these same things but never from people that actually bicycle with their family. As I already said, we have built cycling into our lives. Our kids (4 and 6) cycle to school with one of us. I cycle to work. And I am saying…
> Or is he in the window where he can't cycle far enough by himself, but too heavy to be safely steered on a cargo bike?
My wife cycled me around in her cargo bike, and a couple of other adults (not at the same time). I'm not a light chap, fairly sure I'd outweigh both your kids together. Steering on those things is pretty good, they're not light in and of themselves.
edit: we actually cycled both our kids to school in the cargo bike when they were 8 and 5. I'd forgotten, it was a few years ago.
Re: Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, US civil engineering is very dogmatic, so if it isn’t approved by AASHTO it won’t be done. The civil engineers also like absurdly wide turn radii to accommodate 53 feet trailers and large fire trucks even in residential streets, so you end up with comically wide roads even for dead end suburban streets. https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/suburban-street-2779407.jpg
I agree it's stupid but can you imagine how HNers would react if a trailer so much dragged an outside dual on their shrubbery. The hand wringing would probably start a fire.
Fortunately for traffic engineering, they often remove those too, to maintain a “clear zone” for road safety. (The clear zone is intended for keeping cars at high speed from killing their occupants when they decelerate into stationary objects.)