Tangentially: Belgium's interregional environment agency (irceline) publishes very detailed information on our (awful) air quality: https://irceline.be/en
Where does air pollution come from?
131–140 of 146 posts
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Percentage wise absolutely, said beach can have 99% less pollution. but in absolute terms, pollution is so high in that street that even 1% of said beach pollution (which is already 1% of street) is already out of bounds of limits considered safe. Blue "haze" is pollution, not fog (water vapor). Look, people do not understand scale, one motorcycle/lawnmower can have emissions of 300 cars equipped with catalytic conve…
The faster acceleration and tendency to be heavier do usually make EVs worse for tire pollution, which if nothing else is a really good reason not to pinch the accelerator if you own one.
i loathe tire wear argument. i had to put it there. because it is local emission. just in one day you burn more kilograms of fuel then kilograms you remove from your tire for whole year. it is orders of magnitude away from being even relevant, but always someone points that out as a con, so i "proactively" put it there XD
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other striking aspect for me is how, as has often been the case, those most affected are the poorest. Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vacinity of the docks where cruise and container ships and moor. They sit there running their engines for power, churning out SO2 and other pollutants. These areas are some of the poorest in London. The same was the case in industrial cities during the indu…
> Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vicinity of the docks Someone else pointed out that there's very little shipping in central London now. It's all cars and buses causing this pollution. > In fact if you try to do anything about inner city pollution you can pretty much guarantee an angry pushback. See how bonkers people got over the ULEZ: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66268073
> Someone else pointed out that there's very little shipping in central London now. It's all cars and buses causing this pollution.
Or gas boilers, in the case of NOx pollution:
> Gas boilers now produce ~72% of NOx emissions in central London.
https://bsky.app/profile/janrosenow.bsky.social/post/3lltacf...
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I asked shop keeper is it happening often, she confirmed and said that no one is interested in doing otherwise, installing sensors was directly opposed by town council. One way to address this sort of localism (where there's a significant risk that the owners of the factory are slipping the town councillors the odd brown envelope) is a national regulator. The Irish EPA, which was created to take this sort of thing…
Doesn't seem there is anything done in Dublin or other Irish cities though vs Europe? https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/userhome/map I don't believe Dublin city air is all that clean given that the cars are primary mode of transportation.
Yeah, as you say, the main source of air pollution in Dublin is cars. Those are basically outside of the EPA's remit. It has been very effective in cleaning up _industry_, which is in its remit, though a lot of this was playing catchup with the rest of Western Europe.
The cars are basically some combination of the NTA's and the local authorities' fault; a massive expansion of Dublin's bus and commuter rail capacity, and a new metro system, are all years behind schedule, largely due to planning permission nonsense (though also due to disastrously incorrect government planning about 15 years ago, which assumed that Ireland would go back to its traditional perma-recession after the financial crisis, with the result that starting these expansions was delayed by about a decade).
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#135The charts for black carbon seem to have the labels for "Buildings" and "Energy" switched.
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#136For those who are worried about indoor air pollution like me, I found out thanks to this [dynomight post]( https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier/ ) that having an efficient air purifier is a low bar and is actually quite accessible to poor people like me !
I ended up purchasing a Lasko Air Flex[1]. It fits standard HVAC filters. It doubles as a white noise machine for me, it is quite loud. This review[2] indicates it works well but a bit power hungry, and it definitely gathered a visible amount of dust over a 1 year period. [1] https://lasko.com/products/lasko-air-flex-2-in-1-20-inch-box... [2] https://youtu.be/daayXtlpg_o
Standard filters is interesting but it looks that the Ikea one has many advantages: it's smaller, discreet, less power-hungry, has textile pre-filter so that you filter will work longer, can accommodate activated charcoal filter and is not loud on 1
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
That top 10 was for childhood deaths from air pollution per capita and included mostly poor nations with less healthcare. When you look at consumption based accounting for e.g. CO2, the list is very different, namely for 2022: !. Singapore 2. United Arab Emirates 3. Qatar 4. Saudi Arabia 5. Kuwait 6. Brunei 7. Malta 8. Belgium 9. United States 10. Oman source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-ca…
Very surprised to see Belgium in that list. What gives? Our electricity mix isn't too bad. We don't have much heavy industry. We're not heavy A/C users. Is it our meat consumption?
What is worse, our real consumption based per capita emission is still rising (+8%)! We love importing stuff that polluted elsewhere.
Local reasons:
Belgium has a highly industrialized economy, with significant sectors like chemicals, steel, cement, and refining which are energy-intensive and heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Antwerp’s port, with very high and very dirty maritime transport, hosts Europe’s largest petrochemical cluster.
Belgium's car culture, company cars as a tax benefit, and a well-developed fossil-fueled freight transport sector. One of the most dense road networks in the world leading to heavy road traffic and congestion.
Belgium also hosts the capital of Europe. The diplomat and CxO consultant class flies in and out of Zaventem almost daily.
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#138For those who are worried about indoor air pollution like me, I found out thanks to this [dynomight post]( https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier/ ) that having an efficient air purifier is a low bar and is actually quite accessible to poor people like me !
Air there any air filtration systems that use water (maybe by bubbling air through water or a fine mist) to remove particulates? Like a canister vacuum cleaner, I'd love to be able to see the dirt/dust/particulates/gunk that is being removed from the air.
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#139It's interesting to see the number of deaths caused by pollution. But everyone will die of something. Could it be that many of those people whose death was caused by pollution may have been frail and close to death anyway? I wonder if it would be more useful to talk about quality-life-years (QUALYs) lost as a result of pollution. Probably much harder to get that data though.
There was some interesting data from China where the north got free coal heating but not the south. There was a difference in life expectancy of 5.5 years. Maybe not the best free gift. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/08/northern...
Re: Where does air pollution come from?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lab grown meat seems to be comparable to classic meat in terms of environmental impact so at the moment it seems to be better purely in moral terms. I wish we'd bite the bullet and go all in on vegetarian and vegan foods but we need to invest a ton in them to make them more palatable and easily accessible, including to poor people.
I don't think vegetarian is enough, since it often means diary, which goes back to cows as one of highest polluters. Could be that one needs way fewer cows to produce diary equivalent to beef, that would invalidate above sentence. Anybody knows this? I've lived for maybe 6 months in cca vegan diet when backpacking in India and Nepal (apart from infrequent paneer cheese, their meat in cheap dhabas was not great to be…
> but I know very few (specifically) men in Europe who would find it acceptable replacement (women seems more reasonable in this)
I can't speak for everyone, but there could also be plain old biological reasons for why spicy food isn't for everyone.
Just to give an example, spicy food is spicy throughout the entire digestive tract. It's much easier to control your reaction to spiciness at some points in your digestive tract than at others...