101–110 of 158 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Burning coal and wood wouldn't be that bad. Unfortunately its quite common that people burn their trash
The traditional Polish categories of sorting rubbish is „to the burner” and „to the forest”, optionally „to be burned during the day” and „to be burned during the night”.
Funnily enough, Kraków region has the longest live expectancy in Poland (see https://stat.gov.pl/en/topics/population/life-expectancy/lif... ). Which is interesting, as either air quality does not matter that much or those data are just bogus. Well, air quality matters probably, so we are left with the data. Let's check what is the origin of this information: https://www.iqair.com/poland/lesser-poland-voivodeship/kra…
If not IQAir, you can use Windy, WAQI, Airly (founded in Krakow, so lots of sensors here).
I am in Krakow right now and my IKEA sensor is reading 183 µg/m³ when I put it outdoors. On a good day it's normally less than 5.
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Assuming a large contributing factor is all the coal plants now running to sustain Germany's independence from nuclear? Berlin's air quality has also tanked a lot since the energy crisis started.
But coal and lignite power production in TWh in Germany went down over the last decades? [0] Are you saying Germany is importing form Poland who is using goal power plants? [0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
We got a whiff of that in Berlin a few weeks ago when we got some cold wind from the east. Really noticeably bad air quality when I went outside to enjoy the snow and the cold. When I checked the map, I saw that we are basically getting Poland's pollution blowing our way. Most of the time the winds blow from the west and it's fine. Berlin has a bit of traffic but not a lot of coal plants or industry. It would be bett…
That's completely made-up. And also - nobody "smells" pollution from Poland in Berlin. Even AI would not generate this erroneous claim. > Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). And that's also made up. What is "clean" here? Radioactivity? Also if you refer to carbon cost, you have to calculate in EVERYTHING including mining and transport. So no, it is not clean - that is a lobbyist dream to cla…
You may also want to take into account how localized and preventable the emissions are. In this particular case, burning fossil fules to heat up homes, already implies no expensive filtration systems, because installing them would be a private investement and one that likely makes no sense given they could equally well replace coal furnace with gas one for less the price.
What's more important is Poland has one of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Even accounting the downsides, it totally makes sense to replace the base of the energy mix with nuclear power and leave coal/gas for when there's a shortage of power. At that point moving to electical heating should make the actual, both financial and envioronmental, cost of inevitable emissions more 'efficient' and manageable. So two ghouls with one rod?
But... how?
Assuming a large contributing factor is all the coal plants now running to sustain Germany's independence from nuclear? Berlin's air quality has also tanked a lot since the energy crisis started.
IQAir has shit coverage. I live in Kazakhstan in a city at the eastern part of the country, near the border with Chinese Xinjiang, where PM2.5 levels regularly exceed 1000 µg/m³ (that's right, it's not a typo). The highest concentration I've seen this winter is 1900 µg/m³ just a couple of days ago. SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unhe…
A Kazakh city in the eastern part of the country, near the border with Xinjiang. That's Almaty, right?
https://aqicn.org/station/@517492/
Almaty also has terrible air quality, but looking both at averages and extremes, it's about 3-4 times cleaner than this place.
As I said, it currently looks okay due to some wind, but it's a short abnormality and the first relatively clean "window" for the past ten days. Look at this station's history and you'll see conditions more typical for this region.
Even historical data shows "only" 310 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but this is also misleading. The new network includes 26 more accurate stations spread all over the city, but the public portal for these data is being worked on. Hopefully next time this subject comes up on HN I'll have something to link to.
Several of the nearby stations are simply not working and always show zero.
All I'm trying to say is that using IQAir data to rank anything global is exceedingly misleaing.
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It depends what you're burning and how you burn it. If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out. If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust. It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove…
Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer. Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite government incentives and regulations some people burn garbage in stows. It's a local cultural thing and the state seemingly is powerless to do anything about it despite being the 20th economy in the world.
Out of curiosity, why would you burn your trash, and especially plastics? It smells and is clearly unhealthy and the caloric content is worthless compared to wood.
Few years ago Kraków has forbidden the use of solid fuels which improved the situation significantly. Days like today are happening much less often since then. Moreover, Kraków has probably one of the densest network of pollution sensors in the world, which is why we talk about it at all. There are places in Poland that are much worse off, but there's not that much data to back it up.
> improved the situation significantly That's just yet another coping mechanism, I believe. I lived in Krakow in ~2015, and live there now. It's the same. It smells the same, it looks the same, the polution levels are the same, and the number of days like today in a year is the same.
[1] https://powietrze.malopolska.pl/aktualnosci/wyniki-pomiarow-...