Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

iqair.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 158 posts

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#131

Post by 0rzech »

Despite Międzyzdroje (zachodniopomorskie, Poland) lying directly at the seaside, the air quality in winter is so bad it literally irritates the throat and can even give you headaches or make you nauseous, and only directly on the beach can you still breathe fresh air.

The common argument is that people use bad furnaces or burn bad fuel or trash out of poverty, but far too often the actual cause is mentality and not financial issues.

Smog kills around 40,000 Polish people each year. [1] It was reported in 2025 to be 20 times more than in car accidents. [2]

On the bright side, industrial and post-apo art fans can wear breathing masks in Poland without even pretending.

[1] https://pulsmedycyny.pl/medycyna/choroby-ukladu-oddechowego/...

[2] https://www.infor.pl/prawo/nowosci-prawne/6826105,umiera-od-...

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#132

Post by 0rzech »

niemandhier wrote: post #121

Poland has stronger economic development than the rest EU at the moment. I’d hazard to guess that part of it is that they accept being on the “don’t over regulate, but grow” path.

It was mostly buying votes with money from ETS instead of spending those money in whole on energy transformation as intended.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#135

Post by js8 »

pjc50 wrote: post #64
timeon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you jump to this conclusion? I wonder why some people on internet are repeating narratives like drones. Poland has largest use of coal in EU. Czechia and Germany are behind. Poland is including energy from sun and wind now a lot but there is still long way. Unlike surrounding countries they never had nuclear for some reason. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/

Soviet Union was unwilling to put nuclear that far west, and then after Chernobyl most nuclear construction was cancelled.

> Soviet Union was unwilling to put nuclear that far west

That seems wrong; Dukovany (and IIRC then-planned Temelin) were further to the west than most of Poland and operated just fine.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#136

Post by ErroneousBosh »

tpm wrote: post #130
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> catastrophic converters Nice one. Anyway three-way catalytic converters also convert NOx to N2 and O2. It would be quite bad if they wouldn't. > You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out. No, you still get small amounts of the bad (acutely toxic) stuff too. This point is important - whether it's home cooking on gas, gas heating or ICEs running on unicorn farts, there will still be byproducts from imperfect b…

You might get other byproducts but in quantities barely large enough to measure and certainly too small to make any difference.

If you bring out the paper on how cooking with gas fills your house with toxic smoke and the only safe way to cook is an induction stove, I'll show you why it's utter bunk. The TL;DR of it though is that induction stoves emit far more combustion products than gas stoves, if you pick your operating conditions carefully.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#137

Post by tpm »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #136
tpm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> catastrophic converters Nice one. Anyway three-way catalytic converters also convert NOx to N2 and O2. It would be quite bad if they wouldn't. > You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out. No, you still get small amounts of the bad (acutely toxic) stuff too. This point is important - whether it's home cooking on gas, gas heating or ICEs running on unicorn farts, there will still be byproducts from imperfect b…

You might get other byproducts but in quantities barely large enough to measure and certainly too small to make any difference. If you bring out the paper on how cooking with gas fills your house with toxic smoke and the only safe way to cook is an induction stove, I'll show you why it's utter bunk. The TL;DR of it though is that induction stoves emit far more combustion products than gas stoves, if you pick your ope…

> I'll show you why it's utter bunk.

You won't since it is our direct experience that replacing a gas stove with induction improved our breathing. But nice try.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#138

Post by ErroneousBosh »

tpm wrote: post #137
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might get other byproducts but in quantities barely large enough to measure and certainly too small to make any difference. If you bring out the paper on how cooking with gas fills your house with toxic smoke and the only safe way to cook is an induction stove, I'll show you why it's utter bunk. The TL;DR of it though is that induction stoves emit far more combustion products than gas stoves, if you pick your ope…

> I'll show you why it's utter bunk. You won't since it is our direct experience that replacing a gas stove with induction improved our breathing. But nice try.

The placebo effect is wonderful, isn't it?

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#139

Post by tpm »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #138
tpm wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll show you why it's utter bunk. You won't since it is our direct experience that replacing a gas stove with induction improved our breathing. But nice try.

The placebo effect is wonderful, isn't it?

"Open fire with the products ending up in the room has no negative influence on the air quality in the room" is the hypothesis you failed to prove.

Re: Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide

#140

Post by readthenotes1 »

ansgri wrote: post #87
unglaublich wrote: post #34

Fossil fuel heating is _extremely_ polluting, and really costing the population months, up to years of their life. But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.

Natural gas heating is not the problem in this case, it burns very cleanly with semi-modern heaters. The pollution is from coal, wood, and especially all kinds of trash (plastic, painted cardboard, pieces of various engineering wood products).

I'm the US, one presidential administration spent some effort to also squash natural gas.
Post reply on HN