151–160 of 165 posts
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What is the altitude of where you live?
I live northwest of Denver, higher up overlooking it. I'm at 1900 meters (6200 feet). Nothing too crazy, but makes a difference for sure.
Living close to sea level, I've always been fascinated by the great height of places like Denver and Mexico City.
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Only minority of cars are responsible for majority of pollution. A single badly maintained diesel car produces as much pollution as thousands of legal new cars. Same goes for trucks -- the low in air pollution you felt was likely not due to less cars but less trucks (and possibly busses, depending on where in Europe you live)
I don't know why this correct comment got downvoted. A car without a catalytic converter generates as much toxic pollution as 100 new cars with catalytic converters. A car whose catalytic converter has broken and which has engine trouble produces even more. And diesel produces more than gas. (Though new vehicles of both types are about equal.) Thus a single badly maintained diesel car can produce as much pollution as…
"Catalytic converters generate 100 times less toxic pollution. Installing catalytic converters into millions of cars prevented millions of tons of toxic pollution" gets turned into "A single badly maintained diesel car produces as much pollution as thousands of legal new cars."
Why turn a success into a failure? It only serves to make people feel powerless. Being "technically correct" was just a way to masquerade the real message "Don't try, you will fail and when you fail it will undo [0] your success".
[0] only a small part of (this is the fine print)
One very simple thing that we can do a much better job at is preventing people from idling their cars in pedestrian areas. I walk through supposedly eco-conscious Berkeley every day, and without fail there is at least one car stopped at the curb, idling, often while the owner plays with his phone. The problem has gotten much worse now that food-order apps are more popular. I think that people have some kind of magica…
Deaths using this method decreased dramatically when cars started having catalytic converters fitted.
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That would imply they had actual power to do so. One average individual isn't going to be able to do anything to those who are polluting our air. Case in point: the US government is one of the top 10 greenhouse gas polluters in the world. You really think one individual without billions of dollars backing them can do anything against the US government?
Yep. I do believe one person can make a difference.
Action from the top means that we will have capitalists willingly going against their own short term interests. This is unlikely to happen; capitalists don't even look past the next quarterly earnings projections if they can help it.
Action from the bottom is also unlikely, since people at the bottom of the economic ladder can't take time off work to protest.
I don't see any other scenario that even comes close to saving us. At this point, I would say only God could help us, if I believed.
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Why do you live there? I mean of all places, Gary Indiana is near the bottom of the list of anyplace in the USA that I would consider living. Economically destitute, dysfunctional government, high crime, terrible schools, and horrible contamination from the steel mills. I assume it was a work-related move?
In 2011, I was in college in the UK, managed to score a year internship in Chesterton, IN, a few miles from Gary. Lived in Valparaiso while I worked in Chesterton. Revisited same city in 2016, met my now wife who is from Crown Point. We got married and rented from a friend in the Miller Beach community neighbourhood of Gary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Beach , a block from some really wonderful beaches, dunes…
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Paris, at least, is doing an amazing job of replacing motor vehicles on the streets with friendlier alternatives, with great results in terms of reduced air and noise pollution. Try to elect a mayor of Lyons who's like Annie Hidalgo?
> Try to elect a mayor of Lyons who's like Annie Hidalgo? New mayor of Lyon is a member of the Green party. There were a lot of ecologist mayors (a "green wave" according to the media) at the last municipal elections in France. It's a dividing issue. More and more people are concerned about environmental issues. But at the same time, there is a universal hate for ecologists.
This doesn't seem to be true? Annie Hidalgo won re-election and has pretty decent popularity ratings. Maybe they're hated out in the countryside or whatever, but the actual citizens of the cities run by these "ecologist" mayors do seem to be generally happy with them.
I really wish we had one here in NYC. Only 22% of households in Manhattan where I live even own cars, yet an ungodly amount of the total public space is given over to cars, including two whole lanes of free parking on most blocks. Meanwhile the sidewalks are narrow and often full of trash bags because we can't even put in dumpsters lest some sacred parking spots be removed, and delivery vehicles are constantly double-parked or blocking bike lanes since there's no delivery-only spots.
I think the majority of people here would be in favor of a mayor that de-emphasized cars and got a lot of this traffic off our streets, thus making it more pleasant for people on foot.
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I don't know why this correct comment got downvoted. A car without a catalytic converter generates as much toxic pollution as 100 new cars with catalytic converters. A car whose catalytic converter has broken and which has engine trouble produces even more. And diesel produces more than gas. (Though new vehicles of both types are about equal.) Thus a single badly maintained diesel car can produce as much pollution as…
The problem is that such a comment doesn't help. It's just a pessimistic viewpoint where you have to read the fine print to see that things are better in reality. "Catalytic converters generate 100 times less toxic pollution. Installing catalytic converters into millions of cars prevented millions of tons of toxic pollution" gets turned into "A single badly maintained diesel car produces as much pollution as thousand…
What the comment points to is that reducing car pollution isn't so much a question of saying we all need to pitch in as one of saying that we need to identify the serious problems and promptly deal with them. It is the kind of thing that is absolutely essential to understand before you have any chance of proposing an effective solution.
This is, for example, why it is common to have regular smog certifications required. And why those certifications do more to reduce smog than, say, telling everyone to drive 20% less would.
This pandemic gave me so much to think about air pollution. It puzzles me how we can have, just in Europe, around 800k yearly premature deaths caused by pollution[0] and still not care at all. On the other hand, covid-19 hasn't caused yet as many deaths but we quickly intervened, as it should be. Why can't we, as a society, react with the same effectiveness to air pollution? - [0]: https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/…
> 800k yearly premature deaths caused by pollution[0] and still not care at all
The deaths are diffuse and happen all over so there's not a huge panic about it because it's hard to spot. Also 'air pollution' isn't the listed cause of death so people have to make the extra step to link the huge number of knock on effects back to the cause. Even when you do there's a lot of push back from well paid lawyers to argue that there's no direct link between the pollution of their clients and the fact that communities near their factories die 5 years sooner than anyone else.
> covid-19 hasn't caused yet as many deaths but we quickly intervened ... Why can't we, as a society, react with the same effectiveness to air pollution?
COVID is acute and new which means we haven't grown systematically numb to it's effects yet so there's the chance for a very pointed response. Even now though there's people arguing the same line as polluting industries, that the numbers are skewed and people with other conditions didn't die because of COVID but should be listed as dying because of their heart disease/respiratory problems/etc.
It also helps that no one is in the business of COVID and in theory once the vaccine is widely available and COVID is just another occasional background illness things will largely go back to normal. To address pollution on the other hand you have to permanently make whole swaths of industry either vastly more expensive (and therefor less profitable) or practically eliminate them. Those get a lot of push back of course.
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You want the real reason? Fixing air pollution quickly would disrupt the global economy on a long term scale. Capitalism doesn't like that. Edit: Y'all so predictable.
Just curious, who does like disrupting the global economy on a long term scale?
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London taxis are supposed to do the same. Decent idea for hybrids.
I'd like to see someone do analysis on what percentage of "Zero emissions capable" London taxis actually spend any reasonable proportion of time powered by electricity. I suspect the drivers, not wanting to wear out their batteries, set the vehicles to use the engine the whole time, which is a built in feature (the 'save' drive mode)... It's time we said "no taxi may run an engine inside zone 1, and if they do it's a…