Hey, stop trying to stop people from making money!
These kinds of Reddit-esque comments are generally frowned upon, here.
India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#22I don’t see how we can address resource consumption and pollution more broadly without population controls. We need a two child, replacement rate rule. Otherwise we will continually play whack a mole with patching symptoms and bickering politics. And yet no one wants to own up to this reality.
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
No Indian government will openly fine farmers (they secretly fine for not maintaining the minimum balance in the bank accounts of state owned banks) -- with majority of population coming under the name "farmers" (including Amitabh Bachchan.
> No Indian government will openly fine farmers Why aren’t the farmers’ interests balanced by the afflicted voters?
More voters are farmers or are aligned with keeping farmers' costs low than are affected by the pollution or aligned with clean air standards.
It's not a local issue because the pollution emitting happens in a different state than where the concentration causes most of the problems, so it would need to be addressed at the national level.
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#24>Harsh Vardhan, the union minister for health and family welfare, urged people to eat carrots to protect against "night blindness" and "other pollution-related harm to health".
A small part of the article, but I just wanted to point out the night vision part is a WWII disinformation campaign by the British to hide the fact that they had sophisticated RADAR: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propagand...
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#25Some specific points that may be lost in the headline / cursory reading of the article: 1) India as a whole is overpopulated and has a pollution problem. This particular issue is limited to Delhi, however. 2) From the perspective of the magnitude and extreme levels of pollution, this is a seasonal issue whose primary contributor, by a large margin, is farmers burning off their crop stubble after their harvest ends. T…
South Korea and Taiwan have higher population density than India, and Japan is not far off (517/km, 652/km, 412/km, and 334/km, respectively) > 1) India as a whole is overpopulated...
Yeah, I've come to believe that the word "overpopulation" just doesn't mean anything.
I would rather say Indian society is badly organized.
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#26Tangent: Does anyone know if/how the human impact of planting trees is measured? What I mean is, what metrics determine the "quality" of a tree plant? I assume this can vary greatly based on location and type of tree planted. I often see impact quantified by CO2 removed from the environment, but what about the impact on people nearby? Would it be better to plant 100 trees in the center of New Delhi, where the air is…
Trees might as best smell nice and provide shade. They do nothing to purify air.
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried "no-till farming"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming It's very popular here in Argentina, and it reuse the stover. [Disclaimer: I live in a city (Buenos Aires), but at least I have a few flowerpots.]
I travel to India every other month for my job. Most agriculture happens on small farms by poor and uneducated people. Introducing new technology and agricultural practices is difficult but is certainly underway in parts of the country. There is also a lack of political will to solve the problem in the particular case of Delhi and its neighboring state of Punjab, and as the parent comment suggested, there is very muc…
Introducing new technologies is difficult with the supposedly highly educated American farmers. Reality is, farmers worldwide are awfully anti-intellectual with a strong contrarian streak and rarely listen to science, even if ironically science has given them their way of life in the form of fertilizers, GMOs etc...
Source: I worked for an ag-tech company and I will never EVER have anything to do again with anything that has to do with that world.
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#28Can anyone find on the internet:
1. An explanation of how AQI is calculated? Some initial searching turns up very little information as to the basis of the index.
2. How the safety levels (green, orange, red, purple) are decided.
It seems somewhat opaque. Anyone know why this is?
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#29[deleted]
Re: India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
South Korea and Taiwan have higher population density than India, and Japan is not far off (517/km, 652/km, 412/km, and 334/km, respectively) > 1) India as a whole is overpopulated...
Yeah, I've come to believe that the word "overpopulation" just doesn't mean anything. I would rather say Indian society is badly organized.
And a lot poorer overall, which certainly doesn't help.
GDP(PPP) per capita for India was 7874 in 2018.
Versus 41351, 44227 and 53023 for South Korea, Japan and Taiwan respectively.
These countries that manage their high population density pretty well are also much smaller (Japan is around 10 times smaller than India) and it is much easier to optimize/organize on a smaller scale.