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Most polluted cities of 2018

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Re: Most polluted cities of 2018

#61
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who have kids are also the ones causing the most harm to the environment. The single most effective way to diminish your impact on the environment is to not reproduce.

It's also the most selfish way, in some regard. My wife and I just recently had our first after some time, and one of the biggest factors involved was how selfish it would be not to. A lot of parents feel the same way; you need to appreciate that it's not in black and white and there are multiple perspectives.

The future for them is very bleak. The pros/cons of facing it is a hard decision to make. Personally, I'd hate to make that decision for someone else, let alone a person I would end up caring about the most.

Re: Most polluted cities of 2018

#62
post #11

In a world where individualism and short term profit is valued above all. What do you think happens when we buy asian gadgets on amazon with same day delivery, mindless pollution, from the first step to the last. Go out, and look at the streets, hundreds of cars with (90% of the time) a single person in it. Moving 2 tons of steel for a 80 kilos meatbag, now that's efficiency. We could almost ignore that if it wasn't…

If you buy your mango frozen, it's quite likely that the majority of the transportation CO2 is the trip from the grocery store to your home. From the plantation to the grocery store it's being transported in large quantity by highly efficient trains, boats and semi-trailers.

Yeah we can continue to lie (to ourselves ?) and perpetuate these ideas. Or we can look at the facts:

- https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...

- https://medium.com/@victoria27/heres-how-much-pollution-ship...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...

And then you witness that half of the bananas delivered to your office every week ends up in the trash because they're too ripe, but yeah, the ship that moved them from latin america to europe was efficient, no biggie.

Just like half of the cheap, low quality things imported from asia that breaks after a few weeks (basically 70% of amazon inventory)

Re: Most polluted cities of 2018

#63

I always had the question is the source of pollution at least the air quality is local or can it travel across globe ?

Both can happen but pollution is diffused as it travels and spreads. There were incidents when Chinese smog was bad enough to make it to California and cause air quality issues but weather can do that in general if winds trap pollution instead of dispersing.

Re: Most polluted cities of 2018

#64
To give some perspective, Paradise California (which burned to the ground on Nov. 8 2018) had a PM2.5 measurement that month fairly similar to that of the world's most polluted cities. That seems so grim to me.

I feel so fortunate seeing this list. The area I live in is almost entirely blue despite being subjected to bursts of wildfire smoke in summer.

Re: Most polluted cities of 2018

#66
post #42

Changing the ranking to the world's most polluted countries really puts into perspective the ecological destruction wrought by the trend of western consumerist fetishism (this isn't to say that the destruction of natural systems is entirely the fault of western citizens, of course). The top 25 (at least) most polluted countries are all firmly outside what would be considered the western world; it's obvious that the e…

Go back 100 years and the world’s most polluted countries would still be the ones rapidly industrializing at the time. Your comment seems woefully ignorant of history, which is okay, but the world hasn’t _just_ existed for the last four decades.

Although I'm detecting a significant amount of hostility and condescension in your response, I'm going to ask you to elaborate on your position a bit more since I don't really understand what it is that you're trying to say. What do historical cycles of industrialization have to do with the observation that modern, information-rich consumers appear to have a growing moral imperative to prioritize human rights and positive environmental management when deciding how to allocate their discretionary resources (time / money)?

Re: Most polluted cities of 2018

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be more useful in the current format if you are trying to decide where (not) to live

Why pick one city which is clean but maybe 50km from another which is heavily polluted? I'd rather know pollution like a weather radar shows clouds or cold fronts... Then I can just eliminate entire regions for where to live.

Like this visualisation you mean ? https://www.airvisual.com/earth You can see the whole world with particulate matters clouds and how they are affected by the wind.

Re: Most polluted cities of 2018

#70

I was really surprised to see that in my neck of the woods Chicago proper had better air quality than some of the nearby suburbs (that aren't industrial exurbs) such as Naperville: https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities?contine...

Lake effect?
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