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Earth Technology Science

US Embassies May Have Accidentally Improved Air Quality 26

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2008, the United States embassy in Beijing installed an air-quality monitor and started tweeting out its findings every hour. Since then, these monitors have popped up in more than 50 embassies in countries and cities around the globe. Something unexpected happened in each of the cities in which the monitors appeared. Researchers found that, overall, air quality improved in the cities where embassies were tweeting out air-quality data. "We were surprised," Akshaya Jha, assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the paper's authors, told Ars. According to the World Health Organization, in 2019, more than 90 percent of the world's population lived in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. Further, according to Jha's paper, this phenomenon tends to be worse in low- and middle-income countries. However, air-quality monitoring in those countries is quite rare.

Work on this research began around a year ago. Jha's team wanted to look at something completely different: the impacts that improvements in air pollution had on hazard pay among embassy workers. However, when the team began studying the literature, they couldn't find good information on reductions in air pollution relative to when embassies started their monitoring in many locations. As such, they began looking into it themselves. To study this, they used satellite data to look at air pollution in 466 cities in 136 countries, of which 50 cities across 36 countries received the air-quality monitors by 2020. They looked at the air pollution in all of these cities in the years before and after the monitors were installed, using the years prior to installation and the cities that did not receive monitors as controls. The research found that the cities that had a US embassy that set up one of these monitors and tweeted out air-quality data saw a decrease of PM2.5 particulates to the tune of 2 to 4 micrograms per cubic meter -- compared to their air quality before getting the monitor and to other similar cities that do not have a monitor.
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US Embassies May Have Accidentally Improved Air Quality

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  • Could it be.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dread_ed ( 260158 ) on Friday October 28, 2022 @11:20AM (#63006183) Homepage

    Could it be that informed people make better decisions, and tend toward better outcomes when they have objective data to judge their performance against?

    • Could be that they just need to clean the filters of the sensors to bring them back up to spec.
    • Could it be that informed people make better decisions

      Given that it is China I think a government trying to avoid embarrassment is a far more likely explanation.

      • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        That's why I think the title should be "US Embassies May Have 'Accidentally' Improved Air Quality"

        There are no accidents in some decisions.

    • Maybe, quite possible air quality is improving in many places and governments the world over have programs in place to do something irrespective of where US embassies tweet.

      Let's all sing together: "correlation is not causation"

    • Could it be that this is a great case of correlation != causation? Why would some tweets no-one has ever heard of before now cause city-wide, and in some cases given that air movement goes beyond cities, nationwide, air quality changes?

      It'll be interesting to see the followup paper that explores where the flaw in their reasoning was. Statistics texts love to give examples of stuff like this.

  • Maybe they had better start getting them.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Proof that online bullying does work.

  • Yeah, that ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Guybrush_T ( 980074 ) on Friday October 28, 2022 @11:43AM (#63006253)

    Or simply bad air quality is a serious issue for such cities and there is a lot of work to make it better. Like, in pretty much every city in the world nowadays.

    The fact embassies installed air quality sensors was because it was really bad in the first place. In other words, correlation not due to causation, but due to a third hidden factor: "air quality was bad".

    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      spot on, but surely not much fun at (flag waving) parties ...

    • The fact embassies installed air quality sensors was because it was really bad in the first place. In other words, correlation not due to causation, but due to a third hidden factor: "air quality was bad".

      You seem to have missed the part of the summary that indicated they controlled for that factor:

      The research found that the cities that had a US embassy that set up one of these monitors and tweeted out air-quality data saw a decrease of PM2.5 particulates to the tune of 2 to 4 micrograms per cubic meter -- compared to their air quality before getting the monitor and to other similar cities that do not have a monitor.

      I.e. When you look at other cities that had bad air quality but didn't have this data being monitored and publicly tweeted, they didn't see as much of an increase. It still doesn't prove causation, but it's a much stronger relationship than your post would suggest.

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Or simply bad air quality is a serious issue for such cities and there is a lot of work to make it better. Like, in pretty much every city in the world nowadays.

      The fact embassies installed air quality sensors was because it was really bad in the first place. In other words, correlation not due to causation, but due to a third hidden factor: "air quality was bad".

      Embassy quarters also tend to be more affluent and less trafficked than most sectors in a city. More gardens, less roads, no factories or even light industrial so fewer light goods vehicles and almost no heavy goods vehicles going through.

      I first noticed this when I visited Manila (Philippines) which has terrible air quality, the area around the embassies (which also has a lot of hotels) had noticeably cleaner air than other parts of the city. You also didn't have 40 yr old Jeepneys going through every 5

  • So? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by groobly ( 6155920 )

    Was the air already getting better before they installed the sensors? Right, no one knows, because there were no sensors.

    • Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)

      by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Friday October 28, 2022 @01:11PM (#63006521) Homepage

      "To study this, they used satellite data to look at air pollution in 466 cities in 136 countries, of which 50 cities across 36 countries received the air-quality monitors by 2020. They looked at the air pollution in all of these cities in the years before and after the monitors were installed, using the years prior to installation and the cities that did not receive monitors as controls."

      They used satellite data as the data source, not the sensors themselves. It's right in the summary.

  • Louis Brandeis (although there are earlier similar concepts, his made it gain wide popularity)

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] (Wikipedia mentions this is confused with Uncertainty Principle, even by Heisenberg himself...)

    Or arguably, a Heisenfeature, because the 'debugging' made the "program work."

  • by BytePusher ( 209961 ) on Friday October 28, 2022 @12:27PM (#63006393) Homepage
    Every city has a political and economic elite. All you need to do is convince them they'll lose a few years of life and health and they'll start kicking industry out to the periphery.

    However, correlation is not causation. More likely, the trend in the US of moving to/gentrifying cities over the last 20 years and viewing city life as 'elite' and rural life as 'backwards' has probably had an even greater impact than the US embassy's shaming cities in developing nations as dirty. One could argue "Sex in the City" initiated a trend that improved air quality globally.

    Also, there's been massive education about the dangers of 'dirty' energy, wood, coal, diesel. It's relatively inexpensive to filter the exhaust of power plants. Electric cooking and heating are cheaper/easier/safer than wood and gas once you have a moderate developed economy and distribution infrastructure. In nations like China, the abolition of extreme poverty has brought about exactly that moment, where the distribution infrastructure makes using electric heat more of an economic choice.

    Natural gas in the individual home is honestly an insane luxury. Overall it works as long as homes and gas lines are maintained, but it's not uncommon for houses and buildings to blow up. I live in a city where in a condo building I lived in, none of the owners/occupants would throw away a mis-delivered sandwich for over a week. I ignored it just to see what would happen. No way in hell they're gonna call in a smelly gas leak or even call the fire department if they see a building on fire.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Don't let this distract you from the U.S. per capita emissions! Reducing U.S. per capita emissions is the ONLY THING that will save our planet!

    • by uncqual ( 836337 )

      "Our" planet doesn't need "saving".

      Long after humans are extinct and it's difficult to find evidence humans ever existed (assuming the unlikely case that some entity cared about this rock and sent explorers/robots to check it out), the Earth will still be here. It will still be rotating "daily" (although the days will get longer) and orbiting around its sun.

      Obviously it will become inhabitable to humans at some point because Earth's sun has no "idea" what the pollution level is on Earth and it will proceed

  • The direct monitoring was and is hated by Nations like China. However, they can not tell embassies what to do.
    BUT, right now, there are a few CO2 sats that monitor and coverage is KNOWN by the various governments. What is needed is to get enough sat coverage so that all areas are covered ever 4 hours or more. Then it will be easier for governments to simply clean up their mess, than it is to keep cheating the system.

I THINK THEY SHOULD CONTINUE the policy of not giving a Nobel Prize for paneling. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.

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