Delhi's Air a 'Crime Against Humanity' (reuters.com) 67
Delhi's 20 million residents were effectively breathing smoke on Thursday as the air quality index (AQI) breached the "severe" and "hazardous" categories in nearly all monitoring stations of the Indian capital, raising calls to close schools. From a report: The AQI exceeded 450 at many places early in the day, according to data from the Central Pollution Control Board. A reading over 400 affects healthy people, with serious impacts on those with existing diseases, the federal government says. The index was over 800 in some pockets of the city, according to data from the Delhi Pollution Control Committee. "What is happening with air pollution in Delhi is nothing short of a crime against humanity!" author and socialite Suhel Seth wrote on Twitter. "There's a total collapse of accountability!" The world's most polluted capital is blanketed in smog every winter as cold, heavy air traps construction dust, vehicle emissions and smoke from the burning of crop stubble in the neighbouring states to clear the fields for the next crop.
Burning fields (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
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The world's most polluted capital is blanketed in smog every winter...
...smoke from the burning of crop stubble in the neighbouring states to clear the fields for the next crop.
These statements tend to imply that this burning event is an annual one, so perhaps before we start clutching our pearls over the 'crime against humanity', I'd love to know what the pollution levels have been for the last 10 years during this burning.
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Probably at 'crimes against humanity' levels. Since humanity committed the crime, it's a wash anyway.
I was a bit more concerned that this was nothing more than clickbait, since that's what sells today. Pretty much everywhere.
So I thought I'd ask humanity to prove the pollution problem is actually larger than the addiction to Greed.
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There's no cure for human greed so just blaming greed gets you nowhere. Make greed work for you. Show them a better means to make money. Show them a better means to clear the crops than burning the chaff in the fields. Maybe bring them modern farming practices with tractors plowing the chaff into the ground for erosion control and adding nutrients.
As bad as the "Dust Bowl" was of the 1930s it raised awareness of the issue of soil erosion from the farming practices of the day. It likely took a world war
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There's no cure for human greed so just blaming greed gets you nowhere. Make greed work for you. Show them a better means to make money. Show them a better means to clear the crops than burning the chaff in the fields. Maybe bring them modern farming practices with tractors plowing the chaff into the ground for erosion control and adding nutrients.
As bad as the "Dust Bowl" was of the 1930s it raised awareness of the issue of soil erosion from the farming practices of the day. It likely took a world war to force the issue of mechanizing farming and getting more food from less labor. Getting more crops from the same land will get greed working towards getting people to stop burning chaff. Less burning of crops means better air quality.
What is your solution? Shake your finger at the farmers for their greed?
No. Figure out why Greed has been suppressing the flow of decades-old farming knowledge to this area of the world for a very long time. What you've described isn't new, and has been going on since horses and donkeys were our "tractors". There doesn't appear to be either a monopoly or connectivity problem when over a dozen ISPs provide broadband service in the Delhi area. Given that fact, dunno...maybe shake a finger or two at the "old dog" farmer who refuses to learn any new tricks?
If education and/or a
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These statements tend to imply that this burning event is an annual one,
Correct.
so perhaps before we start clutching our pearls over the 'crime against humanity', I'd love to know what the pollution levels have been for the last 10 years during this burning.
Bad enough to kill people.
You did notice that I linked to a two year old article about the problem, and the problem was not new then, either.
https://www.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
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What makes you think it wasn't a crime against humanity before?
Nobody should be burning stubble. You get better soil water and carbon retention if you turn it in.
Re:Burning fields (Score:4)
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Prior to the EPA, the air quality in many industrial American cities was famously atrocious. Acid rain around Philadelphia in the 1980s was so bad that rain would literally irritate or even burn skin, and the particulates bad enough that building exteriors would turn black within a year or two of being washed. LA was also legendary for air pollution. I was in grade school nort
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Records for the last decade indicate: bad. Seriously, the air there has always been terrible, even on good days, and the annual bad air from burning crops is just added pain on top of it. The air is literally dangerous to breathe. It's a seriously outdated farming technique, but trying to stop it creates seriously bad political fights.
West coast also has poor air quality (Score:2)
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Seattle had the title of worst air quality in the world a few days ago. It's time we fought to get that back. The Mariners fell on their face. What else do we have?
Build Nuclear (Score:1)
Re:Build Nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
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But radiation takes much longer to clear after you stop, ash simply settles after a while.
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I'm not sure that's quite true: there's decontamination of the plant when it reaches end-of-life, which isn't necessarily done by pulling the structure to bits and sealing it in canisters. But yes, at least it's possible to monitor the waste and take effective action if it's not sufficiently contained.
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You don't think those atomic bombs (and eventually hydrogen bombs) they built from the by-products of the reactors we encouraged them to build is negative?
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Technically, it's radioactivity.
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Re:Build Nuclear (Score:5, Funny)
If you want to reduce air pollution build new nuclear energy. If you want to continue killing people with fossil fuels don't listen to me. Remember coal kills more people every hour than non-soviet nuclear has ever total.
I'm all for building more nuke capacity, but energy sources has fuck-all to do with the article.
*Choking Indian* "Man, all this crop field ash and concrete construction dust is killin' me!"
*You* "That's what you get for not building more nuclear"
*Choking Indian* "WAT?"
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The obvious solution, then, is to nuke these crops from orbit.
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It's the only way to be sure.
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If you want to reduce air pollution build new nuclear energy.
That's obviously the only solution... clearly there's no other sources of energy which could be built quickly and would lesser lifetime AGW-exacerbating CO2 emissions. Except, you know, wind, or solar.
None of which has anything whatsoever to do with burning crop stubble, except that it has in common with nuclear being popular with people who want to watch the world burn.
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I don't know about that, an atomic bomb is pretty intermittent and the Indians have shown ingenuity in leveraging safe Candu reactors into bombs by extracting the plutonium from the waste.
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Remember, boys and girls, that nuclear power (including Chernobyl) has killed (to date) fewer people than normal Rush Hour traffic does every day (except Saturday and Sunday, when traffic is lighter).
And if you think I'm picking on the Russians, the other two nuclear disasters (Fukushima and TMI), have killed, between the two of them, to date, ONE person. He didn't die for eight years, but he did die....
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Well until India nukes Pakistan with the by-products of those safe nuclear reactors.
Will it change? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the outside looking in, probably not any time soon.
In the late 40s in Pennsylvania, you had something similar (e.g. the Donora Smog of 1948). However, the will was there to eventually pass legislation and establish oversight that had a major impact, such as establishing the EPA, and the clean air act. Of course, there are folks actively working to roll all that back in the name of industrial activity, and damn the consequences... they probably don't live next to a steel mill.
A cursory search doesn't lead me to any significant attempt to right the ship in India.
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This was all the American Way. Gummint keep your nose out of our business! Things changed when rivers actually caught fire and L.A. was the laughing stock of the country for having unbreathable air. The EPA essentially had to happen because the politics demanded that something be done. Lo and behold, today the Air in LA is not so terrible and we don't hear about rivers catching fire. Occasionally some mine lets a slag pond overflow into a river creating a strange color but they get a sternly worded let
Re: Darwin in action (Score:2)
One argument that "developing" countries make against environmental criticism from "developed" countries is that the "developed" countries went through the same periods of high pollution, ignoring public health in order to get an economic leg up (see Pittsburgh or London in the early 1900's). From that perspective declaring that developing countries should stop polluting is synonymous with saying they should stop developing, which isn't an option. The "do as we say, not as we did" argument is easy to attack
I have the solution (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm pretty sure there's already an embassy in the capital of India.
Just imagine what the pollution would be like without the embassy though!
She's an Author and Socialite (Score:2)
Guess we'd better do something about it then - all that pollution has reached the rich enclaves!
For those advocating libertarian anarchy (Score:2)
Welcome to Mad Max world folks. Sorry to all you bronchitis/asthma sufferers, aged, or young people, and all soon to be bronchitis/asthmatics. Only the tough survive in libertarian anarchy, as whichever of the gods you each freely believe in intended.
Instead of closing schools. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Shut down the polluters
As pointed out above, these "polluters" consist largely of poor, low caste people forced off farms who have moved to the city to feed their family of 12 by driving 2-cycle rickshaws. Put all of them out of work and you will have a riot that the government might not survive.
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This isn't an emissions discussion. It's about air pollution. These are not the same thing.
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Shit, Amazon's warehouses are on fire? I hope my orders got shipped before it happened!
Auto-Rickshaws (Score:5, Interesting)
If you go to big cities in India like Delhi or Mumbai, you will notice lots of Auto-Rickshaws [wikipedia.org]. They are tiny cars with super inefficient two-stroke engines. They are what Americans might find in a go-kart, a push lawnmower, or a leaf blower. They smell terrible and are a huge source of pollution [bbc.co.uk]. This is part of what it means to be a developing nation: using industrial-revolution era technology and not having enough of an economy to have things like enforcement of air pollution.
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* they killed Lawn Boy
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you need a spline tool, which is illegal to sell to end users
Do you mean one of these [amazon.com]?
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It is simply amazing this isn't the way for the EPA to be used as a tool to ban imports from China via Amazon.
India is a wasted opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, India has the potential to be the biggest most important player on the global scale, rivaling even the US. It has a strong, growing population, it's people are relatively well educated, it's industrious, and culturally unlike places like China it's relatively fair and accepting of other cultures making it a decent enough place to do business. Other than Pakistan and China it has no real rivals, has never really aligned with the West or the East; they could be both an economic powerhouse combined with being the neutral nice guys that everyone likes, giving them tremendous diplomatic power.
Two things hold it back: it's utter mismanagement of it's economy leading to widespread pollution (ie bad government), and it's caste system that just hampers opportunity and social mobility.
It's such a shame to see such wasted potential. I know the story there is much larger, not the least of which that India isn't even a country historically but rather a combination of several ethnicities and cultures and it is just a legacy of British colonialism. Still, the potential that India holds is so high; it sucks to see it struggle when it's clear it could be so much more.
My personal benchmark for this (Score:2)
Those numbers are a bit abstract. My personal benchmark for when this comes up is based on an incident that took place near Redwood City, CA. A large recycling plant near the bay caught fire. Residents were told to shelter in place. I was in San Jose at a friend's house and stayed there until it cleared. The number? 600.
Wasted minerals. (Score:1)
How long until they start mining the air for raw materials?
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Go see Krakow, Poland in winter (Score:2)
Have you ever been to Krakow in winter? Or any other Polish city for that matter? Polish households use coal or coal-like products to heat their homes when it's cold. The air quality gets so bad that you feel like there's no actual air in the air, and that's for 4-5 months straight since they have severe and long winters.
It costs money to protect the environment (Score:2)
What many so-called "green" types never get, or deliberately choose to ignore, is that it costs money, a lot of money, to protect the environment. For people who are living hand to mouth, talking about environmental protection is no different from talking about the afterlife, it is irrelevant to them.
By forcing developing countries to implement stringent env protection laws, it is effectively telling them to stay poor. Of course, many would go ahead and develop anyway if they can. After a country develop
Mark Twain (Score:2)
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason"--Mark Twain (b. 1835) #PeterPrinciple