Almost Everyone in Europe is Breathing Toxic Air (theguardian.com) 114
Europe is facing a "severe public health crisis," with almost everyone across the continent living in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution, an investigation by the Guardian has found. From the report: Analysis of data gathered using cutting-edge methodology -- including detailed satellite images and measurements from more than 1,400 ground monitoring stations -- reveals a dire picture of dirty air, with 98% of people living in areas with highly damaging fine particulate pollution that exceed World Health Organization guidelines. Almost two-thirds live in areas where air quality is more than double the WHO's guidelines.
The worst hit country in Europe is North Macedonia. Almost two-thirds of people across the country live in areas with more than four times the WHO guidelines for PM2.5, while four areas were found to have air pollution almost six times the figure, including in its capital, Skopje. Eastern Europe is significantly worse than western Europe, apart from Italy, where more than a third of those living in the Po valley and surrounding areas in the north of the country breath air that is four times the WHO figure for the most dangerous airborne particulates.
The worst hit country in Europe is North Macedonia. Almost two-thirds of people across the country live in areas with more than four times the WHO guidelines for PM2.5, while four areas were found to have air pollution almost six times the figure, including in its capital, Skopje. Eastern Europe is significantly worse than western Europe, apart from Italy, where more than a third of those living in the Po valley and surrounding areas in the north of the country breath air that is four times the WHO figure for the most dangerous airborne particulates.
Fair enough, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, sure, I accept that studies show reduced air quality. But if you need 1440 ground stations and cutting edge satellite imagery to tell you this, then I'd hardly call it "toxic air" or a "public health crisis". A public health crisis is something that becomes evident when there is, in fact, a widespread and obvious issue with the public's health. That type of thing is something that should become self evident with data coming in from health care channels, not data from cutting edge satellite imagery requiring complex analysis.
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Exactly, as UN chief said: we are past the global warming stage, we have just entered global boiling! I dropped water some water on my balcony and went to check 30 minutes later and it was all gone, all boiled away so my own test shows that UN boss is right!
Same for pollution, we have reached the boiling phase, we need to stop all human activity and instigate lock-down so people stop moving and polluting.
Also, there are way too many people on the planet so we must raise food prices to such an extend that on
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It's probably global warming tracking stuff being "misused" to point out at a much more severe and immediate problem caused by the same things that don't get as near as much PR, because either companies don't want you to know you're being slowly suffocated to death, or there are people that purposefully want those deaths to happen.
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Or perhaps the thresholds for what is "safe" have huge margins so even twice or four times that level isn't really a problem.
Hominids have been sitting around campfires for a million years. A wood-burning stove in a hut produces way more particulates than the WHO's guidelines. So does a candle.
My prediction: No one will pay attention to this "crisis" and life will go on.
Re:Fair enough, but... (Score:5, Informative)
We do have around 7 million deaths per year from air pollution, so it's not a nothing.
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That's worse than covid!
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That's worse than covid!
Indeed. Of course, the COVID deaths are to date, whereas the air pollution deaths repeat each year.
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But much of that air pollution in India is directly the result of the manufacture of solar panels.
A claim like that needs trustworthy evidence.
Re:Fair enough, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fair enough, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Did you mean ERoEI? Energy Return on Energy Investment? Or maybe EROI [wikipedia.org] - Energy return on investment?
Because I'm seeing that being closer to 9. An actual study that includes recycling says 7(Alaska)-15(Florida) [rsc.org] with batteries. Batteries decrease EROI substantially, because they take energy to make. If you do grid-connect, that increases to 14(Alaska)-27(Arizona).
So, no, that's not the "best case" for solar I can make. It might be the best worst case you can make. I'm not seeing the Tesla publication claiming 4. Edit: Well, I think I found it. [bravenewclimate.com] It's specifically for Germany, for a grid disconnected house, IE lots of batteries, using 2014 tech. We've improved the technology quite a bit since then.
Also, a critical failure: Solar panels are not 100% made using coal power. There's still hydro, nuclear, and natural gas to consider. Plus, as long as they're above 1 - and by your own admission a solar panel will return 4 times what it took to make it. Ergo, solar panels can be used to make more solar panels. Wind power works as well.
Hell, consider the worst case that solar panels ARE built using coal power, 100%. They still reduce coal use by 75% because now you're not having to burn as much coal to produce electricity.
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You also have to compare, deaths vs. what?
The baseline is dirt floor poverty for hundreds of millions, not western suburbia. As they industrialize, life expectancies should be skyrocketing in spite of pollution deaths, just like western countries 150 years ago.
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Re: Fair enough, but... (Score:3)
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Re: Fair enough, but... (Score:5, Informative)
"Hominids have been sitting around campfires for a million years. A wood-burning stove in a hut produces way more particulates than the WHO's guidelines."
Wood burning stoves in huts are in fact a leasing cause of cancer in the third world, so yeah. That's over the WHO guidelines, AND IT SHOULD BE. People are literally being killed by that RIGHT NOW and you are dismissing it.
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Or perhaps the thresholds for what is "safe" have huge margins so even twice or four times that level isn't really a problem.
Hominids have been sitting around campfires for a million years. A wood-burning stove in a hut produces way more particulates than the WHO's guidelines. So does a candle.
Data. Put up or shit up.
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Hominids have been sitting around campfires for a million years.
And how many of them lived beyond their 30s?
This may just be one of the dumbest points you've ever tried to make.
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Most of them. Life expectancy being in the 20's is a result of many infants dying shortly after birth. If one survives past 5 years old, the life expectancy doubles.
Re:Fair enough, but... (Score:4)
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Germany's coal consumption has been falling for years, and has not reversed. Gas consumption slightly increased last year, as did renewable energy production.
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2022's stats show a continued drop in coal consumption. We obviously don't have 2023's stats.
Do you have a source?
Re:Fair enough, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, sure, I accept that studies show reduced air quality. But if you need 1440 ground stations and cutting edge satellite imagery to tell you this, then I'd hardly call it "toxic air" or a "public health crisis". A public health crisis is something that becomes evident when there is, in fact, a widespread and obvious issue with the public's health. That type of thing is something that should become self evident with data coming in from health care channels, not data from cutting edge satellite imagery requiring complex analysis.
The consequences of breathing a lot of toxic air may not become apparent in individuals for decades, but we know it's unhealthy. Consider this. Your children's school gets remodeled and new insulation is put in. Then someone checks the air quality in the school and determines that there's asbestos in the air and that it's coming from the new insulation which (in this imaginary scenario) is asbestos. Do you say: "if you need [air testing] to tell you this, then I'd hardly call it 'toxic air' or a '... health crisis'. A ... health crisis is something that becomes evident when there is, in fact, a widespread and obvious issue with [shoolchildren's] health."? That would be consistent with your position here. You would insist on your children being left in school, breathing in asbestos and only become concerned if they developed mesothelioma or other issues years and years later. That, of course, would be stupid. We know that asbestos particles in the air are terrible for the health of anyone breathing them in so, when we find asbestos particles in the air we react accordingly _before_ it becomes a health crisis. Kind of like how, when we catch fire we move instantly to put out the fire rather than just letting it burn and deciding to maybe react if it turns out that being on fire is harmful.
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What you describe here is a sudden change - yesterday: no asbestos, today: asbestos - and of course you will rather detect such a pollutant in advance than figure out its bad effects a few years later.
In the actual case we're looking at no sudden change. That's the air, which has been around us for decades, and which likely has improved in the last three decades due to much stricter environmental laws. People are not dying from "bad air" either these days: they're mostly dying from unhealthy nutrition/lifes
Re: Fair enough, but... (Score:2)
"People are not dying from "bad air" either these days"
https://www.who.int/health-top... [who.int]
HTH noob
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Yes, there will be sudden changes in some areas, but these will not affect 99% of the world population. Germans are roughly 1% ...
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People are not dying from "bad air" either these days: they're mostly dying from unhealthy nutrition/lifestyle and from very old age.
The problem is that what you're saying simply isn't true. Sure, nutrition/lifestyle is an issue, but there have been numerous, credible studies showing that poor air quality leads to reduced lifespans in populations.
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In many cases, the remediation of the asbestos was the source of the problem. I worked for years in places with asbestos embedded in the walls that could not be touched. It was fine as long as we didn't drill or cut.
Eventually the building was torn down. It's orthogonal to your point except to indicate that asbestos isn't the perfect exemplar of what you are trying to say.
This whole topic lacks historical context. Most of Central Europe was submerged in a lignite haze that dwarfed the disgusting coal du
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We have panics over stuff from time to time. The drum is beaten loudly until Congress spends hundreds of billions to address it.
Curious, that.
Before asbestos, it was black mold. Which, it turns out, isn't a problem except for one rare species. It was all fraud.
Watch for panicks. Journalists, do your job. Follow the money.
Re: Fair enough, but... (Score:2)
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The consequences of breathing a lot of toxic air may not become apparent in individuals for decades, but we know it's unhealthy.
But that's not a crisis now, is it? By their own admission, it's barely detectable using state of the art analysis. It has an unknown and currently unknowable future effect. I am 100% certain that it's not a good effect, and I grant that. But that's not a health crisis now, and is likely not to be in the future either.
20% or so of the world's population smokes. They breathe pure toxins in a dozen or more times a day. That's not a health crisis either - it has been perfectly manageable for generations.
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But that's not a crisis now, is it?
If you know what the inevitable long-term consequences are then it is a crisis right now. Hence the comparison to your clothes catching fire. You may be able to let your clothes burn merrily without being burned yourself, for a time, but harm to yourself is obviously inevitable in that situation. So, it is indeed a crisis because the result is not "unknown and unknowable". The same is true of these air quality issues. There's plenty of research showing that this kind of air pollution reduces lifespans.
20% or so of the world's population smokes. They breathe pure toxins in a dozen or more times a day. That's not a health crisis either - it has been perfectly manageable for generations. It's not a good effect, and it's preventable, but it's not a crisis.
This
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When the wolf has been here for generations, it's an ongoing problem, not a crisis.
Otherwise by your definition, old age is a crisis, because the vast majority of people die from age-related diseases.
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When the wolf has been here for generations, it's an ongoing problem, not a crisis.
No, that can still be a crisis. It's not a crisis if it's a permanent, persistent condition, but a time of crisis can extend for years. In the this case, by the way, the air quality has in fact taken a turn for the worse recently.
Otherwise by your definition, old age is a crisis, because the vast majority of people die from age-related diseases.
Old age is a chronic issue. It has always existed and will continue to exist into the foreseeable future. That indefinite timespan makes it not a crisis. A condition that shortens lifespans so that old age and death from old age occur sooner across the whole population would be a c
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the air quality has in fact taken a turn for the worse recently.
Where did you see data indicating this? The map in the article is average data from 2000-2019. Moreover, from the article:
They say pollution levels will not be significantly different today, but added there may be areas where stringent anti-pollution measures have been implemented that have seen some improvement.
Which implies the opposite of what you're saying.
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In terms of health issues like this, I consider within decades to be pretty recent. The point is that it's a correctable problem that shortens life spans, so we need to correct it. You can nitpick over whether the word "crisis" is appropriate, but it doesn't change the facts of the matter.
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And they should be able to tell you that smoking causes cancer after 1 cigarette, right? Cumulative effects are a weak signal in a lot of noise. It doesn't mean it doesn't shorten lifespans significantly - it just means it's really hard to measure the human impact because it's not in isolation.
Be thankful that preserving health is now at the level of removing particulates and trace chemicals from the environment. It means we have overall come a long way from basic safety concerns that are obvious and avo
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Yeah, these sort of excessive headlines just diminish actual problems.
I'm a super fan of Purple Air and their model of citizen-based data. Previously one did have rely on gate keepers for raw data. The organization that maintained the one air quality sensor in your city and/or who ever administers the satellite data. I don't think anyone was out to mess with the data, but there was very little and it wasn't very accessible. With the PurpleAir model people can buy a device and if they choose (importan
I know right? (Score:3)
And as for those 1.7 ppm of Asbestos the State inspector found I say, that's not enough I demand more Asbestos!
There's all sorts of things that aren't immediately obviously poisonous. Air with particulate matter in it especially. I'd really like to not die in my late 50s of lung cancer for no good reason.
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But the main point of this study is to show how accurate, granular data about concentrations can be gathered & analysed to better inform policy decision-making. Not all countries prostrate themselves before the almighty car manufacturing industry & ignore the horrible effects that an over-abundance of cars has of people's health.
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Cases of asthma have been rising in line with pollution. There are widespread, detectable health consequences.
The availability of high accuracy PM2.5 sensors is relatively new, but smaller scale testing proved the link to health problems long ago.
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> a widespread and obvious issue with the public's health
Ever heard of cancer? PM2.5 enters your bloodstream via lungs.
The air in the UK is pretty good but if you go down the London underground with a meter you find a different story, amd a lot of that stuff is airborne asbestos too.
Other areas of the world with different weather patterns however will have this stuff accumulate.
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Ok, sure, I accept that studies show reduced air quality. But if you need 1440 ground stations and cutting edge satellite imagery to tell you this, then I'd hardly call it "toxic air" or a "public health crisis". A public health crisis is something that becomes evident when there is, in fact, a widespread and obvious issue with the public's health. That type of thing is something that should become self evident with data coming in from health care channels, not data from cutting edge satellite imagery requiring complex analysis.
Firstly it's the Guardian, arguably one of the better papers but still far too clickbaity.
./ 2 minutes of "You-Rope is bad heheh" hate.
Secondly this is your standard
I suspect the air quality in some of Europe's worst cities is better than that in the US. It's just that we tend to care about it a bit more (hence we have various CAZ (Clean Air Zone) and LEZ (Low Emission Zone) type programmes).
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But if you need 1440 ground stations and cutting edge satellite imagery to tell you this, then I'd hardly call it "toxic air" or a "public health crisis". A public health crisis is something that becomes evident when there is, in fact, a widespread and obvious issue with the public's health.
There is evidence of obvious issues with public health. The use of ground stations are to determine the source of the health issue and countless scientific studies have correlated the health outcomes to the toxic air.
Incidentally a lot of people died of cancer from smoking before we did any studies that linked smoking to cancer. Just because no one had invested into the measurements doesn't mean the underlying data wasn't already there.
Article needs (Score:3)
...a #wereallgoingtodie tag
The Dose Make the Poison (Score:5, Interesting)
I think one thing we as a society struggle with is trying to quantify exposure to various substances. Public health officials will say things like "there is no safe dose of lead", but nobody really believes your skin coming into contact a single lead atom once in your entire life would ever have a negative effect. There is a dose at which effects become noticeable, but nobody can safely quantify that dose because it would be unethical to ever conduct a controlled study to find out (because it would effectively require quarantining people in a lab for decades and intentionally exposing them to lead at different levels).
Air pollution is the same way. It's impossible to accurately quantify the exposure risk, especially when you are talking about a wide variety of chemicals that may exist in air. And different elements of the population may respond differently. What we can observe is that human lifespans (and health spans) in Europe currently appear to better today than in the past. So whatever the impact of current levels, it's probably not enough to serious impact health for most persons. Of course people living right next to certain facilities or people with occupational exposure may receive much higher doses which may indeed at levels that impact health in a noticeable way.
It depends (Score:2, Insightful)
So no, dose doesn't make the poison, total exposure does. Some things our bodies can expunge. Smog is generally one of them, but if you're exposed to it every day in the quantities suggested a significant number of people will die in their 50s through no fault of their own.
I'd call that a public health crisis, wouldn't you?
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Re:It depends (Score:4, Informative)
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One thing, which commonly happened in science, and also in regulations based on such science, was the following:
So that one lead atom - if there was an affordable method to detect it - would have quickly been declared a dea
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That statement is B.S. (Score:2)
>> 3 Nobody dared questioning the new limits.
That statement is B.S.
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A very close relative of mine was personally involved in research debunking the ridiculously low limits for some mycotoxins. These lower and lower limits were not questioned ever before his research proved them wrong. I have personally observed this process from the first row.
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So, you are saying that somebody dared questioning the limits, right ?
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Yes, someone did question these limits in a very limited field, received lots of flak for doing this, but experimental evidence eventually proved the research correct. I do not see this happen in many fields, so I am not surprised about the claim, that "99% of the world population breathes toxic air".
Yes, there are large regions on this planet, especially in urban areas of South and East Asia, where the air is quite unhealthy, and yes, we should take measures to address bad air quality wherever it persists.
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I think one thing we as a society struggle with is trying to quantify exposure to various substances. Public health officials will say things like "there is no safe dose of lead", but nobody really believes your skin coming into contact a single lead atom once in your entire life would ever have a negative effect.
Well, True enough, but lead has no safe dose because it isn't something like say selenium, which is a needed substance, but is toxic in large doses.
And no, one atom isn't going to kill you. But the cumulative effects might. Even more likely is that they will create various problems. So the rule is avoid all exposure when possible
Now people can get overly excited about things like tin/lead solder, and ban it. And then replace it with antimony, which is in itself poisonous - with symptoms similar to arse
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Who modded you up?
There are other ways to do studies than labs. Here's a study that links to more than a dozen other studies on lead toxicity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
We know that lead is toxic. Can the human body repair from damage? Yes, it can. Does that mean a poison you survive wasn't a poison? Of course not. If someone beats you up, he's not proclaimed innocent on the basis of whether or not you'll eventually heal from the wounds he caused.
When public health officials and doctors say that ther
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Nobody is questioning that lead (or the things in the air they are referring to) are toxic or can impact health. The question that is incredibly difficult to answer is what level exposure will lead to measurable/noticeable ill-effects, and attending policy question of what is reasonable to do to mitigate exposure. Clearly, it makes no sense to pass policy that attempts to prevent anybody from ever coming into contact with a single atom of lead (nor is that remotely possible). We've removed it from household
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The question that is incredibly difficult to answer is what level exposure will lead to measurable/noticeable ill-effects
No.
Metaphoricaly, you are still trying to argue that if we only murder a couple people, nobody would notice much. And you're trying to figure out how many people we could murder before society as a whole starts to notice that something is going on.
Civilization doesn't work like that.
We made murder illegal. That's how it works.
Now that we have the basics out of the way (nobody should put lead into the atmosphere, period), we can talk about possible exceptions to the rule. The same way self-defense can get yo
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The problem is that they live north of the Sahara Dust Bowl.
Just Come To America Like Your Ancestors. (Score:2)
We have great *cough* air *cough*. Just don't drink the Kool-Aid. Bring a lawnmower, because you will get hungry and everyone is a vegan.
Running out of time, running out of options (Score:4, Insightful)
Europe would see cleaner air from more use of nuclear fission power. The usual kneejerk response to any mention of nuclear fission for energy is that it costs too much. How much does air pollution costs? How much does global warming cost? How much would it cost to run undersea cables to Africa to get enough wind and solar power to replace all the fossil fuel power plants in Europe? The monetary costs might be manageable, so long as the nations of Europe and Africa got along. I'm not so sure how that relationship would work out long term. We could see a repeat of Russia using European dependence on their energy against them. We could see a repeat of Europeans colonizing Africa, or at least debate over if that's what might be happening if there's wealth in natural resources like wind and sun being exported to Europe.
The IPCC has been issuing reports on global warming that points out that there's no chance of averting global warming without greater utilization of nuclear fission for energy. The IPCC is not alone in this assessment. The UK government has issued similar reports in the past, which explains why they are so adamant to build more nuclear power plants in spite of the rising costs.
I'll see people go just ballistic on how we should not, could not, and would not consider more nuclear power. Well, we are running out of time and running out of options. We can keep burning fossil fuels until we figure out nuclear fusion, figure out how to better harness geothermal energy, or build some globe spanning electrical grid to get wind and solar power where it is needed. Or we can use what technology we have now to keep the lights on and not see global warming get worse, and one such technology is nuclear fission.
You don't have to like your options but refusing to accept them isn't likely to work out well for you long term.
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>> cleaner air from more use of nuclear fission power
Soo funny, but nope. That is completely B.S.
For the exact same cost, you get 3-4x more kWh of electricity using solar and wind installation than a nuke install.
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> For the exact same cost, you get 3-4x more kWh of electricity using solar and wind installation than a nuke install.
No, wind and solar are massivly more expensive in the long run not to metion more wasteful.
1. Wind doenst blow, no electricity. That state could last weeks.
2. Sun dont shine, no electricity. That state certainly lasts weeks and in winter it's even worse as when the sun does shine you get barely anything as it is so so much weaker than in summer.
3. 25 years and you have to decide what to
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Nuclear needs de-regulation.
The reason why it is so expensive is because the greens and oil companies tied it up with so much red tape that to build a nuclear powerstation every bolt, every weld must be made by hand and inspected and signed off.
Small moduler reactors luckily dont have all the red tape and the UK are pushing these hard. They can be made essentially disposable, enclosed units that last decades powering nearby towns. Or more flexible models that can be refuelled to last longer.
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Nuclear needs de-regulation.
Ah yes, what we need to do is de-regulate this hazardous and complex technology so that we can have more problems with it. How could we all have been so stupid as to miss this obvious fact? We want meltdowns now!
Small moduler reactors luckily dont have all the red tape
They also don't exist. No one has ever built even a single prototype of a commercially viable SMR.
They can be made essentially disposable, enclosed units that last decades powering nearby towns.
Prove it. So far, no one has done so.
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Prove it. So far, no one has done so.
They'd love to, but to prove it works means building prototypes. Then we get to people demanding proof it works before the license to build the prototype is issued. It's not like we don't have 50 years of evidence on how the basics of a nuclear reactor works, and 50 years of operating them safely. You want proof it works? That's not happening until something is built in the real world. But then nobody wants actual proof it works because then they'd look bad for getting in the way of the technology for
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Europe would see cleaner air from more use of nuclear fission power.
Nuclear fission doesn't reduce diesel particulates, it doesn't reduce farming emissions, it doesn't address the many sources of air quality problems we deal with. There's a reason the worse air quality is measured in the middle of city centres, and it's not because someone built a coal power plant there.
FFS you nuclear trolls could at least stick to trolling somewhat relevant articles. You're now turning into caricatures of yourself which all leads to nuclear power being taken less seriously. Stop working a
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It would also see cleaner air from not smoking.
Removing particle filter on diesel car is cheaper. (Score:4, Interesting)
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DPFs make diesels more carcinogenic, not less.
Diesel soot is big and greasy, the particles tend to clump and they are larger than your cilia so they are easily removed from the lungs. The purpose of the DPF is to trap soot and let it burn again. When this happens, the vehicle emits more CO2, and finer soot. It reduces soot mass by around 50%, but the remaining soot is PM2.5 and smaller and it's smaller than your cilia, so it tends to persist. Any persistant irritant can cause cancer, and soot is definitely
Greek Arsons (Score:2)
A substantia part of the bad air quality in Macedonia has to be the result of dozens of intentionally-set wildfires in Greece this summer.
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The country's Constitutional name, I believe, continues to be the Republic of Macedonia. The names "FYROM" (former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia"), then later "North Macedonia," were forced on it by Greece for reasons related to the ongoing fallout of the Balkan Wars of about 110 years ago.
What happened during those wars is that, generally, stronger countries and territories tried to annex weaker ones, and in this case, Greece gained control over part of the historic region of Macedonia, and did a degree
The cause. What is the cause of this? (Score:2)
This is the important part.
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The cause: This is the important part.
From the article: ..."
"The measurements refer to PM2.5 – tiny airborne particles mostly produced from the burning of fossil fuels, some of which can pass through the lungs and into the blood stream...
Traffic, industry, domestic heating and agriculture are the main sources of PM2.5
That's as much as it states. Perhaps there's more in the study, but I don't care enough to go look (assuming I can even get to it).
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I'm more concerned about what can be done to mitigate against this. We'd need to have some understanding of the cause to come up with solutions but it would seem to me that the causes are quite apparent while the solutions perhaps a bit less apparent.
Solutions to particulate pollution from electricity generation would be shifting from fossil fuels to hydro, nuclear, onshore wind, and maybe geothermal. None of these options burn anything for power, and have a history of being safe and low cost.
Particulates
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The answers to this are pretty simple. They're man made and based on the consumption of Fossil fuels.(Ignoring the naturally occuring environment contributors which aren't the main cause)
Short term
Move to an area with lower particulates
Wear a mask suitable for PM2.5
Medium term
support tighter emission controls
Support clean non-fossil solutions ie BEV, nuclear. (Solar and Wind with fossil gas and coal firming is not non-fossil, biomass is also unclea
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Long Term
Ban All Fossil fuel power generation
Ban Biomass combustion Generation
Ban Biomass
Ban Fossil based concrete
Ban Fossil based steel and aluminium production
Bans won't work if there isn't an alternative offered. Much like there was no effective ban on whale oil until kerosene came along. There were attempts to ban whale oil before kerosene became a viable alternative but those attempts to implement a ban failed, if implemented then enforcement was lax, and if there were any attempts at rigorous enforcement then violations were so numerous that it was rather pointless. Expect the same on fossil fuels, there must be a viable alternative or enforcement of any b
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> I recall a periodic burn of forest area is necessary to maintaining healthy mature trees
Yes, but we live in an age where we dont let that happen, which is why Australia flared up.
Easy fix... (Score:2)
Price of progress (Score:2)
PM2.5 is made by burning "stuff" (Score:2)
This "stuff" is primarily fossil fuels in the form of gas, coal and liquid fuels. However biomass does make some contribution.
We burn stuff in a fuel engine like a petrol or diesel car, we burn stuff to make steel and we burn stuff to make concrete.
If you want to stop PM2.5 you need to stop burning stuff and this mostly aligns with the move to lowering world CO2 emissions. However there are some key standouts.
If you're backing up "green" technologies with coal and gas you're doing it wrong and you're going
Cities (Score:2)
It's the cities. Population density plus traffic plus construction, minus forests to clean the air.
Cities are at the same time our biggest invention and our worst invention. Modern society would not exist without them, but they are long known for being unhealthy in hundreds of ways.
I wonder if we'll eventually invent something better.
Clickbait is as clickbait does (Score:2)
And here I thought I was going to read about chlorine gas or a serious chemical spill. The headline is more toxic than the air.
Almost Everyone in Europe is Breathing Badly Polluted Air **
There, was that so hard?
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** It is not a "public health crisis" unless we leave it that way, in which case it will eventually become one. People aren't being carried to hospitals in stretchers by the thousands at this moment. It is not an emergent situation, it is a dangerous situation that will have long term consequences
Going underground (Score:2)
After the latest Khan ULEZ fiasco I've discovered why I will probably never set foor insode the London underground again without a gas mask.
The air down there is incredibly unhealthy, nearly toxic.
Use the buses! Up above the London air is practically pure in comparison.
And I should believe The Guardian why? (Score:3)
Why should we be inflicted with their daily partisan talking points?
Re: (Score:2)
Because sometimes it's useful to know what delusions are being harbored by others.
CO_2 (Score:2)
Thankfully, however, CO_2 is being reduced!
Re: (Score:2)
WHO provided guidelines for safe air quality, not the research or data itself. If you don't trust WHO, you can just look the map and select your own level for safe air quality.
Re: (Score:1)
The WHO is a political organization with a healthcare name. There goal is to use fear as a means to take control from you and me, and give it to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington DC.
You don't have control either way.
If the WHO doesn't successfully encourage governments to control the quality of the air you breathe, then big polluters will control the quality of the air you breathe.
Right now, it appears that the people controlling *you* in particular are the ones who fed you those silly talking points that you spit back out verbatim.
Re: (Score:2)
If the WHO doesn't successfully encourage governments to control the quality of the air you breathe, then big polluters will control the quality of the air you breathe.
This is pretty much what we've done up to this point. It seems most of our regulations come about when we find a new way to be assholes to the whole of the planet or at least the little chunk of it we inhabit, and somebody finally comes along and says, "Yeah, we should probably not let the biggest dick involved be making all the big decisions about what's acceptable here." Unfortunately, this makes small minded folks think that the person coming along after the fact and suggesting we not allow anything goes