Can jet engines clean up Delhi's air? | Hacker News Reader

Can jet engines clean up Delhi's air?

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84 pointsscdoshi121 comments

Doesn't this just make the smog somebody else's problem? Unless I'm missing something - which is quite possible - it appears to be perhaps the purest expression yet of the "not in my backyard" concept.

Smog is made of up several things, but some of it is only stable over relatively short time frames. Move that to the upper atmosphere and it does not nessisarily end up in anyone's back yard.

EX: Ozone is not heathy, but it's useful in the upper atmosphere. It's formed in part from Nox compounds, but they both end up as N2 and O2 the two main components of the atmosphere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_oxide

PS: This seems unlikely to work well. However, one option to break up the heat inversion might be to change surface coloration over a relatively large area to create large updrafts / downdrafts.

The jet engine idea is absurd. Why not build a taller stack that pokes through the inversion layer? Non-trivial to engineer, but guaranteed to work if constructed.

In the end using coal is probably a super bad idea. Hopefully other methods come online soon.

My guess is the inversion layer is thicker than a taller smokestack could be practically constructed.

Yes, we can build buildings almost 1km high, but that's not practical for every smoke stack in the city.

A jet engine is a much cheaper and quicker to deploy option, assuming it actually works.

Last time I checked, a jet engine doesn't quite blow smoke entirely across a tarmac.

Maybe hot air just rises anyway. Maybe kinetic influence matters less than boosting the thermal energy?

But inversion layers change with the weather, so even if this works once, it may not work every time. And a band-aid that fixes this now, may only encourage more runaway growth covered up by more band-aids.

Wouldn't want to actually change technologies though. Just blunder along and cobble together dust busters and blow torches and continue with business as usual.

I suppose I'd only expect roughly the same from my own town supervisor...

I have my doubts as well as to its effectiveness, and of course, it's just a band-aid, but if the band-aid stops the pain long enough to fix the underlying issue, then go for it.

Unfortunately, like many tech band-aids, once the pain goes away the problem is ignored until it flares up again.

In the UK 30+ years ago we had a scool trip to Cranfield university and they had been experimenting with using tall chimneys to fire giant smoke rings into the upper atmosphere to do something similar,

> In the end using coal is probably a super bad idea. Hopefully other methods come online soon.

The only use of coal is for electricity in the power plants already there. Coal makes the majority of the fuels used to power India.

I'm from Poland and I would bet that majority of homes are still heated with coal every winter.

Responses to pollution depend, in part, on concentration.

Pour a bag of fertilizer in a little garden pond and you'll kill any fish that may have lived there, and the water will turn to an algae muck quickly. That little pond may never heal.

Sprinkle the same bag widely over the surface of a large lake, and the algae, plankton, and seaweed will take up the fertilizer, grow a bit, get eaten by fish, and the whole system will return to equilibrium.

Similarly, smog will eventually nucleate rain clouds and fall to earth, noxious ozone will disperse to the upper atmosphere, and volatiles will degrade.

True, some effects remain (like the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere), but there's some benefit to changing "deadly concentrations for millions of people in this small area right this moment" to "long-term effects for a large geographic area in the future".

Unfortunately, many kinds of pollution would also be mitigated by being spread out temporally as well as spatially. If we could spread out our CO2 emissions over many millenia, they'd be no problem for the environment to take care of.

In addition to the quick decay of much of the smog described by Retric, you also have a huge benefit purely from dilution. The world is really big, and most humans live clustered in <1% of its area. So even if every coal-burning plant on the planet were to implement this tech fully, it would decrease the worldwide human exposure by a couple orders of magnitude.

The effect is even more extreme when you consider the vertical dimension; probably at least another order of magnitude, but hard as a layman to estimate.

I don't know what it's like in India, but in the US people seem to only care about pollution that looks or smells bad. If rivers are catching fire or the sky is hazy from emissions, people seem to become more environmentally friendly. Which makes sense, you're not relying on some elite expert, but your own gut reaction. However if we start hiding pollution will that have the effect of making people care less about the effects of pollution that aren't easily detectable anymore, such as climate change?

You're making a general argument that we should impose injuries to people in order to incentivize them to not produce a negative externality. Not a transfer from them to someone else (like the government) in order to align their incentives, but literally a dead-weight loss, as if the government smashed your windshield in every 10k miles you drove in order to incentivize you to drive less.

Actually, it would be more like the government randomly picked a thousand motorist on the road each day and executed them in order to disincentivize driving. Literally half a million people per year die of smog in India.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

The way I see it is that you've got a garbage fire in your backyard and it smells bad and is making breathing difficult, so the government steps in with a giant fan to blow the bad smell away from you instead of working on finding a real solution.

Maybe this will work in the short term, but I'm a bit worried that it will cause complacency with the current situation. If they said that they were moving away from coal-fired plants to look for better energy solutions in addition to this, I doubt anyone would have any complaints. This feels like a band-aid fix when they should be amputating the arm.

Smog is different than carbon. Traffic deaths are different than carbon. We don't give up on reducing traffic deaths in order to disincentivize carbon.

You're seriously suggesting allowing half a million people to die per year unnecessarily in order to incentivize them to adopt cleaner power plants.

Why are you putting words in my mouth? I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm suggesting that the government look into different solutions in addition to this. The CO2/kwh of coal is the highest of any modern energy source. If they're willing to spend money powering jet engines to shoot the smog higher into the atmosphere, why won't they transition to using a cleaner energy source that requires less money to maintain?

> I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm suggesting that the government look into different solutions in addition to this.

OK, then I am happy to withdraw my characterization of your comment. Your comment just adds nothing substantive to the discussion.

> If they're willing to spend money powering jet engines to shoot the smog higher into the atmosphere, why won't they transition to using a cleaner energy source that requires less money to maintain?

Because one is orders of magnitude more expensive than the other. It's as unrelated as bringing up carbon emissions by cars when people are discussing highway safety.

I was saying that if they were making any effort to clean up their energy source, there would be no backlash. You're trying to make this into a dichotomy where either you're for or against the deaths of people from smog. So, if I'm not participating in your flamewar, I'm not adding anything substantive?

It is reminiscent of the "clean-coal" marketing scheme that already exists in the United States and that's what most people in this thread are discussing.

You're not adding anything substantive because your reply to my comment introduces a completely distinct issues from what's discussed in my comment, and you do not appear to have a grasp of their relative effect size. You said "This feels like a band-aid fix when they should be amputating the arm." But the ill effect of the smog produced by a given plant in India is dramatically worse, and easier to fix, than the ill effects of the carbon.

Do you even know just how much it costs to run a power plant?

You need a few hundred (400-600) tons of coal per hour per one decently sized BLOCK (few hundred MW), usually power plants have several of those, sometimes a dozen or more, a few jet engines running at full blast its a big deal compared with a FUCKING POWER PLANT /rant

Also, none of the renewable energy sources are cheaper than coal, especially when you look at the bigger picture (mostly unutilised capacity, grid overbuild requirements, volatility)

They could transition to a combined cycle plant if they wanted to increase efficiency. I'm obviously not an expert, just like 99% of people here. If you look at the basic sentiment here it is that this seems like a fake solution to the problem of coal power plants and I somewhat agree. I think that it would help to know that they are at least attempting to move away from coal towards nuclear or renewable sources. It seems like there are a lot of solutions that could be pursued.

The problem is smog.

>They could transition to a combined cycle plant if they wanted to increase efficiency.

And who is going to pay for that? How do they fuel them? They already have to import a sizable part of their natural gas consumption. Do they spend even more and add coal gassification?

India is building out nuclear, obviously after Fukushima retards made sure to obstruct as much as they could

Again, the issue is smog, that is killing right fucking now. Should they just ignore the problem and develop a massive program so you feel better?

You can use coal and avoid smog. It's an incentive problem without enforcement pollution is slightly cheaper. So, really the core problem is corruption not technology.

Considering many people can save money by installing solar power without incentives that's not actually true.

The problem with coal is not power production, it's the infrastructure of power distribution that makes going off grid so viable.

If you actually manage to go off grid then yes, maybe you are able to save. Good luck doing it without either massive lifestyle change or tons of capital for storage in most of the world.

Once you take the feed-in away the benefit is not so clear cut. Also, many people dump the externalities of home solar on everyone else (the negative spot electricity price) and then use cheap power from the grid for most of the 24h cycle

Where do you think going off grid is so viable?

For people like me that use less than 600kwh / month or 20kwh/day just about anywhere in the US works as long as you are not in an apartment. In the northern US you will want a solar hot water heater, but that's got a 2-5 year ROI.

Granted, my electric would only be 50-60$ a month so the savings is also not huge, but that still adds up to 9-11k in 15 years and panels last well past that.

PS: Solar quietly got really cheap, installation is often one of the major costs.

Wouldn't cleaner power plants = less pollution = less deaths?

"Ecology" extremists are becoming crazy as of late.

Sure, let's let them suffocate, starve or have their society collapse, as long as they are not burning coal!

Except that this isn't the Government doing anything - it's an externality of industry operating in the area. The Government would have to do something to prevent people from seeing the issue, which is the moral opposite of what you're suggesting - it's the Government tricking people into failing to see the results of industry.

Are you really trying to exploit the distinction between government action vs. inaction here? It's trivial to modify my example: just replace "executing 1,000 people per day" with "purposefully not pursue safety standards that would save 1,000 lives per day". The position is insane.

Except that they're not implementing safety standards - they're just making the problem less visible. It's like if, instead of implementing a reasonable Health & Safety organisation with teeth, they forced companies to hire people not related to the local community to kill by negligence instead, making the deaths less hurtful as they're mostly happening to "somebody else".

"Blow the deadly smog away from people who are dying" is the safety standard, which we can implement or not implement. This isn't just people's ability to notice, this is a huge, deadly, quality-of-life destroying phenomenon.

The deaths don't happen to someone else! As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the number of death reduced by this policy is greater by many orders of magnitude than the number of deaths caused.

I don't see where elsewhere in the thread this is stated, especially not with references to studies on similar ideas. Destroying the atmosphere by messing with it on a large scale kills people over time - implementing a solution to the problem of creating smog in the first place kills nobody.

Perhaps this could be useful short term to prevent deaths now long enough to implement a better solution - but the fear is that it's not going to be short term at all.

You're conflating smog and CO2! CO2 is invisible and a free molecular gas. Smog is mesoscopic particulate matter.

It does. What's worse, people who pollute in Delphi won't have any incentive to stop doing it now, the air will be clean no matter what they do, so might as well continue burning rubbish.

When Germany had problems with acid rains they did something similar (exhaust higher up) and had to stop because the only thing that happened was that acid rains spread to larger radius. Is this different because it's going to hit higher altitude?

Canada and the US have both been doing this for decades.

In Canada, the Sudbury SuperStack is the cause for acid rain across the eastern seaboard of the North American Continent.

And where does the garbage from large dense cities go? Into land fills, externalized, definitely not within the city limits :)

There is no other place for the pollution to go other than somewhere else "not in my backyard." Unless we throw it up into space, basically every single waste management system is "not in my back yard".

All this jet engine idea reveals is not covering it up. At least it's in the news.

It's still a problem, but the threat level goes from the scale of a running car in a closed garage to a running car out on the road.

The finest tradition of all humans, shared across the globe.

So according to google a 747 can through 36,000 gallons of fuel in a 10 hour trip. Being conservative and you only need half as much for 2 engines at full throttle, that means that you would need ~40K gallons of fuel a day?

Google tells me that jet fuel ranges from $4-$8 a gallon, therefore the operating costs for a single truck is around a quarter million dollars a day ($250,000)? Even if the operating cost is only 1/5 of this ($50,000 a day), that's 20 million dollars a year in fuel costs.

If India has 20 million a year to spend on fuel for this contraption, why wouldn't they just spend that money to clean up the power plants instead?

My guess is that the operating costs of this terrible idea are so large, they would hardly ever turn it on. I agree that this seems like a PR stunt rather than a real idea.

If $20M per year can actually clean up Delhi's air that would be a great solution. That is if that works. Central Delhi's population is 10M and this is $2 per year per head.

I am pretty sure people are spending lot more than that to protect themselves from harm coming from pollution.

> If India has 20 million a year to spend on fuel for this contraption, why wouldn't they just spend that money to clean up the power plants instead?

Shows gross ignorance about Delhi and India. Delhi's pollution is not caused by power plants. This is not California you are talking about.

Powerplant do not contribute much to Delhi's pollution. The real problem with Delhi is that it is land-locked city surrounded by even more polluting industries. Delhi administration has 0 control over what happens in the 4 neighboring states.

People around Delhi are burning wood and cow-dung to cook food. There are thousands of brick kilns that produce worst kind of soot. Farmers in Punjab regularly burn husk. Unlike Mumbai Delhi has no oceanside to replace city's polluted air with relatively cleaner air.

For example In Delhi fine particle pollution rates are ten times higher than that of Chennai, which has ten times more cars but is coastally located, without the surrounding industrial areas.

He's only talking about one of these units though. They would need more than that to completely clean up the city's air, assuming it works.

Jet fuel in 747 quantities at an airport is about $1.75/gal.

They might not need to do this all the time. Maybe only when a temperature inversion is having an adverse affect on air quality.

Believe it or not, retrofitting a single large coal-fired power plant can cost more than a billion dollars.

Does that mean retrofitting is more expensive than just building a net new solar plant of the same capacity?

I'm not in the power industry, but you can read more about the economics of retrofits here[1], and technologies here[2]. I'd imagine the cost of retrofitting depends on how much pollution needs to be mitigated to make the (pollution*dollars)/power figure acceptable.

This industry source[3] seems to have about as many stories about stations being decommissioned as it does about large retrofit projects, which says that in the US the cost assigned to the pollution often is more expensive than moving to another source.

Like a lot of environmental issues, I think concerns about emissions tend to be treated as though they are decadent compared to immediate economic impact, until a crisis is underway. That is, people notice their power bill, brownouts or their factory shutting down from a shortage of electricity, but they may not directly attribute their children's asthma or getting cancer a decade later to the power plant. Furthermore people can bemoan the waste of shuttering a functional power plant if the harm the decommissioning averted is not tangible to them. Crisis-level smog days can help justify policies that take action, as well as create an appreciation for the importance of air quality in general.

These jet engines sound like the equivalent of building a taller smokestack. They're probably a cheap way to lessen some of the health effects during a smog crisis, but not any sort of long term solution.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/us-coal-fired-pow...

[2] http://nma.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Fact-Sheet-Clean-C...

[3] http://www.power-eng.com/coal/coal-retrofits-upgrades.html

In some cases, I believe so. But a solar plant is only useful for half the day (at best).

That seems kind of absurd. Where does all of that cost come from?

It is colossally stupid to do this jet engine experiment rather than spend their $20 million on, say, preventing the city's poor from burning trash.

But why address the root cause of a problem when you can treat the symptom in an extremely stupid, expensive, and temporary way?

20 million dollars does not go a long way as far as civic infrastructure goes. Someone farther up pointed out that this is equates to $2 per person per year. Someone else pointed out that the fuel cost of jet engines is around a quarter of what the parent comment estimated. So, all in all, I'd say it's a somewhat reasonable approach.

They could bribe those poor people with $2 a year not to burn trash.

I'm Indian. I'' concerned about the air quality for my fellow citizens in Delhi, but an idea like this should never be allowed without proper scientific research of impact. What if blasting pollution to the upper atmosphere causes an even bigger problem? India being a developing economy wouldn't have the money to fix that as well :-( and the coal plants would continue to run up Jet engines until it becomes another crisis because it makes business sense for them.

I can't see this idea ending well. Because a thorough scientific evaluation of impact isnt going to be cheap.. India might as well make deals for Nuclear plants for that money, or keep extending the already good use of solar and wind power setups.

Make Delhi air tolerable but make climate change on Earth worse. This masks the bigger problem, fossil fuels and the changes they cause to the entire planet. Pushing smog from one place to another sounds like a terrible red herring.

Climate change is not a priority for India where people are already dying of polluted air. It is pointless to think about "clean air for future generations" when the current generation itself is dying at rapid rate.

As an Indian I will leave that problem for Californians and New Yorkers.

Well, OR you could try to fix both problems. You can blow the pollution somewhere else OR couldn't you instead clean up the sources of pollution? India doesn't even have to develop many of the solutions, scrubbers for coal plants, catalytic converters, 4 stroke engines, and a plethora of other technologies have already been developed and refined.

Again, gross ignorance about India and its people. This is probably modern day version of imperialist "Indians are ignorant heathens we need to show them the light".

Indians actually don't care about climate change and global warming and will not care for a long time to come. This is an exclusively first world problem.

I get where you're coming from, because people are dying RIGHT NOW but the fixes for "right now" and "future times" can be the same solution. Scrubbers for example would make things cleaner pretty much immediately (not perfect, but better), and of course long term as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be one or the other.

I'm by no means an expert, but I don't think climate change is only a first world problem. For example, my mom's country is the Philippines, and it's one of the hottest places on the planet. It's also extremely poor, and when I visited ~12 years ago, many places did not have electricity, or air conditioning. As temperatures rise, being such a hot place it starts to get too dangerous to go outside. It makes it hard to do farm work. People get sick from the heat.

Literally none of silverstorm's suggestions relate to climate change and all directly bear upon the "people [already] dying of polluted air", which it seems is very much India's problem.

The climate change benefits are merely second-order side effects of dealing with the immediate problems.

> Indians actually don't care about climate change and global warming and will not care for a long time to come.

Granted I only visit India about once a year but that was not the impression I got at all. Climate change is discussed in the media (English and non-English). India is already suffering from many of the effects; heat waves, drought and water shortages and much of the general public and leadership seemingly agree on the cause. I was actually pleasantly surprised how seriously it's taken there compared to the US.

Climate change is not a political issue in India. American government and organizations are pumping a lot of money into India over climate related issues. Clearly as a result of that you will see ivory tower intellectuals writing in op-eds.

Indian public policy however does not see climate change as an issue unless it is about stopping some project for political or financial gains.

I was kind of wondering that as I read the article. I went in expecting it to be some sort of modified jet engine that sucks crap out of the air and sequesters it or something. Then reading I thought "wait, are they just shoving all the pollution further away?"

I initially assumed it was to be like an incinerator for smog, burn all the incompletely combusted particulate. Jet engines being far better than trash fires at combustion.

Yes, this is just a way to push the problem further away (in time and place). The best thing to do is probably to add some decent filters to capture small particules before they arrive in the air. I wonder why this is not a solution, maybe a prohibitive cost, or patents.

Jet engines seem like they have good potential if applied effectively. They could use the engines as an intake into a maze of water walls[0]. They could also use them near passive air cleaners during slow winds[1]. What else?

0: http://www.kineticfountains.com/blog/do-water-fountains-clea...

1: http://gizmodo.com/5992764/this-giant-mesh-wall-acts-like-an...

It's not really cleaning, it's more like wiping under a blanket.

Exactly, cleaning spilled coffee on the table by smashing it with palm of your hand - table looks cleaner, room - not so much.

When you ignore problems until they reach a crisis level, all solutions are short-term.

This is just another symptom of our global situation that's similarly being collectively ignored.

But hey, mars!

Earth saving technology is developed and pioneered in space exploration so... yeah, Mars.

I think maybe they are referring to the fact that some people think we can just trash this planet because hey, there's another one.

I'm conflicted: On one hand this sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Why would you try to make coal less smoggy, rather than focusing 100% on replacing the plant? On the other hand, if it works, it will probably improve the health of a lot of people living in the city.

Is it ethical to make people suffer, if it's for the sake of giving the people and the government more motivation to phase out coal power plants?

I think the logic likely goes like this. Coal power is cheap and cheap power allows industry to grow faster. Faster economic growth means faster growth of the people out of poverty. And since poverty kills through lack of education, nutritious food, good jobs and safe infrastructure, bad coal is still better than no energy, or energy so expensive it slows growth.

By sending all those soot particles high into the atmosphere, will they create an effect similar to that of a volcano where the soot reflects sunlight?

Wouldn't replacing the power plants be cheaper (and better) in the run rather than running jet engines to get rid of the pollution? Why isn't that an option in this case?

Indeed... the idea of burning more fossil fuels to blow away the emissions from burning dirty fossil fuels seems pretty crazy, but I guess that's the nature of short-term solutions. I assume that the cost of building new power plants and buying enormous quantities of more expensive fuel for them probably vastly outweighs the cost of getting a few retired jet engines and tankers full of jet fuel.

This has nothing to do with carbon and global warming. It has to do with smog, which kills millions of people through respiratory problems and decreases quality of life. The additional carbon emitted from running the jet engine is negligible compared to the carbon emitted by the plant.

Fair enough.

A large part of the worst pollution days in dehi is not from burning fossil fuels but from burning agricultural fields because farmers don't have a more effective way of preparing the fields for the next year. This means that in November the air is the worst, and it slowly starts getting better in December. Even if you just address this problem it will make a huge difference in the air quality.

Ah, I see.

No. A new jet engine is ~$10M, so a retired jet engine is probably ~$1M. The article says a single jet engine can handle a 1GW plant, translating to less than 1% of the cost of the power plant. (Electric capacity is of order $1/W https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_per_watt ) Some cleaning retrofits are do-able and worthwhile (just like the jet engine), but making power plants clean to developed-world standards is an order-unity fraction of the cost.

This is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever read.

It sounds kind of plausible until you spend a few minutes thinking it through.

Power plants are not the only source of pollution in Delhi or India.They burn garbage as well as manure for fuel. And the land-fill also caught fire. On my last visit, I saw this up close: http://www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/delhi-pollution-panel-sends-n...

My dad and I have allergic asthma and this just makes it worse for us.

I wonder how they plan to keep the engines maintained. Jet engines aren't exactly cheap, and maintenance, spare parts, and fuel aren't free, either.

Indeed. Though I don't think they intend to maintain them. The article cites donated 'retired' engines.

So this is an experiment, or a P.R. stunt. But if they'd take this seriously, it'd be so weird to estimate the maintenance costs. $5 mil per engine, 3-4 months uptime, 2 months downtime for rebuild so you'd need multiple engines, constant sandblasting by particles sucked in the turbines.

In theory there's no shortage of engines available for scrap value because they're obsolete and/or their expensive moving parts have reached their life limit for airworthy aircraft, and most of them will keep running for a while yet. The fuel bill is a bigger deal than the supply of old engines

I still agree with the people here that think this is a colossally stupid idea.

My guess is they only turn these on during the most polluted days. In many colder climates they have power plants of last resort that are basically old jet engines. They only fire them up when power demand hits peak of the peak levels.

I agree with your thought that these are part time, but for a different reason. I think they'll only be turned on when the temperature/env conditions are right to form the inversion. Fire the jet up for a day or two to prevent the smog from getting trapped under the inversion layer, then turn the jet off once the conditions subside. None of this 20mm a year business will end up happening.

Why not mount engines on the top of chimney itself? It looks more logical and effective than trailer on a ground. Though, I'm still skeptical as this is not a solution to a problem, but more a cover up of it. Coal in XXI century is not an acceptable power source.

I've stood a few hundred feet downrange (downwind?) from small bizjet engines and its noticeable but hardly overwhelming, which makes the whole discussion very strange in that the inversion must not be broken mechanically or fluid dynamically or it must be incredibly close to the ground. Clearly concentrated heat from the exhaust doesn't crack the inversion of the chimneys would "naturally" take care of the problem.

My immediate assumption is this has gone thru the journalist filter too many times... decades ago we were able to make catalytic converters that ate hydrocarbons so effectively that car exhausts were cleaner on average than California air. Heck its even been run thru a particulate filter before the carburetor. Now I'm not sure this is the case as cat conv are only a little better and California air is so much cleaner its nearly transparent, so I'm told. Anyway, jet engines usually run pretty lean so I figured somewhat more CO2 could be traded for zilch hydrocarbon leading to zero to no smog if you blew all the air in a city thru an operating jet engine.

I'd guess that the airflow through the engine is greater than the output of the chimney. So if you put it directly over the chimney, it'd draw more from the chimney than the power plant is designed for, throwing off efficiency. With the jet away from the chimney, it will naturally draw from surrounding air without messing up the exhaust flow.

Why not just design the chimney properly in the first place? Chimneys are supposed to have enough updraft to do this by themselves.

To do what? Blast emissions at 900mph through a temperature inversion?

The world's highest chimney is just over 400m, I don't know if that's high enough to get above the inversion layer.

In any case, the pollution is not just coming from power plants and other industrial uses with chimneys:

The widespread use of festival fireworks, the burning of rubbish by the city's poor, plus farm waste from around the city, vehicular emissions and construction dust, all contribute to the city's thick "pea-soup" fogs.

There is no silver bullet, govt is probably trying a multi thronged approach to address the problem. A Solar power plant is being built in Rajastan, Western India[0], one more in neighbouring Gujarat [1] & one more just got completed in South India [2], and there are nuclear power plants being built or in the initial design phase. These things take time, but there needs to be some interim solutions as well. Don't you think?

[0] - http://www.rrecl.com/PDF/Solar%20Park%20Bhadla%20Presentatio...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarat_Solar_Park

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamuthi_Solar_Power_Project

So I see that alternative energy sources are talked about a lot when discussing climate change. Why isn't there just as much R&D and discussion going on about the other half of the equation - reversing climate change or reducing the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere or making megacities smog-free?

We already know a lot about making megacities smog-free. That's why London and Los Angeles had absolutely dreadful air in the mid-20th century but it's much better now. As for why Delhi hasn't followed the example of richer cities in cleaning up the air, I'd say it is mostly due to lack of funds for infrastructure and enforcement.

There is also research about reducing the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere. Here's one of my recent favorite papers: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/cont...

The reason that emissions-free energy sources get discussed more than carbon dioxide reduction from the atmosphere is that reducing emissions appears to be significantly less expensive and more scaleable for dealing with the bulk of the problem. Once you bolt on the extras necessary to make coal plants low-CO2, the electricity costs more than if you'd just eliminated coal altogether, so there's no point to it. For an example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemper_Project

I don't know if this is a good idea (really, I know very little about this, save having read about the concept a long time ago), but everyone jumping to the conclusion that this must be a bad idea should look up thermal inversions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_(meteorology). As I understand them, they prevent the dispersion of smog, and create much denser pockets of pollution than would exist in a city that didn't have a thermal inversion.

So it seems like one reading of the situation is that most cities "make the pollution someone else's problem" in the sense that their pollutants disperse in a way that pollutants from cities like Delhi don't.

I learned as a kid that moving the mess into the closet doesn't count as cleaning.

Why not just ban the usage of fireworks for various festivities such as Diwali or enforce stricter vehicle inspection code during annual registration? I am sure there will be "some" folks jumping through/going-around the enforced laws but it can make a significant difference when a good majority starts following them and such following gradually increases every year. In this way more and more cities start implementing similar routines.

Sometimes we get so much caught up in "cool" or "fun" projects that it becomes easy to ignore simple yet basic implementations that lies in front of our eyes all-along :)

The author has a strange notion of cleaning up.

We're going to reduce fossil fuel waste by...burning more fossil fuels(jet engines don't run on water)?

I hope this works, but within my small knowledge sphere, don't think that it will. Please prove me wrong India :)

I was expecting a story about changing a coal fired plant for a gas turbine plant to reduce CO2 and particulate emissions. I was not expecting using old jet engines to blow away the coal exhaust!

Guess this is a opex vs capex thing?

Will it not simply create a blue colored hole in the sky for the duration the jet engine is turning and then when the engine is turned off the hole will soon turn grey again ?

Assuming they fire the engine during daytime. I hope they do it in the day time as that will be simply awesome and better due to the possibility of sonic boom (from the gaseous fluid in the jet exhaust going near supersonic) or the noise otherwise will prevent people from sleeping within a couple mile radius.

Stupid question - could jet engines be used by rich middle-east states as floating platforms on the sea/s to create clouds/rain on dry/desert?

Why not point it the other way around into a filter instead of just moving the smog further into the atmosphere?

I might be missing something, but this sounds like an idea taken from the movie Idiocracy.

At least they're trying something badass. This seems one step above "We're going to have Todd do a gnarly Tornado kick at the smog."

Jet engine silver bullet rather than holistic, comprehensive smog abatement. Yeah, right.

So what happens when it rains?

Burning more fuel...brilliant plan.

Betteridge's Law.

In short, no.

How is this being upvoted?

Because people feel like this is worth thinking (read: getting worked up) about.

I think so, too, because I cannot image how this is a good idea. Blowing pollutants into the upper(-ish) atmosphere, what could possibly go wrong?

Sometimes dumb-sounding ideas actually work. Pollution is a serious problem for many cities, so it's sensible to at least consider whether this idea might actually have merit. Even if the answer is no, at least those of us who read the article and comments here have perhaps a better understanding of the problem.

I don't think upvotes and downvotes are saying you agree disagree, it's a way to keep the community great. For example don't downvote a comment because you disagree with the politics, downvote it because it seemed abusive (e.g. ad hominem attacks). The same goes for stories.

Controversial way of "cleaning pollution" by making it your neighbours problem.

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