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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Unfortunately, like many tech band-aids, once the pain goes away the problem is ignored until it flares up again.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
You're seriously suggesting allowing half a million people to die per year unnecessarily in order to incentivize them to adopt cleaner power plants.
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.
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 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.
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?
The problem with coal is not power production, it's the infrastructure of power distribution that makes going off grid so viable.
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?
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.
Sure, let's let them suffocate, starve or have their society collapse, as long as they are not burning coal!
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.