Smog in Western U.S. Starts Out as Pollution in Asia, Researchers Say | Hacker News Reader

Smog in Western U.S. Starts Out as Pollution in Asia, Researchers Say

npr.org

95 pointsreirob31 comments

Every lawmaker that wants to gut the EPA should have to visit Shanghai and New Delhi. Once the air or water is trashed, its much harder to bring it back.

It would be nice if our politicians had the best interests of the people in mind when making decisions. Obviously there are good politicians and it's a complicated subject, but I think most informed people would agree that the current cabinet in the US is only interested in serving itself. I truly, honestly, would love to hear evidence that they are making laws or acting in such a way as to help the people where there is no obvious benefit to themselves (usually money).

Politicians are cogs in a system that doesn't give a shit about the people or the life supporting qualities of our environment. Things would be different if we had democracies instead of the aristocraties / oligarchies / autocraties we currently have around the globe.

Besides, politicians are not making decisions nowadays.

If this were going to help -- if the people who want to gut the EPA were inclined to care enough about the country's air and water quality -- they wouldn't have to go to China. They could just read about the past in the US.

You have to experience it to care.

In my experience, if someone had a good head on their shoulders they merely have to use the lessons of the past as guidelines for what you do (or not do) in the future.

I haven't seen a politician like that in a while, but they have existed.

This is not only the US but the whole industrial / coal revolution. But I think they do know about that already.

Shanghai isn't even considered bad for China.

I know but I was just there last week. Its shocking to see, especially when you fly through it.

I go there a lot and never felt it was that bad and also to Beijing which feels far worse; the worst I have been recently was Hong Kong. I immediately had burning lungs coming out of the plane. My Google Now kept telling to stay inside and it felt like that was a good plan. But Shanghai/Suzhou were I spend a lot of time are ok.

Looking here [0] India seems scary. Have not been there for 10 years, I remember it as dirty but not necessarily the air.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_polluted_cities...

HK is at 91 ATM, which isn't really bad. Most of the time, HK and SZ have relatively mild pollution by Chinese standards.

Here is how it works:

1. start with moderate regulations in the USA

2. switch to tough regulations in the USA

3. industry moves to a place with lax regulations

4. pollution blows across the ocean

5. the USA gets smog

It seems we went wrong at step 2, unless you'd like to stop international trade. By being extra strict, we actually got more pollution. We'd have better air and water if we partially gutted the EPA.

We have failed at keeping our water and air clean, and we also lost our jobs.

Not really; even with the smog the US has now that this contributes to, it is far less than before regulation, and shifting comparative advantage away from dirty manufacturing hasn't reduced the average rate of aggregate growth in the US.

The economic problems experienced everywhere but the top of the income distribution in the US are entirely distributional problems, not aggregate activity problems, and they stem from policies which have deliberately shifted retained gains up the distribution over the past 40 years or so (Reagan's tax shift being a major early contribution.) "Job losses" to outsourcing and immigration are convenient distractions because they are easy to conceptualize, but they don't really reflect the substance of the real problems.

I don't think this is an accurate picture:

1. Job growth has increased overall by every measure since the EPA has started. Regulations mainly affect industrial manufacturing jobs, and job growth in most of those is more affected by automation than environmental regulation.

2. Overall air and water pollution is down substantially in the U.S. since we've put tougher regulations in place. What this article seems to be saying is that we're reaching the point where toughing EPA regulations further won't do as much to improve air quality since half of the remaining air pollution is coming from outside the country.

3. International trade regulations and consumer actions can still reduce some pollution outside of the U.S. simply by making more environmental friendly manufacturing a selling point for your products. It won't have as much effect for heavy industry, which is what produces most of the pollution, but it can and has made a difference in electronics and use of plastics in packaging.

"China and India, where many consumer products are manufactured, are the worst offenders."

So instead of merely blaming and regulating, it is ultimately upon all of us to change consumption behavior.

It's extremely hard for the US to regulate those places. It's true we can do things like raise tariffs on goods coming from those areas or something but that's unlikely to have the intended effect.

On the other side China and India are both pursuing renewable energy faster than the US.

> On the other side China and India are both pursuing renewable energy faster than the US.

I was in Beijing last year for a layover. The pollution was so bad you couldn't see the runway from the terminal. It was so terrible you could even see it inside the terminal.

I think the pollution absolutely terrible, and it needs to be addressed.

But you know what? I'm even happier that the pollution is so blatantly terrible and visible. Why? Because if it wasn't so obvious, the populations of China and India wouldn't be demanding change, and the governments would be free to ignore the issue.

The fact that the pollution in China and India is so bad is driving these countries to improve regulations and curtail their pollution much faster than the US had to in the 20th century.

Pollution is terrible, but I'm really glad that the two most populated countries on earth are waking up and installing renewables at an unprecedented rate. It's not only improving their pollution situation, but economies of scale are making renewables cheaper for everyone.

Except these two countries are quite an upscale from the late 19th to 20th century occidental air pollution issue, an upscale of one or two order of magnitude.

Even if they both stopped every source of pollution instantly right now, the consequences would still last decades. Even if they do something, improving the pollution situation is not enough by a large margin, keep in mind the occident failed to fix their own air pollution issue to this day.

Economies of scale may well worsen the situation further due to Jevons paradox, while most renewables are actually not renewables at all.

The only way out is a radical global change including a large decrease in energy consumption and this will come when the massive overpopulation issue will fix itself through famine due to lack of oil to grow food "green revolution" style.

There's not doubt that reality will catch up on us, it is just a matter of time as this is now inevitable. Our choice is between crashing full speed ahead in a wall of brick or trying to slow down to crash in a hopefully somewhat less dramatic manner.

> an upscale of one or two order of magnitude

I think you're underestimating how much polluting the west has been doing. After all, China got into the game only in the last maybe 20 years.

As of 2011, the United States had released 28% of the world's total post-industrial revolution green house gasses, while China contributed 9%: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/21/countrie...

Now granted 2011 was 7 years ago, but just eyeballing, if the US had stopped all its emissions and China released its current rate of 9.6B tonnes each year, they'd have to emit for another 24 years before they caught up to the United State's emissions.

That's not to say that China shouldn't clean up its emissions before they become the new #1 emitter, but we who live in the west have to do our part as well.

This should also be concerning: The US has over twice the emissions per capita as China [1], and China is not yet done developing. Basically if all nations are aiming to develop into the united states, we're hosed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

The pollution is going down atm. Don't get me wrong, it's still massive, but the trend has been reversed the last 2-3 years.

(Talking to researchers, I don't know how far they're into publishing yet.)

So you regulate demand locally.

Like we have with drugs over the last half-century?

No. The two situations aren't comparable.

Part of the MO for TPP was to have America's trading partners conform to better environmental/safety/health regs, but any chance of that happening now is a pipe dream, let alone with either China or India.

That being said, both countries are attempting to move rapidly away from fossil fuels and dirty industries as their burgeoning middle classes start to clamor for cleaner air.

I think a carbon tariff would be more realistic.

The human race is going to need to evolve a bit, "going without" is not whats going to move us forward, figuring out how to work as a team is

https://www.google.co.in/amp/indianexpress.com/article/india...

A solar power plant in Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu just became the world’s largest plant. the plant was built at a cost of $679 m and was completed in just eight months.

So yeah... we're getting there.

There's something odd with this article: "(...) a capacity to produce 648 MW of electricity (...) built at a cost of $679 m(...) The solar power plant has the capacity to generate electricity sufficient for about 150,000 homes"

Then we have Ivanpah solar power plant: cost $2.2 Billions, theoretical capacity 392 MW but only output 40% its first year of operation and about 66% at best since. This while burning 525 million cubic feet of natural gas a year (almost twice the amount initially allowed).

Then we have the former biggest solar plant in Spain: combined solnovas, PS10, PS20 and AZ20 for a grand total of 300MW of electricity enough to power 180,000 homes.

So a plant in Tamil Nadu built for around 1/4 of the cost with almost twice the output of Ivanpah but only enough power for 30,000 less homes than the Spain plant which has an output lower than Ivanpah's.

These numbers do not add up, with a PR smell floating around and politics/business/marketing as usual.

Nope.

http://www.ecowatch.com/india-solar-market-2118202661.html

Unless you believe every news outlet bought into the story. We have free press you know.

Ivanpuh is much older, the price for new equipment has gone way down + construction costs are much less in India.

> The study's authors said their work was funded by NASA grants...

Expect those grants to go away under the current administration. It's one thing to argue about the best policy in light of scientifically-observed data. But when you start denying facts and limiting the opportunity for scientists to gather data in the first place, all that's left is uninformed opinion. Anyone's uninformed opinion is problematic, but Trump et al have uninformed opinions that are truly dangerous.

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