Air pollution in London passes levels in Beijing (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Air pollution in London passes levels in Beijing (2017)

telegraph.co.uk

65 pointssandGorgon72 comments

The picture halfway down with the jogger is extremely misleading. That's not smog, that's a foggy morning in a comparatively rural area over 60 miles north of London.

Wood burning stoves should be banned outright in the capital.

It's mostly hipsters and posh people using them anyway, they will survive.

The article mentions that it's "partly down to the savings they can make to energy bills". It's time to tax them accordingly then, people shouldn't be allowed to pollute the air just to save money.

I used to think this too but heating costs are expensive in the UK.

My own country has a very large supply of natural gas in the ground so its pretty cheap to get through the winter. The UK has to import.

Don't they also need to import wood? I can't imagine they have such oversupply. On the other hand they have oil in Scotland.

That would be simple to do. When I bought my wood burning stove (I'm a posh hipster) I bought one that was specifically certified by the Department for the Environment to be used in smokeless zones (of which London is one).

Either the certification/regulation isn't stringent enough (although I can't see smoke emerging from my chimney from the adjacent lost room when it is running) or people are fitting non-DfE approved stoves, in which case enforcement needs to be improved.

Of course, I originally got the wood burner to minimise my CO2 footprint - the same reason I bought a diesel rather than petrol car.

I applaud your effort, but generally speaking it looks like we were lied to about the diesel efficiency claims.

And CO2 is not the only pollution consideration. There are all sorts of carcinogens, heavy metals, and particulates that can be released when burning anything.

I'm not sure that's correct, certainly the updated current CO2 emission figures post-scandal are still significantly lower for diesel than petrol per mile.

Do you see much smoke during the first few minutes after lighting? After it gets up to proper operating temperature then the combustion should be more efficient, with a lot less smoke visible, but as it warms up it could be belching out a lot of smoke. I see large quantities of initial smoke from mine (and a few other houses in my old, rural street). The type of wood used will also affect it, of course.

BTW, given that you bought an exempted stove you could probably burn this sort of thing as well:

https://solidfuelcentre.co.uk/homefire-olive-briquettes

Why burn wood for heating if you care about CO2 footprint? Even electric heating is more efficient the reason why no fireplace is allowed to be classified as heating in a flat anymore (they are all decorative) is that 90% of the energy is wasted down the chimney.

> Why burn wood for heating if you care about CO2 footprint?

Presumably because (assuming sustainable forestry) burning wood is carbon neutral.

> Even electric heating is more efficient

It's not more net carbon emissions efficient. Energy efficiency and carbon impact are not always aligned.

Sustainable forestry is a myth it can take centuries to sequester the carbon back into wood that you would burn in one winter.

Electric is by far more net carbon emission efficient than wood burning stoves (wood boilers are a bit better but not by much) especially considering the percentage of nuclear and renewable energy in the UK.

A sitka spruce grows to full size in about 35 years. With the amount we burn, a single large tree lasts around 5 winters.

Because I have a friend who owns a wood and they are felling old pines while replanting deciduous. Hence the wood burner is more-or-less carbon neutral. It's also a really efficient model.

I would love to see a summary of what's been happening in Beijing. What are their policies? Because Beijing air has apparently been awesome these days for the entire winter. My friends who live in Beijing confirm this for me. In the dead of winter, this would have been unheard of even one year ago.

http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://www.stateair.net/web/historical/1/1.html

I was in China last year. The airplane newspaper had a few articles devoted to how the government is trying to reduce pollution in many different areas. But one of the big measures seems to be to go hard after corrupt local officials that let industries pollute for money.

Beijing uses very heavy handed policies, that would be harder to implement in London. For example: cars with numberplates starting with A-M are banned on certain days of the week and the rest are banned on other days of the week. They also confiscated wood burning (or was it kerosene?) stoves and although it lessens the pollution, lots of poor people are living in freezing homes because of that.

I know that Paris had similar restrictions on cars a few times recently. If your car had an even number it could be used on one day, odd on another. If I remember correctly they also made all public transport in the city free for them days too.

It was coal, no one uses wood or kerosene to keep warm, but almost everyone was using coal in the villages.

They got rid of coal for not only energy and central heat generation, but also for the villagers in and near Beijing who used it to keep warm during the winter. Coal in the form of dirty personal furnaces was where most of the pollution was coming from.

The downside is that they had to import more natural gas for heating, and there has been a shortage (china has no significant NG production, it’s all imported). Villagers without gas access have been using electricity, and the subsidies they were given to do that haven’t been enough to offset cost, so there has been some unrest. The government is backing off on this aggressive approach a bit for other areas (e.g. in Hebei where the problem has been worse than BJ).

If you look at the aqicn history, the air still isn’t that great in BJ, they spiked red for a few hours today for example. Still a massive improvement, but Beijing is also still at the mercy of the wind when it comes to clean air (but a purple before being a red now is really good, I can deal with a red, but not a purple).

Alarmist article. It's more like "best day in Beijing / worst day in London" conditions comparison. See the data, last year average air quality is 3 times worse in Beijing[0] than London[1].

0. https://air.plumelabs.com/en/year/beijing 1. https://air.plumelabs.com/en/year/london

My thoughts exactly. When I read the headline I thought, how did London suddenly get to 500 AQI? Then I read the actual article and it's "just" 200.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312989

Beijing gets much higher than 190, though... many times over 500 (some from Jan 2017, the month of this publication, even).

See historical data from the US embassy in BJ: http://www.stateair.net/web/historical/1/1.html

January and February 2017 were particularly bad for Beijing last year. This year they have definitely been trying harder with getting coal out of the near capital zone in rural Beijing and surrounding Hebei. Still gets polluted a lot, it’s the orange and red zone regularly, but much much better than last year (doesn’t get into the purple and dark red zones as much as it used to).

That's because the Beijing authorities simply ban burning coal and limit the gas supplement in nearby areas.

check this out http://www.xinhuanet.com/local/2018-02/05/c_1122367331.htm

> Demand for the [wood-burning] stoves, which cost between £400 and £7,000, has tripled in the last five years – partly down to the savings they can make to energy bills.

This raises lots of moral questions. Should London ban wood stoves, effectively increasing costs for some of its poorest inhabitants?

Burning wood might produce pollutants, but how does the net effect compare to the production of the oil/gas/electricity required to produce the alternative? Of course that production is done off-site, not in urban centers, but it wouldn't surprise me if wood-burning is better for the environment than manufacturing the necessary amount of coal/oil/gas/electricity required to heat the same house.

Wood smoke is surprisingly nasty. Standing next to a fire you miss this because it's all rising above you, but it cools fairly quickly and becomes a health hazard nearby. The public Heath costs vastly outweigh the savings. So, banning wood stoves and simply giving people money for something else is a net win for society.

PS: I suspect a most wood burning in London is for aesthetics not really need.

You can't even compare the two. Even if you burn coal in a plant, you are required by law to use advanced filters that greatly reduce the amount of pollutants.

Poor inhabitants can't afford £400 for a wood burning stove.

Many parts of London are "smoke control zones", and there are already strict rules about what you can or can't burn.

Since London has already banned some burning fuel it's easy to add another type.

> Many parts of London are "smoke control zones", and there are already strict rules about what you can or can't burn. Since London has already banned some burning fuel it's easy to add another type

Except, of course - you can buy woodburning stoves specifically certified for use in smokeless zones by the DfE (I know, I have one). It's already prohibited to use non-certified stoves in those areas.

Burning wood is also CO2 neutral as the forest has captured this CO2 in the last few decades compared to fossil fuel that is accumulated over many millions of years.

In Norway you actually get a higher (greener) energy rating for your house if you have a wood stove, and our electrical power almost entirely hydroelectric.

The article doesn't say, but the wood pollution is relatively minor compared to diesel etc. This Greenpeace article[1] doesn't even mention wood.

[1] https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2016/11/03/causes-londons-a...

> In Norway you actually get a higher (greener) energy rating for your house if you have a wood stove, and our electrical power almost entirely hydroelectric.

You can possibly get a higher rating when you replace an old stove or an oil stove (parafinbrenner/oljekamin) with "clean-burning" stove, or do I miss something? Otherwise the rating depends on how tight the house is insulated, does it have balanced ventilation and so on.

And CO2-neutral sounds a bit hand-wavy tbh. Sure forest captured it only recently, but there's no advantage releasing it back to atmosphere.

The issue with wood in urban areas isn’t CO2, it’s the particulate pollution.

Yes, but if you have electric only and install a "peis" your rating is increased. There are better options regarding particular pollution like the pellet burning oven, but you do get higher rating from wood alone.

The CO2 part is not hand-wavy, unless you clear-cut the forest and do not let it grow back. Unfortunately that is what is happening in the rain forests of the Americas.

You need to harvest and transport that wood, so it's not CO2 neutral.

PS: Gas also takes a lot of energy to refine and transport so it's worse than the direct CO2 produced during combustion.

I think it's very dependent on where you live.

The way we do it is to walk into the forest with the axe or chainsaw (often electric) and cut down a tree. After that we drag it home and chop it up with an axe using muscle power ;)

There are even books[1] about firewood and how to stack it so it's very ingrained in the culture.

But if it's done industrially with machines then you are very correct.

[1] https://www.bokklubben.no/livsstil-hobby-og-fritid/hel-ved-l...

Sure, but London is not really known for it's forests.

Which means you burn more calories, so eat more food, which has to be grown — and farming uses fuel too (and transporting, storing, & selling that food, and cooking it, and...)

Calculating the full, e.g., carbon cost of a fuel is difficult!

It's posers not poor people, generally. The partly due to the savings is a red herring.

I used to live in a house with a wood burner in the living room and central heating where individual radiators didn't have any regulation - so actually, in winter it was cheaper to stay in the living room most of the time, burning couple logs of wood every few hours rather than heat up the entire house using central heating. Quite significantly so actually.

The poorest inhabitants in London don't live in the kind of home where they can install a wood stove. They rent and likely have central heating.

Poor people in London don't burn wood, they use prepay meters which cost a fortune to top up. This is because:

a) Wood burners are expensive and trendy

b) It takes time and energy to get and/or chop up wood (you really need a car to pick it up at least)

c) You need a good credit rating to get access to cheaper gas/elec tariffs, so prepay meters is usually the only thing a poor person can qualify for

Banning wood burning stoves would be a great move overall. If wood-burning is really that much more efficient (it isn't) then let's centralize it and burn wood in the power plants instead of coal.

I really wanted a wood burner (it's fun to burn wood, creates a tremendous amount of heat and looks awesome), but now I know the environmental costs I won't get one - it's completely irresponsible to use one in a city.

> prepay meters

Wow, that's a nasty way to treat your citizens!

How it's done usually: Any apartment or house has a meter. You have to pay by KWh from time to time. If it doesn't get paid, it's eventually owner's problem.

Bonus points for multi-range electricity meters and central heating. Extra points for central heating with heating meters (OK just kidding about this one).

> Wow, that's a nasty way to treat your citizens!

How do you mean? If someone can't afford to pay, they need to seek help. Why should this suddenly become the problem of the owner of the building? Why should she be the person crediting another person? There are different ways to solve this problem and shifting it to the owner isn't the most fair one.

The assumption here is that a random tenant won't afford to pay for electricity. Which isn't a huge bill as bills go.

I'm kind of shocked by a culture which assumes that kind of thing.

Also, electricity is a kind of neccesity so cutting someone's electricity is a bit like leaving them endangered, which is arguably a crime.

The owner of a building has to collect rent anyway, so I don't see why electricity would be an especial concern.

You missed a crucial step:

1.5: owner gets fed up of paying tenant's bills, installs prepay meters

I don't know what kind of setup would require this, I've had 8 different rental properties in UK so far and every single time the gas/electricity were in my name, not in the landlord's name.

At lower end of the market it's more common, AFAIK, especially these houses where they've split them into 3 or 4 seperate units (multi-occupancy) and it's impractical to have 3/4 different metered supplies.

In my younger days I had a bedsit with a coin-meter even though there was a separate meter in the hallway. Landlord had it set to a crazy high rate so he was making a profit on it.

One day two guys forcibly entered the building to cut off the supply because he hadn't been paying the bill. According to them, my set up wasn't exactly unique.

Usually, when tenant is incapable of paying bills, he becomes ex-tenant.

It gets worse:

- Typical prepay meter cost: £1,026

- Typical credit meter cost: £807

Whooooa!

My meter probably cost me ~£150. It's pretty high tech at that price mark. Does £800 meter also doubles as a HDTV?

Prepay only exists for people with extremely poor credit history, or if you fail to pay your bills few times in a row, the electricity/gas company will forcibly switch you to prepay.

>> Extra points for central heating with heating meters (OK just kidding about this one).

I used to live in an apartment that had a heating meter on every single individual radiator - but then the heating was provided by a central boiler room and I guess there wasn't a single point of entry into the apartment to measure the inflow there.

There's 5.9mn people in the UK on them - it's not a small amount

Usually in the US?

Metered electricity is common in working class areas of the UK. I don't know the history behind it, but as an outsider, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

That's a societal equivalent of a fridge with a lock on it.

Yes you can think of reasons for that, but they're not especially pleasing.

Prepay is especially common in Beijing...nothing like the hot water expiring during a shower!

In Beijing, though, it isn’t that bad price wise, and heating is central (and vastly shaded, since the whole apartment buildings are heated).

The UK stopped the urban use of coal in the 1960s in order to deal with the infamously lethal smog problem.

How come they need to introduce 'no idling' zones? Where I live (Norway) idling is banned all over. As far as I know idling for more than one minute is banned all over Scandinavia. Doesn't stop inconsiderate drivers doing it of course.

In fact it is already illegal in the UK. Here is a quote from Confused.com:

"Stationary idling is an offence under section 42 of the Road Traffic Act 1988," ... The Act enforces rule 123 of the Highway Code which states: "You must not leave a vehicle engine running unnecessarily while that vehicle is stationary on a public road."

And doing this can incur a £20 fixed-penalty fine under the Road Traffic (Vehicle Emissions) Regulations 2002.

My house has a stove. Perhaps I am simply a poseur for having one, but it does get the most-used room in the house up to a comfortable temperature whilst the rest of the house can be left cooler to save on central heating bills. The house was built without central heating, electricity or indoor plumbing and so had fireplaces and had a stove when I moved in.

If, like me, you can wander around the woods near your house (it's not in London, or any other city) and gather fallen branches to cut up and put in a wood store to season, then fuel only costs the time taken to gather and cut it. There are other sources of free wood as well but I still have to pay for it from time to time.

Any savings from free fuel are offset by the fact that the chimney has to be swept at least once a year, ideally twice or more. Getting a sweep in gets the job done a lot more cleanly and quickly but costs about £50-60 a time.

Please don't burn wood, or if you do, use a gasifier/pyrolysis stove. They are also called "smokeless" stoves. Smoke from a normal wood fire is a really awful pollutant.

Perhaps when such stoves are readily available for home use, and the time comes to replace the old one I've got, that might be worth doing.

Apparently, Angostura found one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16324367

I suspect that's one of the ones that runs on certain sorts of solid fuel, such as this:

https://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/appliances.php?country=s

AFAICT these still require chimneys but presumably the smoke they produce contains fewer particulates than that produced by wood in a standard stove, hence allowing them in these zones.

Presumably Asooka was thinking more along these lines:

http://brightstove.com/

This looks very interesting, but appears not to be available.

Diesel cars shut down their emission cleaning when its gets cold. In Germany BMW, Volkswagen had todo a "upgrade" fix but in other countries there wont be a cold weather update.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/06/europes-diesel-cars-may...

https://dieselnet.com/news/2017/08vda.php

Those stoves are "responsible for 10 per cent of winter pollution", the article mentions. What makes up the other 90%?

Air purification at environmental scale is actually an excellent space for new startups ;)

In NYC, there are initiatives for electric vehicle adoption. But we would still require an array of "scrubbers" to remove existing containments.

OK finally we are not the worst

I've spent time in both these places, and based on my experience, London is nowhere near as bad as Beijing.

experience is subjective, numbers is objective, so what maybe one kind of experience is different for someone else

This is from Jan 2017, please add that to the title. I thought this was about today.

Thanks, updated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com