India air pollution at 'unbearable levels'
bbc.com
bbc.com
1) India as a whole is overpopulated and has a pollution problem. This particular issue is limited to Delhi, however.
2) From the perspective of the magnitude and extreme levels of pollution, this is a seasonal issue whose primary contributor, by a large margin, is farmers burning off their crop stubble after their harvest ends. This has been happening every year for some time (more on this below).
3) Political ideologues have hijacked this issue to push their pet issues like automobile emissions and firecrackers. These are obviously important issues which most reasonable people will agree ought to be curbed. Sadly a lot of otherwise intelligent folks have a blind spot when it comes to these issues, so there is a temptation to let it slide when these kinds of politics are being played dishonestly, even though their motivations are different. By emphasizing one's biased issues, the root cause is ignored, which helps nobody.
On stubble burning:
There was a time when sowing paddy in the neighbouring state of Punjab began during the first week of June. Harvest season would be mid October, and sowing would resume in late November.
During the period between October and November, farmers would let the stubble decompose over time. This required a lot of water and time.
Unfortunately this took a toll on groundwater levels. Government intervention led to a reduction in water supplies to the fields during the summer (June), when there was a shortage of water across the state. This led to a delay in the sowing season (moved to July). The entire crop cycle got moved up, and so the time previously available to allow decomposition of stubble had reduced to barely a few days. Their solution to this problem was to burn all the stubble.
Great write-up! But, this issue is not limited to Delhi; the whole of north India is under severe pollution. Delhi gets highlighted the most because it's the capital of the country.
> 1) India as a whole is overpopulated...
I would rather say Indian society is badly organized.
But that also has the risk of trivializing the problem. Improve infrastructure is hard, especially in a compromised system.
I do agree that improving governance is much, much easier said than done. And to be fair, India has had substantial progress.
I think this is just a different phrasing of "Indian society is badly organized".
Which is a different way of saying I think we mostly agree.
I believe South Korea was poorer than India in living memory!
I think one force that can encourage Pakistan to move forward is China. I don't know if Pakistan can have its own Samsung, but it can maybe 'modernize' with China's help. Would you agree?
India's population density is not really a problem though, the problem is lack of urbanization and absolutely horrible California like land regulations that prevent building new cities and infrastructure.
Delhi's pollution is not caused by Delhi, it is caused by neighboring farming zones that burn the stubble.
This is disingenuous.
Australia has an astonishingly low population density (3.1 people / square kilometre) however it has about the same volume of arable land as France and most of that land is poorer (soil, nutrient) quality, and has a lot lower rainfall and is prone to more severe weather events ... etc.
Assessing or comparing population density based purely on people / sq km is wildly misleading. Rather, it's a matter of carrying capacity of the land, which is what I presume GP was referring to.
Parent was comparing country population densities.
GP was asserting whole of India is overpopulated, while also trying to assert that 'this issue only affects Delhi'.
Clearly the 'only affects Delhi' isn't pollution related -- as most large cities in India are literally breathtakingly polluted.
So I assume GP was asserting that the burnoff issue was a purely Delhi (or surrounds) related issue ... though even that seems unlikely given the water management & agricultural practices throughout the country.
For that matter, if Mumbai wasn't a coastal city, it would have been way more polluted than Delhi.
Having said that, yeah, the politicians do not show any kind of intent to solve the problem, it is just another matter for them to blame their rivals.
[Disclaimer: I live in a city (Buenos Aires), but at least I have a few flowerpots.]
Why do you think this doesn't help?
Are there examples of countries with much larger average landholdings where land management practices are considered excellent?
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/pakistan-may-have-...
Source: I worked for an ag-tech company and I will never EVER have anything to do again with anything that has to do with that world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/business/farming-technolo...
Not anymore. Pretty much a huge chunk of North India is in trouble now. Delhi is where the peak problem is manifesting. Our media has other pointless issues to rant on than show problems in smaller towns and cities, that doesn't mean the problem is only in Delhi.
https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#z:6;c:77.5,28.8;d:...
Further reading on crop stubble burning: https://www.news18.com/news/immersive/crop-burning-punjab-po...
I realized this in 2015 when I was looking at the sky and got the small/taste of something burning (and then I must have done some research). It has taken several years for everyone to 'get' it because winter pollution is confounded by other issues (low wind/rain, Diwali firecrackers, etc.) and people stop paying this much attention to the issue after these couple weeks of Armageddon--until the next year, when it happens again.
To this day the issue is obfuscated -- the media is talking about "Delhi pollution" which enables rival politicians to make it sound like a local governance issue when actually all of North India is under a cloud of smoke.
A small part of the article, but I just wanted to point out the night vision part is a WWII disinformation campaign by the British to hide the fact that they had sophisticated RADAR: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propagand...
(In the UK for example) You aren't allowed to advertise "This product will make you smarter" because that's a lie.
But you are allowed to advertise "Vitamin D is essential to normal cognitive function" and "This product has all the Vitamin D you need" which are both technically true - and let the audience draw the false conclusion themselves that they'd be smarter if they used the product.
The product maker has plausible deniability, and especially if consuming the product has no major harmful effect they'll be allowed to keep this up. After all there are also advertisements for fizzy drinks, booze, and plenty of other products that are hardly a good idea, so what's the problem?
What is the obstacle to fining these farmers? (Most agricultural systems have moved past burning stubble.)
Do the farmers form a blocking bloc? Or are there other factors at play.
Farm laborers are a totally different set of working class people. Who only until recent decades were into as bad as a thing like bonded labor. They work on starving wages and are generally poor and from lower castes.
India for very long has given feudals unlimited loan bailouts, and freebies. They also pay no taxes. Most of my friends who come from farmer families has gone to do expensive education in countries like US. And they are often confused with farm laborers and they milk this perception to the very extreme.
Imagine being so rich you hold large banks of land, make windfall profits, pay zero taxes on them and get freebies(seeds, fertilizers, water, electricity) and then being confused as the poorest people in India.
Its the farm laborers that need help. And they are unfortunately treated very badly. Heck many people don't even recognize their existence.
Why aren’t the farmers’ interests balanced by the afflicted voters?
It's not a local issue because the pollution emitting happens in a different state than where the concentration causes most of the problems, so it would need to be addressed at the national level.
Does anyone know if/how the human impact of planting trees is measured?
What I mean is, what metrics determine the "quality" of a tree plant? I assume this can vary greatly based on location and type of tree planted.
I often see impact quantified by CO2 removed from the environment, but what about the impact on people nearby?
Would it be better to plant 100 trees in the center of New Delhi, where the air is toxic and the population is sky high, or 10,000 trees in rural USA where the air may already be very clean?
On topic:
This is incredibly serious as pollution has serious effects not just on health, but on intelligence and behavior. It's a vicious cycle and India needs to break out of it. The environment minister's comments in the article are unbelievable.
At best they spread pollution over a wider area thus reducing the concentration.
“The relationship between trees and air pollution is a complicated one. Particulate matter suspended in polluted air tends to settle onto leaves, and certain gases including nitrous dioxide (NO₂) are absorbed by leaves’ stomata, filtering the air and reducing pollution levels slightly.
But trees and other vegetation also restrict airflow in their immediate vicinity, preventing pollution from being diluted by currents of cleaner air. In particular, tall trees with thick canopies planted alongside busy roads can act like a roof, trapping pockets of polluted air at ground level. To reliably improve air quality, city planners need to give careful consideration to how trees are placed.”
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/do-trees-reduce-ai...
Tldr - Stupid laws trying to tackle heavy water consumption in the dry months forced farmers to grow paddy 6-8 weeks later which then left them little time to get the fields ready for next harvest and hence burning stubble seems like a quick option (with no consequence to them).
Almost every home has people with diabetes/hypertension. And every neighborhood has thyroid camps every now and then, and you see a huge mass of women there. Dengue and other infectious disease breakouts are becoming common and you see a rise every 6 months or so. There are waiting queues running into months for open heart surgeries in affordable hospitals, which should tell you the overall direction of health situation here.
This is beyond a total political meltdown looming above the whole country.
1. An explanation of how AQI is calculated? Some initial searching turns up very little information as to the basis of the index.
2. How the safety levels (green, orange, red, purple) are decided.
It seems somewhat opaque. Anyone know why this is?
https://cpcb.nic.in/National-Air-Quality-Index/
For US, EPA has some additional info available:
https://www3.epa.gov/airnow/aqi-technical-assistance-documen...
The problem is that these rogue states have a) very high fertility (3.3 for Bihar iirc) and b) very high base population which greatly accelerates population
Have you looked at the birth rate of India for the last 30 years, it has been consistently falling down.
Some of the Southern Indian states have birth rates below replacement rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_terri...
So you end up huge masses of population concentrated in existing cities.
The areas around Bangalore are empty. Try visiting Kolar or Tumkur during weekdays, chances are you will be bored in 30 minutes of your visit and fall asleep. The afternoons feel empty and totally devoid of any activity. Bangalore itself was this way a few decades back, when I was growing up here.
The problem with the cities will continue for the obvious reasons. There is economic activity, schools, colleges, hospitals and better life prospects.
Before the Haber-Bosch process, humans numbered about 2 billion. That process requires fossil fuels. With some efficiency gains we can probably double that number, but along with many other triangulation points, it seems only a substantially smaller number than today's would allow sustainable human society.
We can get there by lowering the birth rate or nature can do it for us, which would likely lower it well beyond.