America’s Air Quality Worsens, Ending Years of Gains, Study Says | Hacker News Reader

America’s Air Quality Worsens, Ending Years of Gains, Study Says

nytimes.com

294 pointsluu128 comments

I recently moved to Kathmandu, Nepal (I'm a US citizen). The air quality is debilitating. All the gyms I've looked at (except the American Club which costs $100/month) have open windows, so you are more or less unable to exercise unless you have a gym at home and an air purifier. We have an AP but when the wind blows the right direction our sensor reports sometimes as high as 200 - it comes in under the door (we are searching for a solution). Let's hope it never gets this bad in the US.

Here in California, insanely high levels of mercury have been found in cougars and mountain lions in the mountains between Santa Cruz and the Bay Area. Current research shows the fog has been picking up mercury from the ocean and delivery to our doorstep. I liked the infographic in this article:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Fog-brings-p...

I think one of the problems is even with tough regulation that we have here in California, it's hard to control the actions of all individuals.

We have "spare the air days" and half my neighbors houses still have smoke coming out of their chimneys on those days because they use wood to heat their homes. You can narc them out and report them however the current workaround is for them to claim it's backyard pizza ovens as there is a loophole for cooking food.

When I leave for work in the morning or come home at night and see all the smoke rising laugh to myself that everyone we live nearby is having a massive backyard pizza party and we are not invited! :(

There's also this ridiculously persistent anti electric vehicle roll coal trend happening right now on Tik Tok and platforms where the current fox tag objective a lot of people play on CB radios is to bag a Tesla - benchmark used to be to bag a Prius. I only know about this mainly because my old coworker commuted from Placerville to San Mateo and was obsessed with playing fox tag on his commutes (which would make sense if you're a mega commuter trying to stay awake so making up dumb nicknames with your friends and all keeping each other awake on your CB radios and talking as you drive sounds fun to you).

Anyways... I've just sort of internalized the fact that more and more nonsmokers here are all going to die of lung cancer and hopefully the research and cell therapy trials will get there first before I and my family go out. :(

"Here in California, insanely high levels of mercury have been found in cougars and mountain lions in the mountains between Santa Cruz and the Bay Area"

That area is on top of a mercury mine - there's a reason it's called "Almaden Quicksilver County Park", because the primary economic activity before it became a preserve was mercury mining. The southern Santa Cruz mountains sits on top of a massive mercury deposit.

I'd really like to see the evidence that it's because of the fog. When you have pervasive elevated mercury levels throughout the food chain in an area that's a natural mercury deposit, the obvious explanation is that animals, plants, and fungi are picking it up from the soil, rather than it's being wafted in through the fog. (Mercury is quite heavy and isn't soluble in water, so the idea that the fog somehow wafts it in strikes me as bullshit.)

The researchers measured mercury levels in the fog, specifically. Almaden is also on the other side of the mountains from Santa Cruz.

Don't you see, it goes from the fog to the animals to the ground, man.

> There's also this ridiculously persistent anti electric vehicle

I'm all for working toward better air quality, and electric vehicles definitely reduce greenhouse (and other) gas emissions. At the same time, pollution from cars is not just from exhaust emissions due to combustion. I recall reading somewhere that 80% or more of particulate matter pollution from cars comes from tires and brakes. So the notion of replacing all combustion engine cars with electric cars will somehow solve the pollution issue is not realistic. The Tesla Cybertruck might be a great vehicle, but it's heavy (large tires and lots of break wear). We need better solutions.

As a cyclist, I still find it very hard to breathe when a truck passes me (worst are motor scooters going uphill), and would welcome such a reduction in particulate emissions. I guess that the size of those particulates is not the same either (tires and ICE).

Last article or paper I read on the topic counted particulates drafted from the ground as emissions, which of course EVs do not reduce much. But there's still much less nocive emissions, and doesn't smell as bad...

> We need better solutions.

A good start is fixing our land-use regulation in the US to:

* Allow apartments https://www.sightline.org/2019/11/27/end-apartment-bans-to-s...

* Allow things people need day to day near where they live: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/6/complete-neighb... - if they still have to drive, it won't be as far, and more people will be able to walk and bike.

EVs have regenerative braking. Brake pads last the life of the vehicle.

EV's are harder on tires though because of the weight, does it balance out?

Minutely so. Tesla’s model 3 is 200kg (~400 pounds) heavier than BMWs equivalent 3 series. Don’t think the tire wear due to that difference will make much of a difference...

400 pounds is a lot, that's more than 10%. The degradation is almost certainly not linear. There is an old study, which admittedly has its flaws, showing road damage was proportional to the fourth (!!!) power of the weight. I don't believe it's that bad (there are very specific conditions for that study and also it does not directly translate to tire wear), but I'd imagine it's at least to the second power, making a roughly 25% difference using your example vehicles.

If someone knows more precise math, please share.

That's road degradation though not tire wear...

https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/...

If you’re this study posted here before, it was just extrapolating based on weight of ice vehicles and is therefore largely useless in estimating the air quality impact of regenerative braking vehicles.

"Non-exhaust PM emissions from electric vehicles" study had a Corrigendum because of fake attribution and conflict of interest with a motor component company.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223101...

> The authors regret that as Victor Timmers did not carry out the research under the auspices of the University of Edinburgh, nor in collaboration or consultation with any personnel at the University of Edinburgh, the affiliation of “University of Edinburgh” has now been removed from this work at the request of the Institution. In addition, subsequent to the publication of the Paper, Victor Timmers has disclosed a potential Conflict of Interest with regard to the work, namely: “non-financial support from Innas B.V, during the conduct of the study”.

Other studies show real benefits https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/2/84/htm

I have no idea about ice, but road degradation is fairly well studied (admittedly I'm learning about it as I find these):

https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/IPWEA/c7e19de0-...

> For example, a vehicle with an axle weight of 1000 kg is considered to cause 16 times the damage compared with a vehicle with an axle weight of 500 kg.

It seems the 4th power law might actually be more accurate than I thought. If the vehicles can damage the road proportional the fourth power of their weight, surely there is significantly more wear on the wheels (the only part touching the road) than just a linear increase in weight?

My hunch, and again I want someone to provide a more accurate model, is the wear would be proportional the third power of weight.

EDIT: I found something, and it is complicated.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/16878140177000...

Figure 6 is what we're interested in, although you won't understand it without reading everything before it. It's definitely not linear, but it seems to roughly come out to something like the 3rd power, but it really depends (honestly you should click that link, there are so many variables).

EDIT EDIT: Here we go!

https://www.academia.edu/24153619/Tyre_Wear_Model_Validation...

So it seems to be somewhere between the second and third power of weight.

Assuming tire wear is directly proportional to particle emissions (I have no idea if this is true), that would mean (using the 80% of emissions coming from tires number cited in an earlier comment, and EVs being roughly 10% heavier on average) that EVs are actually worse for air quality! This is lumping together brakes and tires though, which could be wrong. Although I am certain there is at least a second power effect from braking from vehicle weight. But as another commenter mentioned, regenerative braking (while not unique to electric vehicles, I think this is a fair contrast) will benefit the EV greatly here. Also it's worth mentioning that while EVs lose, it's not by a huge amount (but it seems to be enough to be measurable).

So like most things, "it's complicated."

(For anyone unaware, in this context "ice" most likely refers to "internal combustion engine" vehicles.)

Electric vehicles can use regenerative braking for the majority of the time in normal driving. Brake pads can last substantially longer on hybrids and electric cars because of this.

With stick shift cars you can use the engine to brake and get the same brake pad savings

...at the expense of piston rings and other expensive, hard-to-get-to items. And, an educated guess here, probably increased emissions on the overrun.

Besides, who drives stick anymore? I've driven stick since I learned to drive forty years ago, and I even I admit that I can't do better than a computer-controlled DCT, on performance or fuel efficiency. Next car is either electric (we already have a Leaf), or DCT if we must.

> ...at the expense of piston rings and other expensive, hard-to-get-to items. And, an educated guess here, probably increased emissions on the overrun.

This seems like a bad tradeoff. Increasing wear on expensive, hard to replace parts (your engine and transmission), so that you can save on relatively inexpensive, easy to replace parts (your brake pads)

So that's not actually the tradeoff you're making. More to the point you run a much higher risk of acute failure with brakes than with anything else. When that happens on a downgrade you can't stop. If you were actually increasing wear on piston rings (a laughable argument at best) you might end up needing to rebuild the engine after a few decades.

There are no fuel emissions when you engine brake in a modern fuel injection vehicle, as fuel intake is stopped [1].

But it could be bad for your piston rings and catalytic converter [2], so there's that...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_braking#Gasoline_engine...

[2] https://ricksfreeautorepairadvice.com/engine-braking-cause-d...

Good lord Rick's Free Auto Repair Advice is worth what you paid for it. Compression brakes (of which Jacobs is one brand) actually do increase top end wear on a diesel quite a bit. What Rick is prattling on about might have been an issue in the 60s when engines would be well worn by 100,000 miles and PCV was not a thing. These days you're sucking crankcase gasses right into the combustion chamber constantly thanks to what's known as positive crankcase ventilation. Typically when you see a puff of smoke after overrun that's an indication of bad valve guides more than anything else (also not a common occurrence these days).

Oil in your catalytic converter isn't good, but that's why you have one or more spark plugs per cylinder — to burn it. There's the issue of heavy metals in the oil (e.g. zinc – generally in the form of ZDDP) that can damage your cat, sure, but that's why the current API specs have reduced the amount of allowable zinc a revision or so ago (API SN or SM I believe). Zinc is a great anti-wear additive but in high enough concentration can damage your cat.

Stop and go traffic will wear your clutch out (assuming we're talking cars with dry plate clutches here and not a motorcycle or anything else with a wet clutch). Engine braking will not (assuming you're not riding the brakes or constantly shifting while trying to slow down). Hell, even if you are downshifting needlessly if you're rev matching you're not wearing the clutch all that much. I'll take this fictitious clutch wear over acute brake failure thank you very much. In fact I've yet to destroy a cat or clutch in San Francisco traffic.

...at the expense of piston rings and other expensive, hard-to-get-to items.

Uh, no.

And, an educated guess here, probably increased emissions on the overrun.

Also, no. Most cars built in the last 30+ years will stop injecting fuel during overrun.

You can but very few people drive stick in the US and, of those, I suspect very few use engine breaking for a significant fraction of their braking. For getting off a highway maybe, but probably not for stop and go in a city.

In fact engine breaking is illegal in most populated areas

This is not true. There are specific areas that ban it and have signage alerting drivers to that fact, but it is not common.

Plus, it typically only applies to Semis as their engine braking is especially noisy. On a typical gas powered sedan you would be hard pressed to identify that someone is engine braking unless you were right next to it. Being prosecuted for it would be even more exceptional.

That kind of engine braking (the kind trucks do that's extremely loud) is completely different from "engine braking" with the transmission

This is the braking that communities post signage about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_release_engine_bra...

Or just use the Cruise Control speed toggle on your automatic. At least on mine (BMW) it engages regenerative breaking when you click down the speed.

I think most of the things you mention are minor fringe activities unlikely to be more than a rounding error in overall pollution.

I can't find an exact % for how many people in CA heat with wood, but it looks to be <3%. It could be much higher for you locally if you live in a rural area, but for state-wide pollution, I think it's mostly irrelevant.

That doesn't make them good (for places with pollution issues, wood isn't entirely bad as an energy source) or things to encourage, but I don't know that they're worth focusing on on either.

----------

The reason cited by the article for worsening air quality in the West is wildfires.

I spend a lot of time in the semi rural areas outside of San Jose/San Francisco and out of fire season in the cold months the smell of burning wood is persistent until temps get well out of the 60's (given the number of valleys/mountains, lots of areas stay cold all day in the shade/fog zone once it gets cold). Even if it's a small percentage, the odor is omnipresent, so the particulate pollution is present to some extent as well from a non scientific sampling.

Wood burning (not even special low pollution devices) is not permitted in new construction in the Bay Area because of how much effect even a small percentage of homes can have on air quality.

Wood burning is a pollution problem only when burned incompletely i.e. improperly. Unfortunately, properly burning solid fuel for home heating is not typical.

> There's also this ridiculously persistent anti electric vehicle roll coal trend happening right now on Tik Tok and platforms where the current fox tag objective a lot of people play on CB radios is to bag a Tesla - benchmark used to be to bag a Prius. I only know about this mainly because my old coworker commuted from Placerville to San Mateo and was obsessed with playing fox tag on his commutes (which would make sense if you're a mega commuter trying to stay awake so making up dumb nicknames with your friends and all keeping each other awake on your CB radios and talking as you drive sounds fun to you).

I don't really understand what this is. What do "fox tag" and "roll coal" mean?

You can't believe how selfish and awful people can be till you see it in person, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

Uncertain about "fox tag", but to "roll coal" is to intentionally bork up the emissions of your car, leaving a black cloud of smoke and stench behind one's car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

This is "rolling coal":

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZdDxjge5hmY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/rolling-coal-con...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/business/energy-environme...

I don't know "fox tag" but here's rolling coal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

Re Mercury, on the San Jose side isn't there an old Mercury mine (Almaden Quicksilver Park). I'm not saying the fog doesn't carry anything bad but I think the region has a history too.

Yes, there is. It was a afaik Superfund site before it was a park.

Pretty much the entire South Bay is a Superfund site.

You don't have to go so far to experience this: Guadalajara rush hour today is what LA was like in the 70s.

https://aqicn.org/city/guadalajara/

But OMG, Nepal: http://aqicn.org/city/india/patna/igsc-planetarium-complex/

Or New Delhi: http://aqicn.org/city/delhi/national-institute-of-malaria-re...

> Let's hope it never gets this bad in the US

It used to be that bad in the US, when it was as poor as Nepal is today.

Actually, it was pretty nasty during periods of US prosperity.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Donora_smog

GDP per person was $14k in 1948. It's $58k now.

Inflation adjusted, of course.

https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita/table/by-year

I wouldn't consider 70s-era Los Angeles "poor" by much of any standard.

A friend visited recently, within three days with very little time outside, their throat was burning.

Do locals suffer from symptoms like that?

Yes.

I found all the existing sites for looking up air quality to be slow, so I made a faster alternative. I just finished the MVP and I'm interested to hear if people find it useful: https://aqi.today

There's no sensor within 200km of me on purpleair.com, but it still shows a value (a scary one).

Looking at the purpleair map, it seems to be choosing the closest one? Which for me is really far / in another country.

You're right, I put in a distance threshold but it's far too large. I'll make it much smaller. Thanks for the report!

Awesome, thanks!

Maybe it helps: there's also http://waqi.info/ which has a decent API, but more importantly a lot more coverage (at least in Europe).

Thanks, I missed that they have an API available. Their data is nice, but I'm not sure the API and their TOS work for what I'm doing. I will look into it.

My number seems wrong too. I'm in Edinburgh, and it says 86. PurpleAir shows my closest sensor as about 30 miles away, with a value of 10, and the next closest one 130 miles away with a value of 2.

There is a dedicated site for Air Quality in Scotland:

http://www.scottishairquality.scot/latest/?la=city-of-edinbu...

Showing pollution in Edinburgh to be Low?

You're right, there's a bug of some kind here. Thanks for the report, I'll look into it.

This is really nice. Without changing the default look/behavior, I'd be really interested also in a chart of say, top 50 metro areas for the day/month/year avg.

A problem with simplifying/reducing context around a number like this is that air quality can vary dramatically within relatively short radii and timespan.

It currently shows 16 for my address, but that's the realtime value: the average for today on PurpleAir is 53.

Also, the measurement point is on the opposite side of the city I live in, in which the AQI varies street-to-street by ~70+ at any given time.

It's true that local air quality can vary a lot, but there aren't enough sensors in the world to give everyone street-by-street data. I think it's still useful to have a fast source for real time "best available" data. I am thinking about ways to add context and allow people to judge the data quality without adding features like maps that would make the site much slower.

I agree, but I was just pointing out that I think PurpleAir is a better source for this because aqi.today is (unintentionally) misleading without the context offered by PurpleAir.

I know that the air pollution is very bad around my area as there was a comprehensive one-off detailed study done of every area of the city in 2017 which showed it to be, and the causes of it have not since changed. The lack of realtime sensors in my area though would mislead aqi.today users to think that everything's rosy here. At least with PurpleAir one get an immediate idea of a lack of data in one's area.

This isn't intended as an outright criticism: I guess aqi.today could be made more informative by adding either some quick context, or a disclaimer, into the UI.

I made something similar - https://airhealth.now.sh/

Cool, I like your design. Great minds think alike!

Nice!

I use airnow.com. The site's usability is fine, and more importantly, their AQI numbers look much more realistic than the data you're getting from PurpleAir. You might consider another data source.

Can you share the rough location where you see a discrepancy? There are various data quality issues with PurpleAir that I attempt to clean up, but after cleanup the data seems to agree pretty well. They seem to have a lot more sensors than AirNow uses so in some cases they can see more localized pollution issues.

How about a list of famous/well known cities, for comparison purposes? Also, how about a quick stat telling me number and average distance of the sensors used to make the determination?

Why does it show air quality in LA if I’m in Santa Barbara? Wunderground shows several sensors near me in SB.

IP geolocation is imprecise. You can grant permission to use more accurate HTML5 geolocation, which will even use GPS if available, or you can manually specify an address.

So what’s the point if it’s imprecise? I use both Wunderground and Weather apps on my iphone and both are pretty fast.

Most people have a better experience. You were unlucky, but it's easy to fix if you care to specify a location. I doubt that those apps are as fast as my site for the specific purpose of looking up current air quality at your location, but if you are happy with them then by all means continue to use them.

I'd say they probably take a couple of seconds max to load the info (from the time I click on the app icon), while your site is instantaneous. But that's acceptable to me, considering they also show other info, like weather forecast.

Clean and simple. I will use this.

Wait, how did you make it so fast?!

The complete site including HTML, CSS, JS, and most importantly the actual data are all bundled together and served directly in response to a single HTTP request. Your browser doesn't need to make a bunch of extra requests requiring round trips and load a bunch of JS libraries before displaying the data.

I'm using IP geolocation to make this possible, which is imperfect (though surprisingly good), and I allow you to override it with optional geocoding or the HTML5 geolocation API.

That’s great, thank you

Nice!

AirVisual's global air quality map provides some perspective: https://www.airvisual.com/earth?nav

Much of Southeast Asia and Africa are about to enter "burning season," so AQI will soon spike in these regions.

Kind of unrelated to the topic, but does anyone know what the big spot of bad air quality near Houston is?

There was a condenser explosion at a refinery outside Beaumont this week (edit: TPC group refinery in Port Neches, Wed thru Thanksgiving morning. Primarily 1,3-butadiene). Probably related, either directly or because of surplus burn off.

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/28...

Worth checking it out just for the video.

Edit: Yep- they reinstated the evacuation order yesterday and canceled school for the week, after attempting to resume classes on Tuesday.

https://m.chron.com/news/article/Shelter-in-place-order-issu...

"The first explosion around 1 a.m. Wednesday sent three workers to hospitals – they were treated and released that day – and blew out windows and doors in homes and businesses for miles. At least five residents were injured, mostly by shattered glass."

It's 5 hours later, so the data may be different but the largest red blob I see right now is in the region of the Gulf Coast near Corpus Christi. Since it's showing PM 2.5 readings, I suppose it could be a strong offshore wind picking up dust/sand from the long barrier island there.

Saw that too and am curious as well. Uneducated guess is either fires or refineries.

The dark red blob in Texas is basically San Antonio.

Why is San Antonio (and Seattle?!) so bad? Also central Africa.

Wow check out how bad Sydney is, likely worsened by the terrible fires burning in NSW

I just got home and its raining burnt leaves. And I'm not even that close to the fires.

Geez, doesn’t sound at all pleasant. Out of interest is the air noticeable different to smell and does it cause hay fever / asthma like symptoms?

It smells! Gets into clothes etc. so they smell to. Smells like something is on fire nearby even though the fire might be 50km or 100km away. Been a while since I’ve seen the sun shining properly. Welcome to 21st century, this shit just getting started.

Last night's moon was a fully saturated red colour in the suburbs at the Northern edge of Sydney, whilst high in the sky, just like the colour red you would get on a computer monitor. More spectacular than a lunar eclipse, as there was no shadow, and weird in that it was a crescent rather than being full. Of a night you can see the flames shining over the distant horizon. 5th day of summer, 85 to go. "Fun" times ahead.

It actually smells nice, IMO. A nice woodfire smokey smell. Not at all like the polluted mega-cities in China and the rest of Asia which has a chemical tinge to it.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's healthy. And it is getting a bit old after around 3 weeks of this.

It smells like I'm near a campfire! Also, I luckily don't get those.

Looks like India has the worst as far as I saw. Some areas above 400(!). For reference, Sydney is mid to upper 100’s which is still not good and likely as you mentioned fire related.

A more barebones earth map that can show PM2.5m as well.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/particulates/surface/l...

AirVisual is great. I'm checking it regularly. Considering to get one of the air quality monitors myself to get even more reliable data. We do need to move to more green energy soon as it's not looking good.

Johannesburg appears twice here https://www.airvisual.com/world-air-quality-ranking

Jesus, what's going on in India and China?

They've been like that for years. China has been steadily getting better, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China#Air_polluti...

Whereas unfortunately it seems like India isn't improving: https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/06/india/india-air-pollution-not...

In the wheat growing parts of India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stubble_burning

There was a great podcast interview with Dr. Karen Clay about this finding and area of research back on November 7th.[0]

She discusses how they evaluate the effect from wildfires. Also, how they trace sources by analyzing PM2.5 composition--but how that's becoming much harder as the mix of these particles is becoming much more ambiguous than it used to be. Good wonky discussion of the science.

Not in the interview, but another of the surprising things I read about local pollution from transportation over the last year is that tailpipe emissions are now a minority of PM2.5 contributions from most cars.

Tailpipes have become cleaner over the last few decades, so braking and tire wear now contribute as much. The biggest contributor is something called "resuspension." Vehicles slowly grind up debris or roadway surfaces into finer and finer dust, then kick it into the air where it just hangs.

The implication is that average vehicle weight, prevalence of regenerative braking, and frequency of street cleaning can all have much more significant impacts on local pollution than other measurers you might expect, like fuel efficiency, emissions check programs, or even electrification.[1][2]

[0] https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/neolibpodcast/Karen_Clay_f...

Don't be thrown by the podcast name, the discussion of the underlying science is very apolitical.

[1] Local pollution is obviously not the same as CO2, which requires a different analysis and is more from tailpipes. But the scientific consensus is that PM2.5 leads to 200,000 early US deaths a year, and as the above podcast mentions, we're not just talking about the elderly or infirm. These are independently important issues.

[2] EVs have many advantages, but, counterintuitively, removing the tailpipe only marginally reduces PM2.5 from roadways: https://www.ridef2.com/blog-del-direttore-ridef/will-electri...

I don't take from that that EVs are bad-- just that we need to combine it with other efforts and technologies to reduce local pollution.

This is why I hate the street sweepers in LA. In any other city, street sweepers leave a wet trail like a slug. In LA, they are basically a dry broom that kicks up dust. They are designed to pick up trash from the gutter, not clean the road of particulates and oils like in other cities.

I used to live down in Oxnard and they’d literally have industrial sized blowers on a trailer and just blow the dirt in the road towards houses. Of course I happened to have all my windows opened when they came but once. But at least the road is clean?

The Denver-Boulder area used to have "brown cloud" pollution caused by temperature inversions trapping auto exhaust, back in the 70s and 80s. These went away with better national auto emissions standards and with state regulations testing car emissions. Recently, however, I've noticed more ozone and particulate pollution, but it's coming from the northeast, not Denver. This appears to be caused by fracking operations. Colorado now produces more oil than California or Alaska:

https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/production/

How does fracking produce ozone and particulate pollution?

Sometimes the oil is collected but the gas is burned off because it is not economically feasible to collect it. Kind of like in this picture: https://www.alamy.com/an-oil-well-pump-jack-natural-gas-flar...

If only there was some sort of pipe that could be used to divert this gas over long distances to more economic processing facilities.

If only there were regulations that said you had to use that pipe even if it is not economically feasible. But there aren't, so it gets burned.

You could imagine some kind of small portable power station that burns the excess gas and...

Well, there is typically no electrical grid by an oil well, so what to do with it might be the biggest problem

How does fracking result in ozone? If you're referring to flaring field gas, that is a typical oil field operation, whether fracked or not. And doesn't methane combustion result in CO2 and water?

Yeah living in the area I have noticed that as well. Pollution coming from the east / northeast (Weld County) probably due to the fracking. But if not, it would be interesting to find out where.

However, this is not to say Den/Boulder doesnt still have pollution issues that need solving. I am hoping they will curtail diesel usage on the Front Range and we see better adoption of EVs here to help battle it. Y

ou would be amazed at the amt of people with diesel trucks rolling coal and modding to emit plumes of smoke here :(

It's probably a lot due to the California fires. Last November we had the worst air quality I've seen since I moved here in 93.

This would seem to be consistent with the presented data; the bulk of the increase is in the West and Midwest (which I believe picked up a fair amount of the smoke from the fires). The Northeast and South are mostly the same.

The article suggests increases in driving as a contributing factor; but does not explain why that would be concentrated in the West and Midwest, and not the South or Northeast. Likewise with EPA regulation changes: why would they dominate in the West and Midwest? There may be reasons, it's unfortunate the article doesn't explore them.

Yes I agree and feel the whole article is skewed by averaging.

West Coast and Midwest rose by ~10 percent while East Coast and the South is still falling by almost 1 percent.

I wonder how much particulate matter is coming across the Pacific from Asia in addition to the fires causing a raise.

I also question how we could have dropped to Zero particulate matter. That seems wrong to me.

Midwest here, we got some weird cold grey, but not cloudy weather during the 2018 California fires. It was noticable, both visually and in the air quality.

Anyone recommend a good air quality detector for use in an apartment?

I live close to a highway and would be interested to compare it to the city average.

Amazon is showing most of the decent ones are in the $150-200 range...

Open Source if you do not mind some DIY. While this is part of a public outdoor air quality monitoring project, the device is perfectly usable for indoor measurement as well. https://luftdaten.info/en/construction-manual/

A coworker gave me an Awair as a housewarming gift, I actually tried to return it, but had no idea where it was purchased- I finally gave up and just set it up, its somewhat helpful- it made me aware of how much cooking and cleaning affect my air quality more than anything.

http://archive.is/aJ9xm

Is this Donald Trump succeeding at bringing industry back to America? Because the West had been outsourcing its pollution for quite some time...

We've not been as successful at outsourcing the pollution as you might think.

https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/abou...

Air quality restrictions on new industries are too strict to have a meaningful impact on this wide of a scale. Forrest fires or just increased driving due to lower fuel prices would have a much larger impact.

As bad as this is, keep in mind it’s small potatoes compared to co2.

Dropping air pollution so significantly seems like something to celebrate- yet the first mention is when, presumably forest fires, have caused regression.

People are surviving longer and it’s not news worthy?

> People are surviving longer

Like expectancy in the US is dropping.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/us-life-expectancy-has-been-...

Still though as explained in that article it's more a factor of a increase in younger people dying young vs. the elderly not living as long.

The overall trend is down but less of that is attributable to air pollution than in years past.

In the context of the story, People are living longer.

The last few years I think it gets overshadowed by dropping life expectancy, and when life expectancy increases it probably gets bundled with dozens of other causes when it's reported on.

It’s certainly newsworthy when a good trend is replaced with a bad trend.

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