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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, but pollution could have come from burning wood or coal for heating and cooking it isn’t all from industry.

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Particulate pollution from burning is mostly non-combusted junk. The bigger the scale the more it makes sense to invest in technology that lets you get more out of your fuel from more complete combustion. Someone just burning trash to get rid of it can burn it in a pit. Someone burning trash as a fuel for their industrial process that requires heat is going to invest in a gasifier burner so they're not spewing wasted joules out the smokestack.

> burning wood or coal

Brick kilns, yes. Heating and cooking, not really. People either use LPG stoves or induction cookers.

We're talking about 1920 though :)

That leads to the next question: why would Corona-stay-at-home stop people from cooking food or heating their homes?

Perhaps they are using natural gas instead of biomass?

Not really. Wood or coal stoves are still very much in use in villages. At least that's what I saw living in many developing countries for the past two decades.

Btw, burning biomass would not change the problem. Wood and charcoal is biomass too.

People in Kathmandu are using gas. That's a few million people. Sure in the villages, but the numbers pale in comparison

Wrong again. In developing countries, a majority of people live in the countryside. That's one thing that differentiates those countries from developed countries.

But that's not really important, because even if only 20% of households used wood/coal for cooking, it is very much noticiable.

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