Air pollution is worse than we thought
vox.com
vox.com
While I live on a street with many cars driving by all day, I thought being a few storeys up would reduce the amount of pollution from vehicles... apparently not at all!
There are programs to buy back citizens' dirty vehicles, in Vermont they tried to reduce the old truck fleet to lower CO2 emissions. The problem is the owners were just fine with their trucks, why should they need to retire their machine before its' time?
There is a process of convincing here, mere economics hasn't been enough. We need all citizens, not just one party or the other, to help fight air pollution. I recognize the poorest will have the hardest time, which means those in power should support climate justice for lower income or frontline communities.
Basically the idea is we then take the tax income raised by a societally harmful activity (like driving) and redistribute it to individuals like the ones who are scraping by so that tax is revenue neutral.
Best to keep in mind both sides of the equation, because we can only eat one of these things.
Americans can buy food from anywhere. There's an oversupply that is difficult to deal with because the farming industrial complex constantly improves yields. We already get food from Mexico, south america, Canada, fish from the ocean all over. We stupidly subsidize ethanol, we should get rid of that. We need to keep some food production going, both for national security but also because the rural areas are already decimated with job loss and lack of opportunities for people. Every town is full of closed shops and the nearby Walmart supplanted all local things, except maybe a bar.
My family has farms in the south and midwest, I want to support farming and those farmers. The US govt pays us not to plant part of our crop. And they also have price supports on crops which basically sets the price. Of course we all benefit from cheap food. Much of the profit is gone from farming. Most young people take outside jobs because you can't make a living unless you have very large mass scale (this is not exactly a new discovery).
My dad lives in a big city in Texas and inherited his mom's farm. Someone else farms it, he doesn't have anything to do with it. 30 years ago there were some salt of the earth farmers but they all sadly died, at least in my family.
That’s not to say that externalities of consumption shouldn’t be accounted for. But if you’re going to squeeze people out of cars, you should probably have a solid plan to deal with the outcome.
This may be true in some areas, but not most.
The problem is that we spent most of the 20th century designing the country around cars, and especially discouraging transit as something generally for poor/brown people. Even in cities which have things like subways, urban design almost always massively prioritized suburban commuters over transit users. People make horrible financial decisions because having a big, late model vehicle is such a social status signal.
The problem is changing that puts us in a prisoner’s dilemma: on an individual level in much of the country it’s best to keep piling your money into a depreciating mostly-idle asset because you need a critical mass of riders for transit to be cost effective. Using things like higher gas taxes to pay for things like road maintenance and pollution remediation can work well but people who are used to being subsidized will complain bitterly as soon as you ask them to pay the true cost for what they use.
>That’s not to say that externalities of consumption shouldn’t be accounted for.
My point is direct economic recovery of those externalities is going to be largely regressive, and that the idea of that investing in bicycles and buses is a suitable replacement is incomplete...particularly in non-metro regions.
In Washington state they have a report from the legislature that has spending in each county compared to tax revenues. This is very sensitive because of course Seattle money goes out to the whole state. There's a second version of that report that tries to compute the economic benefit of the rural areas, separately from the actual tax revenues, I'm sure this was created to lessen the sting.
I want to keep our economy and the people in it living. But we need to have a shared reality.
One county, Lake County, had the good manners to cancel a planned vote of secession in late 2015 after the rest of the state paid to put out an enormous wildfire there.
rural folk think the same way of Urbanites as you think of them. they think everyone should get out of the cities and stop being a polluting leech who is detached from the natural state of humans living in equillibrium with nature.
Now, also look back a century. Rural life existed - not exactly the same but also with improvements like healthier communities because people bought locally rather than driving 2 hours to Walmart or Costco. Raising the price of gas would benefit all of businesses which have been out priced by companies who don’t have to pay for externalities. Sharing a ride might seem like a good trade in comparison to learning that your staple crop no longer grows in your region or that the hundred year flood/fire is now a decadal experience.
Also, remember that this isn’t a ban on cars. It’s a financial cue pushing people to drive less, combine trips, buy the vehicle with the specs they actually need rather than the heavily-marketed guzzler, etc. People like having way more horsepower than they need but nobody is really inconvenienced without it.
This does not seem to be happening now because nearly everything is shut down and what is still running is operating at less than max capacity.
Industrial pollution largely from coal combustion.
They can be roughly grouped into hydrocarbons, other plastics, aerosolized solvents, other absorbed aerosolized chemicals, inert particles.
If you're driving gently (to maximize regeneration), a hybrid or EV pretty much only uses the brake pads to hold the car at a stop. Deceleration is done entirely with regeneration, for maximum energy recovery.
Until you drive down a hill, another driver does something unexpected, you have to take a poorly marked turn, there's a stop sign around the bend etc...
That person is probably referring to the Tesla feature where when you don't use the gas pedal, the system is slightly recharging the batteries all the times (via magnets). You can turn this off if you don't like it. Then you get used to a driving style where you take your foot off the 'gas pedal' before you need to stop and the car slows down on it own (through regen braking), and so the 'UX' is you just selectively apply the gas pedal or not to go fast or slow down. If you need to stop suddenly you use the brake. It's an automatic thing after a while, you don't need to think about it. I sometimes have to get used to a 'regular gas car' that doesn't have this when I drive something else.
They still have brake discs & pads, but mostly just for panic stops & holding in place when stopped.
Normal brakes use 100% friction, which of course causes substantial heat, and increases wear and tear on the pads, the rotor, and brake fluid. These type issues are why it's often recommended to use a lower gear down hills so you can offload the brakes with engine friction.
So not only does regenerative braking produce less dust, but it produces less heat, and the brakes/rotors/fluid are on average cooler and in a state where any needed braking causes less wear.
The only time you need brakes is keeping still and emergencies.
I just had my 2012 Volt rear brake discs replaced due to corrosion. The discs were almost unused but too corroded to pass inspection.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-...
For example, I wouldn't sprinkle dirt all over my food. But I'm perfectly happy for my food to grow in dirt. Does that mean contact with dirt = bad? No.
As for the dirt: plants act as natural filters, they select that which is good for them using their root systems and use that to build the rest of the plant as they go along. Some plants can be used to extract certain materials from the soil, others do the opposite and will react by rejecting the contaminants. What exactly happens depends on the plant, soil conditions, humidity, amount of sunlight and lots of other factors besides. Not all dirt is good, not all plants grown in all dirt are good, not all dirt is the same.
It's actually a good question, and I'm disappointed to read middlebrow dismissal of it.
As long as we want to go fast, there will be some brake dust in the air. Brake pads can be made out of a variety of materials, and we want to use the ones which are least harmful to our lungs and other organs.
That takes research, not emotional appeals to disgust (from the Latin, meaning "bad to eat").
It is preferable to having to drive in back-to-back traffic though, I agree.
I thought I'd get used to it, but as the time passed, I got more and more sensitive to it. Strange.
That's because you stopped making noise yourself. That masks a lot of environmental noise. Ditto of course for a chunk of your neighbors. So then your hearing adapts: it becomes more sensitive so you're more alert in case predators come and visit your cave.
That kept you safe in the stone age, today it will keep you awake at night from traffic.
You could try a masking sound, white noise or ocean sounds should mask traffic quite well. Not very loud, just loud enough to even out the variation. Good luck! Loss of sleep is terrible. I wrote about it recently: https://jacquesmattheij.com/dealing-with-insomnia/
In increased production capacity: 4x electric vehicles, 16x batteries, 12x wind turbines, 10x solar modules. 2x the nuclear capacity. 25% of the energy grid converted into communal/consumer owned renewable production.
Basically full production in every technology that result in zero air pollution for the energy grid. Full production in all technologies also allow us to see which clean technology is cheaper in practice without people sitting still while arguing over which strategy they should use.
I'd love to be wrong and I'd love to see renewable energy and storage solved in the next 10 years (though likely take longer than that to scale up nuclear).
The kind of reactor most people think of (again, AFAIK) are breeder reactors, or otherwise derived from breeder reactors, which were about making weapons-grade material rather than power, which is part of the reason those designs have the issues everyone (largely legitimately) has with them.
They also reprocess their spent fuel, but due to complicated sciency reasons you can only do that a few times when you're burning it in thermal reactors.
France had plans to move to a closed cycle, which would improve fuel utilization by a couple of orders of magnitude, but their breeder reactor program (required for the closed cycle) has largely stalled (see Phenix, SuperPhenix, and ASTRID which was recently cancelled before it even got off the drawing board).
And no, breeder reactors per se aren't about making weapons-grade material except in the feverish dreams of Greenpeace.
That's an issue for most people. The political pressure was huge to stop the project. The CEA wasn't even that good at manipulating sodium, they got two known major incidents in Cadarache. One quite spectacular with a huge cloud of fire.
I think nuclear power is great to research and the risk is sometimes worth it, but SuperPhénix was too risky.
So you would install a number of BNs in Russia and supply recycled fuel back to exported reactors. Not only you will save money on fuel (well, assuming nuclear fuel will cost more than it does today), but also will reduce amount of nuclear waste for long-term storage (today most of waste from exported reactors has to come back to Russia).
It's good that we research these, but there is no pressing need to take them into use soon.
Coal is incredibly dangerous directly - mining and operation are generally unsafe. Hydro has had some terrible accidents like the Chinese Banqiao dam rupture in 1975 which killed tens or hundreds of thousands. Solar and wind I'm not too sure about, but nuclear power has tens of deaths total attributed to it.
The nuclear-relate deaths that occurred have been from using light-water reactors, which are essentially very-high pressure high-temperature radioactive containers. Modern designs like molten salt reactors (like LFTR) have the potential to be safer, but don't have regulatory support and are mired in the process [2].
I made a whole infographic about the safety of nuclear power, but I'm not an engineer or journalist [3]
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
[2]: https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.c...
[3]: https://create.piktochart.com/output/37686680-safe-nuclear-p...
Hydro's mortality is largey attributable to a single, though immensely bad incident, the Chinese Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975. That itself was a consequence of poor engineering, planning, management, response, and an unanticipated weather event (parked typhoon/cold-front dumping > 1,000mm rain in 24h), with most issues being common to any high-profile technical engineering project.
Hydro otherwise is largely safe (there are a few other exceptions, again higghligghting planning, management, response, and institutional integrity, especially in developing regions or periods), problems not specific to the energy-harnessing mechanism) and the Banqiao site is presently home to > 15 millions, rather than being a multi-century technically-induced wildlife park as is the case with other technologies.
There are literally tens of thousand of dams, if not > 100k, worldwide (over 22k in China alone), with well over a century of major utilisation. Granted 100 or fewer major (2+GWe) installations.
There are fewer than 400 nuclear power stations worldwide (3911 by my count from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations...), the bulk in operation for less than 50 years. We've had three major disasters and numerous close calls, all with massive long-term consequences. Building out infrastructure to the scale of present or future (industrialised-world electric provisioning to 8-12 billion inhabitants) would see even at much better safety records* a major accident every few years. And that's only one disadvantage.
Notably, once floodwaters recede, even a catastrophic dam failure returns to livable condition rapidly: weeks to years, rather than centuries.
And, as noted, it's human, social, business, and organisational factor common to any major high-value asset technical project generally to blame.
(This was not a large value of 400.)
This is very similar to nuclear.
> Per IPCC, wind and solar are very nearly on par with (possibly better) than nuclear.
Mind sourcing this? every place I've looked shows nuclear beating solar by 5x and wind by 2x.
Analysis unit was deaths per GWh or similar.
I'll see if I can find it though I'm not optimistic.
Our World In Data posts similar stats, premature deaths/yr at 1 TWe/yr generation:
Coal: 25
Oil: 18
Gas: 3
Nuclear: 14--100
Wind: 29 years
Hydropower or solar: 42 years
Solar: 53
Absolutely the same can be said about Chernobyl (well, apart from the weather) and Fukusima.
Though to clarify: as non-engineering failures, there is no technical engineering fix to this problem.
I'm skeptical of this figure - Chernobyl alone is expected to cause ~4k+ deaths due to radiation exposure.
I'm sure nuclear is still significantly lower than combustion fuels, but I'd expect solar is somewhat safer.
I'd much rather my children face the narrow technical challenge of long term storage, as opposed to global migration crises, drought, and famine.
The simple truth is that radioisotopes decay. When you split Uranium, you dig up the nuclear dust. The more years you give it, the more it settles.
Don't get me wrong, fuel cladding is going to be popping, leaking, and breaking all over those racks of fuel in dry Helium atmosphere or whatever it is.
Also, companies who want to do US reprocessing (but will not anytime soon b/c of $$) are ready to cherry-pick the living daylights out of the fuel inventory. In another 50 years, the best fuel candidates will be vastly more economically attractive. You have the burn history of each fuel assembly, and you know which has the most good stuff and the least bad stuff. Time tends to shift that ratio in the right direction.
And on top of that, the Th fuel cycle requires reprocessing and breeding, again technology that looks feasible on paper but little knowledge how it would work out in practice.
I'm not saying this as a negative, I think MSR's are cool and potentially very useful technology. We should definitely research them with the goal of taking them into use for large-scale power production. But this won't be ready in 10 years.
Now, I hope I'm wrong, and maybe IMSR proves me wrong by deploying at scale sooner. Though that is the traditional once-through LEU cycle, no Th, but still a MSR design.
China.
The utter hysteria around Nuclear is the biggest threat to climate change and if you really want to diminish the use of fossil fuels nuclear is the most economically viable path. The majority of costs are either cultural or obtuse regulations that have layered up over time. Micro reactors, molten salt and other really innovative designs don't get traction because of irrational fears radiation spawns in people.
Similar to a lot of hysteria we are seeing around COVID-19. Even if the majority of the population gets infected, it's only a real threat to a small portion of the population - so rather than managing that specific threat we are acting like it affects everyone the same - with disastrous results that are still unfolding.
I‘m not sure if battery storage, which has predictably falling prices, isn’t already cheaper than that, but you can at least already calculate when it is going to be.
A sensible strategy is to keep old nuclear plants running and invest heavily in renewables and energy storage.
Chernobyl was billed as proof of just how bad nuclear disasters can be, but looking back, we didn't know how good we had it when that was all we had to be afraid of.
Here are a couple TED talks showing the downside of renewable energy - such as the enormous land usage and reliable energy storage needed to compete with nuclear or fossil.
Why renewables can’t save the planet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w
A reality check on renewables https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o
Yes but it would be nice to actually surmount them before making more of the stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU
Plus, such a concentrated power source is going to invite a terrorist attack by something like drones, which can't be effectively defended against. An attack that looks like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at....
If we scale up this mind set and suddenly produce 100x Increase in electric cars and nuclear plants, wouldn’t we see a massive spike in air pollution much more than if we simply had 0 production of these?
I’ve been very skeptical of “produce more green energy” solution because they seem to pile on more problems under the guise that it is better in the long run.
Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less? Fewer cars, fewer things.
I think in general the environmental movement has been hurt by the association with austerity. Most people don't like being told their lives have to get worse for a benefit that's difficult to see. It needs to paint a positive vision of the future that people can get excited about.
This exactly. Most people respond better to carrots than sticks. We can consume less energy and material and still live more, through innovation.
Traveling less would do more, or using more public transport. Bulk transit of non-food goods is very energy efficient, the last mile is not.
See website Without Hot Air as a rough but thorough analysis.
Air conditioning as a luxury to rethink, OTOH, rarely if ever comes into discussion around here (I'm writing from a Mediterranean perspective, obviously AC can quickly become a necessity elsewhere).
Sourcing: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-deadly-extreme-t...
Counterintuitive though.
The story gets even better if any solar, wind, or hydro is used. Sure nuclear helps as well. Seems obvious to me that we should push on all green energies.
How can we do that when overall population is still growing (even if the rate of growth is slowing). I mean, even if I cut my consumption by 25%, there are so many new people that it doesn’t seem like it would matter much?
Of course, if it's doable in practice I'm all for it, and if clean energy is really as cheap as they claim, then we'll get there pretty soon just on economics.
Most people think "clean energy is just about building solar panels" - it's viewed as this linear process. I think the media often present it this way.
But in fact, between us and a society run by clean energy is all sorts of huge technical hurdles we haven't solved yet. Adding 10,20% renewables is simple enough - but 100% renewables without daily blackouts is incredibly hard. We need many orders of magnitude more battery storage to get there (or some other storage technology).
It's the same for electric cars. The cost of electricity to run an electric car is small, so people assume that if everyone has an electric car, running costs will be low.
But currently electric cars are subsidised by fuel taxes, and low emissions vehicles are encouraged by low vehicle taxes. When every vehicle is low emission, we still need to get the cost of maintaining the roads from somewhere. And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
It's a problem because it means most people don't appreciate how far we have to go before a clean energy society is possible. We need to increase investment into this technology by an order of magnitude to have a hope of implementing before climate change has significant effects.
- 100% renewables is hard. 90% renewables is straightforward.
- electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven. Distribution network changes are not required.
I believe most wind power curtailment today happens overnight.
TANSTAAFL
My point isn't that fuel taxes pay the full costs of the road, but that electric cars in many countries receive favourable taxation (which significantly reduces the cost of ownership) which is only possible because they are a minority of vehicles.
This actually depends largely on the country you're in. In the UK (where I live) the effective tax rate on gas is around 68%, and there's lots of tax breaks for electric cars. The effective tax rate on electricity is 5%, and the cost per MJ of electricity and gas is about the same. Effectively the government tax revenue per mile of electric cars is drastically lower than that of gasoline cars - not a sustainable situation for widespread adoption.
It looks like the tax on gas in the US is significantly lower than in European countries, so the same situation probably doesn't exist to the same degree.
> electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven. Distribution network changes are not required.
Yes, average power consumption is quite low. In fact over a year the average car (if it was electric) would probably only consume a few hundred watts.
But that's not the problem. The problem is peak demand. A usable electric car charger draws 7kW for a sustained period of time. That's a very different use case (distributed across every house in the country) than currently.
Taking this study for example: "32% of low voltage (LV) feeders (312,000 circuits) will require intervention when 40% - 70% of customers have EVs, based on 3.5 kW (16 amp) charging." http://myelectricavenue.info/
Bear in mind that's for 3.5kW charging, whereas anyone installing a charger today is putting in 7kW+ charging.
The only way to mitigate distribution network changes is by smart charging on the car side - basically reducing charging rate or times to spread the load. Fortunately that's fairly doable, but it's not necessarily a panacea - if there's a couple of days where many people do higher than average mileage (eg a national holiday) you could find that there's simply not enough capacity locally to sustain charging all the cars on the street.
The problem is that we need to be adopting electric cars _now_ to make a dent in emissions, but there's all these infrastructure problems (I haven't even mentioned on-street charging or long distance journeys...) that will become evident when we do. We need to be fixing them today. Claiming they don't exist is naive. Remember that there's just over 1 million electric cars on US roads today, out of 273 million vehicles. The infrastructure needs to grow by 2 orders of magnitude to support that.
That does not sound right. Napkin math: A tiny Renault Zoe has a 52kWh battery. Even assuming 100% charging efficiency, charging for 8 hours over night you’re looking at 52/8=6.5kW per hour. That’s already more than twice as much as an oven, and an extremely conservative approximation.
edit: thanks for pointing out what I missed. I was somehow fixated on full recharges.
A Zoe has a 245 mile range on said battery, but assuming you drive at 25% efficiency for 20 miles to and from work, you'll use about 30% of a zoe's battery in a day, which spread out over our 11 hours from earlier gives about 1.5Kw per hour.
- My EV has ~30kWh battery
- I charge about twice a week, overnight, from around 50% to 100%, if I drive to work every day
I have a relatively short commute to work. So this is may be a lower bound. But charging 52kWh every single day is definitely an extreme case on the other end.
Where I'm from, EVs typically charge at 10A-32A at 220V, or 7.4kW to 22kW with level 2 chargers. That means you can't charge a Tesla from 0% to 100% over night, but then I haven't heard of anyone who actually needs to do that every day, if ever. The closest I've done personally is charge a Tesla I borrowed from around 30% to 100% at a cabin, but then I started when we arrived in the afternoon and we left just before noon.
It's weird that you'd call a 52kWh Zoe tiny btw. 52kWh is quite respectable. It's only half of the largest EV you could possibly buy now, and I'm guessing 50-70kWh will be the standard mid/entry level battery size for a long time.
30-40kWh cars might disappear. That'd kind of be a shame, because it's a useful size for many people. And having a larger battery than you need is a huge waste unless you have vehicle-to-grid to get more value out of the battery capacity you're not using. But then again, maybe the 30-40kWh market will be taken over by second hand 50-60kWh cars with reduced capacity.
I am sad that there are so few good subcompact/ truly low energy options in this market. There is a tiny Chinese car coming to the US, but right now it seems like it's only going to hit a few markets.
The American (genital) size contest for SUVs and Trucks has sucked a lot of oxygen out of what is a much more interesting variety in EV production for Asia and the EU.
Average drives do more like 12,000 a year, not 80k miles.
It actually a bit above 100% to the point where the price can go into negative during optimal conditions. This has put a damper on the enthusiasm for further expanding beyond 100%.
By my estimates, with land wind parks operating on an average ~30% capacity per year and ocean wind parks at around 60%, the average during a year is about half the energy grid generated from renewable and the rest from fossil fuels.
Going beyond that is going to be hard.
The continental European grid is massive and Denmark has power lines to Germany, Sweden and Norway. The Nordic grid has massive amounts of hydro power.
Not every country has such access to allow them to go all-in on renewable energy.
The real poster-child for large-scale renewable integration is the UK.
Add in transmission lines & a functioning energy market, and demand will timeshift where it can, and whatever arbitrage opportunity finally remains can be met with either storage or curtailment & further overbuilding, whichever is cheaper.
It's not like we need to run the whole grid from storage at night.
It's not a small land area by any means, but it seems a clear case of "lesser evil".
Rooftops, i.e. rooftop solar, are also already "lost" when it comes to nature.
I also don't see why farmland and solar can't live side by side. mixed livestock farming and panels higher above the ground seems doable.
I'm sure it's possible to grow crops under solar panels too provided you're not blocking all the light. Google shows there are some studies on it I don't have time to read right now.
This ignores cost of course. but I'm arguing against the idea that we don't have the space.
See, even with superb photovoltaics only single story homes have the right area to power use ratio to make sense to use solar as main power source. These cause transportation problems that probably eat all the benefit...
But I cannot fathom how the entire total global roof area can only power 8% of Poland. Evidence?
Well, maybe we should just get accustomed to daily blackouts? I mean yeah, it's inconvenient, but so is being choked to death by pollution and staring down a global climate catastrophe. Besides, being accustomed to blackouts would make us better prepared for other causes of blackouts, like a chaos monkey for our power dependency. And to top it all off: people will need to find something to do when their power is out, like maybe go outside and see what we've been working so hard to destroy with our giant SUVs and whatnot.
...I think I'm only half kidding, actually.
Storage options include pumped hydro, a proven technology for long durations, and some analysis like that done by Australia's national science agency is already finding that: "wind, solar and storage technologies are by far the cheapest form of low carbon options for Australia, and are likely to dominate the global energy mix in coming decades." https://reneweconomy.com.au/new-csiro-aemo-study-confirms-wi...
100% renewable is not really required and I think it's not so bad to use some fossil gas on occasion. In the future it may actually be renewable-generated hydrogen.
For countries with more population and less land it'll be more difficult to find room for massive wind/solar so I certainly hope the challenges with next-generation nuclear get solved soon as well..
How? Electrical systems (e.g. cars/heat pumps etc.) are much more efficient than fossil fuel equivalents. An example, most new gas cars get ~30 mpg today, but a Tesla model 3 gets 141 mpge. So switching from a gas-powered car to a model 3 results in a 75% reduction in energy usage (as you advocate) with the identical ‘lifestyle’. [1]
This effect is found far more generally. Quoting from a detailed report [2] on how to decarbonize America, “One key aspect of electrification makes this transformation possible, and it represents perhaps the most astonishing finding in Griffith’s modeling: Large-scale electrification would slash total US primary energy demand in half, from around 100 quads to about 45-50. This a huge deal — it means America only needs to produce about half the energy with renewables that it is currently producing with fossil fuels.”
I strongly support, dense walkable cities and public transit, but for the first time in history we’ve separated the task of reducing energy usage from convincing most Americans to give up the lifestyle they’re used to. It’s incredibly promising news for the energy transition!
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2020/02/19/the-epa...
[2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21349200/climate-...
Diminish need for air conditioning by adding blinds or other sun shades on the appropriate sides. Use air foils on cargo ships, making them follow trade winds and sea currents (trading polution for increased transit time (increase crew cost)).
Make people commute less (works for white collar jobs, but blue collar?).
Increase veganism.
Look into having agriculture require less chemicals through use of perennials or alternative varieties and crop rotations.
I don't know enough about other industries to do more than yell "electrify all the things" and mandate factories to use renewable electricity, put solar panels on the roof etc...
Increased transit time for ships is from month to many months. Not worth it.
Veganism faces a big problem with water use.
Agriculture is being looked into all the time, but cheap always wins. We need to feed these billions of people somehow, and crop rotation won't do.
Mandating greenwashing is what we have now. The area to cover with renewables to power just a single smelter is huge.
That would be an issue only if that prevented the land from being used for other things. Wind power generation doesn't prevent farming on the land or prevent fishing on the ocean. Solar can be deployed on rooftops or parking lots. Solar developments often support grazing animals underneath the solar panels.
Fish are not uniformly distributed, however, so the fishing impacts of offshore wind farms can probably be reduced by not installing wind farms in fishing grounds.
I hope we will see big advancements soon enough although I am cautious about this happening anytime soon in the US.
We're already at the point where it makes more economic sense to build renewable than it does to build infrastructure to support non-renewable energy (in most locations, there are exceptions). In many places, it's more affordable to replace existing, functioning non-renewable generation with clean energy (either solar, wind, or a combination of the two). This is without considering environmental costs, when you consider the externalized costs of environmental damage, the case is even more lopsided.
Maybe we won't be at 100% renewable without massive battery systems, but 70-80% is reachable without a huge investment, particularly in solar rich or wind rich locations. We're not even at 50% at the moment so we have a long way to go before we hit that last 20-30% where it's going to be most painful. Even if we accelerate adoption massively, we have a lot of time to work on that problem.
If nothing else, we can fill that gap with the least dirty non-renewables and eliminate a massive amount of emissions. Nuclear seems like a good choice, particularly some of the new, safer pelletized plants.
> But currently electric cars are subsidised by fuel taxes, and low emissions vehicles are encouraged by low vehicle taxes.
Personally, I think this is the wrong model. Since internal combustion engines cause tons of external damage, we should be taxing those vehicles based on that externalized damage rather than subsidizing vehicles. The fundamental problem with the current approach is the benefit runs out for the manufacturers who are reducing emissions the most.
> But currently electric cars are subsidized by fuel taxes
This is not remotely true. In fact it's the opposite, ICE vehicles are subsidized by externalizing the costs they inflict on society.
> And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
The average driver clocks around 10k miles/ year, a little under 30 miles/ day. That's less power use than a typical refrigerator. Much less than air conditioning a 2 story house in California. The energy grid can handle that.
> It's a problem because it means most people don't appreciate how far we have to go before a clean energy society is possible. We need to increase investment into this technology by an order of magnitude to have a hope of implementing before climate change has significant effects.
One of the bigger problems we have with getting funding for clean energy is exactly the sort of arguments you are making here. When you present clean energy like it's an all-or-nothing thing and paint a verbal picture like there is a big, insurmountable wall, people just throw their hands up and want to give up.
We do need to increase investment in this technology, but there are massive, incremental benefits which can be realized at nearly every step along the way.
> The average driver clocks around 10k miles/ year, a little under 30 miles/ day. That's less power use than a typical refrigerator. Much less than air conditioning a 2 story house in California. The energy grid can handle that.
And with delayed charging and Vehicle-to-grid, it could even be beneficial for the grid.
Many of the problems related to storage don't seem like a technology problem. They appear to be a commercialization problem. We're not waiting on some fundamentally new tech. From elevated water to liquid metal batteries to compressed air, many technologies are all being commercialized right now. It feels like we have the ability to really push that forward in a big way.
I think you misunderstood what cheap means, in the context of public health and a nation scale economy. Cheap is code for "do we want to" and if you implement storage as a public utility there may be no price problem. It makes jobs, it fuels industry. Do you think building out coal and oil and nuclear power was "cheap"?
Vietnam has a lot of problems they need to solve before clean air gets to the top of their priorities. It is a long road but it will come to the top. They are making good progress on the other issues, but we are talking about decades, so no surprise they don't care yet. Give it time.
The culture is literally to not care about these sorts of things because it is someone else's problem. You see it in the day to day living... endless numbers of people routinely just throw their plastic cups carried in plastic bags, into the sewer on the side of the street. Knowing full well, it will either just sit there or one of the govt. sponsored cleanup people will pick it up.
I spent two years actively refusing plastic and it is impossible to convince every single person you deal with that you don't need yet another plastic bag.
Covid will end up being a giant reset for this country and I'm less enthusiastic about the future than you are. It will be interesting to watch for certain.
I understand the intended implication, but the vernacular is pendulum swinging too far in the wrong way factually against CO2.
Nitpicky, but hey this is HN, and I can be unpopular at this party, too! :-P
Build your own sensor for about 50-60 dollars. The community has a DIY guide. There used to be a guide that didn't require soldering, but the current guide still isn't very complex.
- Dying to breathe: Mongolia's polluted air (babies with pneumonia) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUNuHxrd7Y0
and these two podcast describing who is most effected by these issues.
- OPPRESSIVE HEAT: CLIMATE CHANGE AS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE https://www.climateone.org/audio/oppressive-heat-climate-cha...
- Broken Ground: Robert Bullard On Environmental Justice https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com/broken-ground/
I now use this industrial-level laser particle counter to verify my indoor air quality: https://www.iqair.com/us/commercial/air-quality-monitors/par...
I currently live on an arterial road, about 2 blocks from a major Interstate (I-5).
I'm very concerned about air pollution. Pollution here (Seattle, Downtown / Capitol Hill area) is bad enough I can see it in the form of black dust which comes in even through closed windows. And that's just the particles big enough to see.
I placed 4 HEPA filters throughout the house, and I run them constantly on a low setting. Based on square footage, I would only need 1-2 of these filters. But I wanted extra filter capacity in each main room.
One annoyance is that my particle counter returns a particle count (per cubic meter, I think?) which doesn't have an exact conversion to the standardized AQI (Air Quality Index). I found a plausible conversion guide, surely not exact but close enough.
Here's what I learned:
- Indoor air filters make a dramatic improvement to air quality. When the outdoor particle count is ~1M, my indoor count can be well under 100K. That's 90% reduction.
– When I approximate AQI, it's common for outdoor air (https://cfpub.epa.gov/airnow/index.cfm) to be in the "Moderate" scale, and my indoor air to be at the floor (best) of "Healthy".
– The IQAir HealthPro Plus (https://www.iqair.com/us/room-air-purifiers/healthpro-series) is incredibly effective. It lowers particle count to zero at its outlet.
– My other air filters are still effective, even though they don't get the particle count down to zero. They are the RabbitAir minusa2, and two Blueair Classic 205 units.
I was also very surprised when I carried the particle counter around my neighborhood. The quiet streets often have worse air quality than the arterial! And the particle count on the arterial was just as bad as on the Interstate 5 overpass. I think the better airflow on the arterials may help get the pollution out of the area. I really expected the quite streets to have fewer pollution particles.
I have not ventured into testing for C02, other gasses, or Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). But I'm very curious and may try to measure that myself someday soon.
https://twitter.com/typesfaster/status/1116732197031956480?c...
The whole piece reads like political propaganda anti fossil fuels. (Which might be what you are looking for, but not what I expected from the title). Only about 10% of the text is about the air pollution aspect of using fossil fuels, these 10% are buried somewhere in the middle and basically come down to linking to a couple of studies. Are they even new studies? Additionally there is some mentioning of the phrase "air pollution" in sentences that give no new information whatsoever and discuss the various political and societal movements tangentially related to it...
If you are looking for legit reliable information, this piece will hurt your mind to even read. Even the writing style feels like political agitation and not information. (It would actually make more sense if GPT-3 wrote this.)
The article is filled with information on air pollution and its economic effects, making the point that the savings in health care and recovered productivity would more than pay for a transition to a vastly cleaner and more sustainable energy model.
If a brief historical overview, excerpts from congressional testimonies, and summaries from scientific studies are "hurting your mind", I don't think the article is the source of the pain.
To solve particulate pollution in a practical way we don't need to build wind turbines to replace gas plants (that would be good for CO2 reasons though), we need to slap filters on diesel garbage trucks and heavy industry exhaust stacks and wet down construction sites and do other things to keep small dust (which invariably gets into people's lungs, reacts with various organic molecules and causes problems) to a minimum.
Straw manning particulate pollution as a fossil fuel problem is a great way to make particulate pollution seem like a bigger and harder to solve problem than it actually is.
Of course that would be better but that's a hard and expensive problem and the 99% solution is easy and cheap. Seems like a pretty obvious choice to me.
>California with some of the strictest tailpipe emission standards still has huge smog problems.
A combination of bad geographic luck and diminishing returns (everyone else's emissions regulations have 90+% the same effect)
>I don't see the issue with highlighting the air quality co-benefits of fighting climate change.
If your goal is to stop coughing up a lung today then focusing on better batteries and cheaper green energy is wasted effort when you can directly solve the pollution problem more cheaply right now. Sure air quality is a nice side benefit to reducing C02 emissions but if your true goal is improved air quality then reducing CO2 emissions is a crap way to go about it because the two are only loosely correlated and the bang for your buck is so bad. If your goal is to win eyeballs to your site and get people who's understanding of the problems is on the level checkout-isle magazine to share your article then it is probably a good idea.
The big problem is prevalence of old cars or ones in disrepair.
Then of course coal and oil plants, secondary gas plants; and of course industrial pollution from manufacturing.
I agree.
A bunch of articles that indirectly support one or the other candidate all while trying their best to not look like that’s what they are doing.