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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, but: The agency's scientists in a report last year said studies support a new limit between 8 and 10 micrograms, which they said could potentially save more than 12,000 lives a year.

> But officials noted that U.S. particulate matter levels are 20% lower than in France, Germany and Great Britain, and five times below the world average, per WSJ.

I'm floored. I think this is the most informative article describing an EPA rule I've seen in years. Our discourse would be so much more fruitful if we compared what we're doing to what folks are doing in our counterpart developed countries.

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Those countries probably have a much higher population density than the US. To make a valid comparison, I think you need to level that difference.

The comparison with “the world” includes places like Mongolia and other large places with little soot pollution.

Mongolia is probably not the exampke you are looking for... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/mongo...

Ha, good point! But I imagine they still have very low overall soot pollution when averaged over the entire country. Who knows... but thanks for educating me.

I’m wondering if it's more to do with diesel passenger vehicles.

You have to work really hard to even find a diesel passenger car in the States. Whereas, at least for right now, they’re ubiquitous in the EU. (I mean an every day consumer vehicle you buy at a car dealership, ranging from a hatchback to an SUV.)

Which was ostensibly good for carbon emissions, given the fuel efficiency of contemporary diesel engines. Except, oops, they were lying through their teeth about non-CO2 emissions, and they kick out a godawful amount of pollution.

Right. Diesel is filthy and thankfully never became very popular in the US except for tractor/trailers and railroads.

I believe wood burning fires and trash fires also contribute.

Hence my comment tying soot to population density.

And to check myself…

https://www.dieselforum.org/diesel-drivers/clean-diesel-vehi...

Yup, outside of heavy-duty body-on-frame trucks and SUVs, they are gone now.

Although I swore the Mazda CX-5 had a diesel option…

> outside of heavy-duty body-on-frame trucks and SUVs

But aren’t the best selling cars in the US exactly heavy-duty body-on-frame trucks and SUVs?

The most popular car in the US for the last 30 years is the F-150.

Yes…but even in that class, they sell a teeny, tiny percentage as diesels.

https://www.dieselforum.org/vehiclesales/u-s-vehicle-sales-d...

And though I cannot find a citation, I swear I have heard the best-selling F-150 engine is the turbocharged gasoline V6.

I didn't realize this until 10 years after I started feeling these feelings, but diesel exhaust elicits a strong feeling of nostalgia in me from my travels throughout Europe. I would be occasionally reminded of it in the United States but I never knew what it was until I stood next to an idling 18 wheeler

Sigh, oh, that lovely passage in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time when he writes of diesel exhaust…

Diesel exhaust smells like ice cream to me. I assume it's an association from diesel ice cream vans as a kid.

I have similar association between bottled propane smell and cotton candy — cotton candy vendors around here used gas powered machines, which must have leaked during operation.

I have the exact same nostalgia from that smell, although I was fortunate enough to know what it was at the time (“exhaust” not diesel specifically).

Diesel is definitely part of the story. High fuel taxes in the EU help lead to more diesel given their superior fuel efficiency. But more diesels mean more particulate matter.

Those countries do have higher population density, but air quality in US cities is still better than air quality in European cities.

Which actually makes it worse from a human perspective, since there are more people there to actually breathe in that particulate matter.

Pollution of almost all forms should eventually be made illegal. There is no reason the broader population should have to suffer from the externalities of profit seeking companies.

What other countries are doing in this regard is irrelevant. The U.S. is largely considered the leader of the free world. We need to start acting like it and set examples the rest of the world can follow.

> The U.S. is largely considered the leader of the free world.

I can assure you the rest of the world doesn't see it that way.

The rest of the free world would be investing a bit more into defense if what you say is true.

"To lead" has nothing to do with that metal, "lead".

The US hegemony has always relied on science and culture more than brute force. Proof: during the Cold War, both sides had about equal militaries. Or, at least, equal for all practical purposes, i. e. killing everyone and everything 20-times over.

And yet it were eastern regimes that had to build walls to keep their citizens from stampeding westwards. Nobody in West Germany was prosecuted for watching the East German TV channel. Not just because it wasn't illegal, but mostly because it was done rarely, and mostly ironically. The reverse landed quite a few people in jail.

Judging by peoples' actions immediately after the fall of the wall, they weren't afraid of anything American. Or else it's hard to explain how about half of them used their first trip across the border to get a Big Mac.

Are you saying it has more to do with chairing meetings?

No idea what you're insinuating. I believe most international meetings are run with rotating chairs.

The concept is called "soft power". Practically, it means that when the US asked for something before, say, 2016, they'd get their wish, as long as it wasn't entirely unreasonable and/or didn't cost others too much.

Nowadays, they have trouble getting other countries to pick up the phone.

And while that is likely to improve somewhat within a month or so, it isn't ever going to go back to where it was.

You think you can get the French to agree to, say, extended copyright terms that benefit Disney and Microsoft with military threats? How does that work, exactly? Even born-again christians are going to have a hard time to justify mass murder with some marginal economic utility.

> Pollution of almost all forms should eventually be made illegal.

You can’t do anything without generating pollution. None of the things that enable this interaction on HN exist without pollution.

> There is no reason the broader population should have to suffer from the externalities of profit seeking companies.

Sure—the reason is that nearly everyone uses the things that are produced as a byproduct of this pollution. And these industries are highly competitive. Just as rising prices of crude oil quickly get passed along to consumers, so do the rising costs of environments compliance. Rising environmental standards also accelerate the exodus of manufacturing jobs to places like China with less stringent regulations.

> What other countries are doing in this regard is irrelevant. The U.S. is largely considered the leader of the free world. We need to start acting like it and set examples the rest of the world can follow.

Governance isn’t an exercise in moral posturing. It’s about making various trade-odds in a finite world governed by brutal laws of physics and economics. When you increase pollution standards, you save some lives, but increase people’s cost of living, and push more jobs to China. How other countries make these trade-offs is highly relevant.

>>> You can’t do anything without generating pollution. None of the things that enable this interaction on HN exist without pollution.

Uh, you can absolutely be pollution neutral. You can be carbon neutral, and I don't buy for one microsecond that there are 0 technologies that could filter soot from smokestacks. In fact, we could recapture all of it.

If you read about the history of pollution, you'll see that the "informed tradeoffs" is a complete fairy-tale. It's mostly ignorance and abuse of the poor by the wealthy (who put polluting factories in poor areas like West Virginia).

Some reading: https://www.ehn.org/dupont-c8-parkersburg-2644262065.html

> Uh, you can absolutely be pollution neutral. You can be carbon neutral, and I don't buy for one microsecond that there are 0 technologies that could filter soot from smokestacks. In fact, we could recapture all of it.

You said “pollution” should be banned. That includes a whole lot more than soot. And no, you can’t recapture “all” of the soot from a smokestack. Filtering particulates out of flue-gas stacks is a whole field of engineering. And that’s just one source. PM2.5 is produced by a huge variety of human activity: https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/sources-air-pollution-most-i.... The dominant source is actually residential wood burning.

> If you read about the history of pollution, you'll see that the "informed tradeoffs" is a complete fairy-tale. It's mostly ignorance and abuse of the poor by the wealthy (who put polluting factories in poor areas like West Virginia).

I focused on environmental policy in law school. It is absolutely about informed trade-offs, within an economic framework. Equity is one part of policy, but the field is not “mostly” about that. Of course that aspect of it gets a lot of press, because it makes for easy narratives for liberal arts major journalists who have trouble with science and economics.

The future is clean energy and clean manufacturing. We can either embrace it and reap the rewards or we can cede the market opportunities to China and others.

The laws of physics are irrelevant, we already have the technology to accomplish most of what we need. And regarding the laws of economics, we are in a period of record low inflation (according to the fed) despite record low interest rates. As such, this would be a prefect time to make the transition to clean tech. There is tons of capital floating around desperately seeking returns, and a little inflation would be very welcome right now.

It's informative, but if everyone used this logic, nobody would improve. Suppose all nations on Earth had particulate level X, which instead of 12,000 deaths, caused 10 times as many.

We could pat ourselves on the back for doing great compared to our peers. That's not how one innovates.

Diesel cars are much more popular in Europe, so it's not a great measure.

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