Pollution from fossil fuel combustion deadlier than previously thought | Hacker News Reader

Pollution from fossil fuel combustion deadlier than previously thought

hsph.harvard.edu

301 pointsseesawtron268 comments

Some economic gains we will see from adoption of EVs and clean energy:

1. Real estate prices in high traffic metros like Los Angeles and Houston will increase further because the return to clear skies from smoggy days and fresh air will be a bonus.

2. People will suddenly start living much longer lives with more quality years at the tail end "for some strange reason."

3. Cancer rates will stabilize "for some strange reason."

Something to consider when discussing EV's is that they outsource energy production to industrial/rural areas. Sometimes to "sustainable" sources (hydro, wind, solar) but often to coal, nat gas, etc.

I suspect the added electricity demand from everyone switching to EV's won't be easily supplied by renewables thus creating this problem elsewhere.

Hopefully it's possible but the cynic in me disagrees.

Even moving the combustion byproducts from where the people are to where the power plants are is a small win. That the plants can more easily install scrubbers for some pollutants is a further small win. That they are more efficient (even with 15% charging losses) is another small win. That the use of renewables can grow over time without car owners having to upgrade is another small win.

Stack up enough small wins and you can get to sizeable gains.

You can literally take the oil we use right now to power cars and dump it in a generator to get electricity, and not only would you go farther but do it with less pollution at places where pollution matters less.

"Where will the electricity come from" is unadulterated FUD.

I mostly agree, but still laugh a little when people purchase cars to be "green" in a location where most of the electricity comes from coal. Without an EV they never wouldn't have been able to find a car that runs on coal.

Even in places which are pretty decent about green sources like the UK, most populated areas in the country have very dirty electricity - rated at about 250-300g/CO2 per kWh produced. In terms of emissions per mile driven, that's worse than some modern petrol and diesel cars. Yes, you can purchase green electricity from your supplier, but it doesn't change the fact that the electrons going into your car are not from a clean source at all.

Those power plants could implement stronger emission controls.

That is flat out incorrect. Even in places that use only coal to generate electricity, EV CO2 emissions per mile are lower than gas vehicle emissions. See for yourself:

https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

So I don't know why you're linking a US study when I specifically said UK where the emissions are 300g/kWh in some areas, but ok, I mean I can do this too.

Where I'm from(Poland) the biggest power plant is the Bełchatów power plant, which burns lignite for power - the CO2 emissions per kWh generated from that power plant are about 1kg/kWh produced[1]. At such an insane CO2 emissions rate even the most efficient EV - let's take a Model 3 - is worse than a modern petrol car.

According to this site[0] Model 3 is incredibly efficient, using only 11.9kWh for every 100km travelled. So that's about 120Wh per km. If you're getting electricity from the Bełchatów power plant, that also means that Tesla is "emitting" 120g of CO2/km travelled.

There are many modern cars that have their CO2/km emissions at less than 120g of CO2/km. But even if they are slightly above that, it doesn't change the fact that the emissions from driving an EV are not zero like some people say they are. Even if we go back to the UK and use that 300g of CO2/kWh figure, the Tesla is still emitting 40g of CO2/km travelled. That's not zero.

[0] https://thedriven.io/2020/10/20/model-3-achieves-record-low-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...

At 300g/kWh an EV would have to consume 500Wh/km to match combustion cars in terms of emissions.

Highway driving in the winter is the only scenario where an EV can reach 250Wh/km.

This is still a win: it’s easier to replace one centralized fossil fuel burner than a bunch of cars.

Even when you take into account the huge environmental cost of those batteries??

I don’t know enough about the battery supply chain: but, generally speaking, centralizing problems often makes it easier to fix them by giving maximizing the leverage of improvements.

What huge envrironmental cost of batteries?

Australia mines >50% of the world's lithium and 1% of worlds oil, and for them oil pollutes more

And lithium is recycled, oil is not.

Oil is a biohazard, we had massive oil spills wich posioned areas as large as fukushima exclusion zone. Pour barrel of oil in a forest, and everything dies

How many lithium spills were there? Zero. If you sprincle lithium in a forest, nothing happens.

Gasoline doesn't just magically appear at the pump. Oil extraction has huge environmental costs too.

So we can just use coal then?

Of course it matters. Unless the goal is just out of sight out of mind.

Where will all the charging station access come from is the problem, not the electron count.

Everyday this community outs itself more and more as a phony "smart guy club". I stated factual reality and am met with vitriol and attacks.

I never said it wasn't slightly better.

We've always got Nuclear energy and that will scale pretty much to the moon - old generation reactors have all sorts of fatal flaws including requiring a fuel that we have trouble acquiring, but that problems mostly been solved.

Nah - I think your gut reaction is mostly just decades of propaganda painting fossil fuels as a necessary evil.

On the topic of pure renewables - hydro definitely can't scale, we can get a lot more out of it then we currently are but it's comparatively not clean and most locations don't have unlimited options for power harnessing - wind and solar scale up pretty ridiculously and in most parts of the world one or the other is going to be quite accessible and, we've also got geothermal and some other options that we can look at.

Beyond that we can look into demand reduction, the dead simplist of these is insulation/passive cooling requirements on housing and taxing private transportation to encourage ride-sharing especially in the commercial realm.

We've got some great options to look at if only the coal barons would STFU and go away.

Stationary power generation even with fossil fuels is still more efficient than ICEs. This is just FUD.

Actually to clarify: its not so much stationary as it is constant speed. I'm sure not having to be able to move around is a factor too though.

Even if a given EV uses electricity produced by as much fossil fuel as it would have taken to fuel an equivalent ICE car, it's a win because a fossil fuel burning electric plant on the grid is stationary. An ICE car moves.

With the ICE car, any equipment you add to try to capture emissions adds to the weight of the car, in turn making it burn more fuel, and you are also limited in the total weight that the car can have and still drive safely (or at all). You've also got space limitations.

With the stationary power plant, by picking a place with sufficient space there are no weight limits on how much emission capturing equipment you can add to the plant.

EV's may not completely solve the pollution problems because, as I was pointed out, the particles from the asphalt and the tires are actually major pollutants.

Apparently, the dark greasy stuff that you can see covering everything close to vehicle roads is not coming from the fumes but from the asphalt, tires and brakes.

Mostly true, but some is fluid leaks, of which there are fewer in a typical EV (fewer fluid systems, more constant pressures in them, and EVs are newer and less frequently in disrepair; that last point is a downside in some ways as almost no one will be driving a 2015 Tesla in 2070 while there are tens of thousands of 1960s era Mustangs still operating).

EVs do nearly eliminate brake dust, which is a large component of vehicle particulate emissions.

I haven't heard this before - how does that work?

Tha car slows down by using its electric motor to generate electricity instead. So actual brakes are only used for really heavy breaking. I see the same effect in my PHEV which uses its electric motor to regenerate power - after a year of ownership the brake pads are like new, there is no wear on them at all.

Regenerative braking where the braking charges the battery, rather than just converting the speed into heat.

I've heard that the increased weight of EVs results in more tire particulate matter than ICE cars. Is that true? Probably an ok tradeoff to reduce combustions PM and brake pad PM.

Depends a lot on the tires. Weight is bad, of course, as are high-performance tires like those on a Tesla. Other electric cars often have rock-hard high-efficiency tires that don't shed as many particles.

Model 3s weigh about the same as a a BMW 3 series. We're talking about 100 pound or so difference.

The Jaguar i-pace weights about 800 lbs more than the f-pace despite being about the same length.

The model 3 and BMW aren't really that close either depending on which model you pick.

Batteries are heavy, period.

If you selectively choose the smallest Model 3 vs the heaviest 3 Series BMW, maybe it's 100lb. If you choose models with comparative ranges, it's as much as 800lbs. That is a massive difference.

I'm optimistic that self-driving cars (in addition to primarily being electric) will be better maintained (tire pressure, lubrication, etc.) and better driven (fewer hard stops and starts) and that will reduce tire, brake, and road wear.

Or, you know, implement mass transit systems underground like those in Europe and Asia.

If it's a densely populated place, I don't think that "less polluting cars" is the answer.

This underground train thing doesn't have to be called train as I understand trains are considered communism in the USA. It is actually a sharing economy of connected electric vehicles, atmospheric pressure hyper-loop if you wish. Many of those are autonomous too, like level 5 autonomy without LIDAR. They are often used with a loyalty card(called "Osyter card" in London, for example) and even work with your mobile phone if you prefer not to carry a plastic card!

You can always say that in 2 years it would be pressurised and run at supersonic speeds!

We essentially need to do both. US cities have unfortunately been designed with cars in mind, and restructuring cities would be even more devastating to the environment.

We need to work with the current conditions, and that means BOTH public transit and better EV/road infrastructure.

Exactly, European cities have been designed around public transportation, the way sane cities should be designed. American cities are the result of an experiment where everyone needs to have one or more cars to survive.

Actually, the biggest European cities were designed to withstand medieval battles.

All the things attributed to the American car-centric lifestyle were a thing to some degree everywhere. Then people got tired of it and changed it. Probably Europe not having much petrol also helped, which also explains the tendency of the European cars having significantly smaller and efficient engines.

There are plenty of cool videos of European cities that used to be traffic hells that turned into bicycle friendly walkable places. Though admittedly the hell part still exist for those who choose the to drive the cars.

European cities used to be designed to withstand medieval battles. Sadly, they were not designed to withstand carpet bombing due to WW2 and had to spend a massive amount of money on rebuilding over decades.

That said, like you mentioned: that didn't stop them from making traffic hellholes. Designing a city to need cars is a choice.

What? European cities are mostly between hundreds and thousands years old. Nearly all of them weren't "designed for public transport".

Cars are a huge problem in Europe as well.

The core of European cities were built around foot and horse travel, and then that template fit for expansion outward, even after the influence of the car.

Take Mainz, Germany; where my father is from; the core of the city is a walkable old city (which my Opa knew every corner of having worked for the city for decades, and he toured me around all over it when I visited...). But then around it are a whole bunch of villages which grew into suburbs, and are connected by freeway. But it seems to me that because each of those villages, towns, and the central city already had a tradition of walkability, the connectivity between the towns, villages, suburbs took that into account when the post-WWII reconstruction happened.

In Mainz I was able to take a streetcar out from the centre of town to a small village in under 45 minutes and go walk in a forest. Here in southern Ontario -- where we have similar density and population to the Frankfurt/Rhine corridor -- such a thing requires a car.

...and Europe uses LOTS of cars, still. As does Japan. I don’t understand why people argue for public transport as a reason not to electrify cars. Like, we HAVE to electrify cars. Is this just more excuses to justify buying a nice new combustion vehicle?

Sure, the London Metro is a fine system. Add half a billion more riders per year, and run trains at night, and you'll be at parity with New York!

The snark is unwarranted, it is unwelcome, and it is against the guidelines for this site.

America is absolutely enormous, sprawling, and suffers from a relatively recent inability to build things, which is very frustrating indeed.

If we were to cram our entire population into, say, Michigan†, I doubt we would have given over our extensive rail network to freight. But, we did, and Los Angeles tram system was bought out in a shady backroom deal, and there were other various and sundry sins. But mostly, we invented jet travel, and trains just don't cover the 4500 kilometers between New York and Los Angeles in an appropriate amount of time.

Admit it: if you were going from London to Istanbul, you could take a train, but you would fly. Well, London to Istanbul and back, that's the distance from New York to Los Angeles. Which you can do by train! But, people don't.

California, that notorious bastion of communism, voted in a high speed train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and is still waiting for what they paid for. LA has added quite a lot of Metro in the last 30 years, but with a mere 150km of rail, 93 stations, and only a hundred million yearly riders, there's a long way to go. Meanwhile SF can't get the BART to circle around the South Bay for love or money.

† The size of the entire UK, and there are ten states larger.

I don't see why you are so defensive, it's a well-spirited comment IMHO intended to emphasise the problems with a way of thinking that I do not agree with but my apologies if you feel bad.

As the "densely populated area" remark should give it away, I do not claim that USA should build metro lines between cities. What I say that cars in cities are not the solution.

Funny enough, I am in Istanbul since a while. I flew from London to Istanbul, it took me about 8,5 hours I guess. 30 minutes to Heathrow, 2 hours at Heathrow, 5 hours in the plane(did not take off immediately) ,1 hour at Istanbul Airport, 1 hour on a bus to my destination. Definitely better than the train but only because there's no direct line. The trains in Europe are great but expensive. If there was an overnight train to Istanbul from King's Cross at reasonable price I would have taken it.

The mass transit in Istanbul is horrendous but wherever available, the metro is much much better than the Istanbul traffic. Admittedly, the car could be better if you are in an S class Mercedes and being chauffeured.

The UK invented jet travel.

Indeed they did... as well as passenger jet in-flight breakups. There's a reason square windows aren't used anymore.

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

New underground transit lines in the US are ridiculously expensive in dollar costs (which means they also have large environmental costs). In terms of lowest emissions per passenger mile, our best bet might be fleets of lightweight self-driving vehicles.

AFAIK EVs actually start/stop harder (Teslas do, at least) - it's the EV torque thing.

Brakes get less use tho, due to regenerative braking.

They don’t stop harder. If they accelerate faster it’s because people buy them as sports cars because Tesla took the strategy of making electric cars more than glorified golf carts so that people would actually want them.

easy software fix.

Somehow I don't think they will be better maintained, but I can see manufacturers trying to improve tires and others parts now that all the combustion engine complexity is gone and they can spend resources on marketing other parts of the car for competition.

Self driving cars will most likely make it all worse. If you are assuming a taxi like service then they will drive to you empty and away to their next pickup empty so that means more miles. Then you have the problem of a long commute becoming more acceptable if you can relax and read the paper during your journey.

Also, thinking that these cars will be "better maintained" flies in the face of reality. They will likely be minimally maintained.

Believe it or not, a substantial proportion of the population takes pride in their car ownership and the maintenance thereof.

Tire pollution is also what's been attributed to killing a LOT of fish on the west coast, and likely elsewhere in the world where it rains and washes the tire particles from the roads into the streams, rivers and eventually oceans.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/185

Fortunately that's been tracked to one specific chemical which can be replaced much more easily than getting rid of cars.

Tires are still going to produce micro plastics that pollute out waterways.

It makes no sense environmentally to keep private cars around.

However, it makes huge sense economically, so they'll be around for a while.

Does it actually? People are just happy to spend $50k on a car but dont like paying for public transport.

If we channeled half that money into public transport, we would have amazing systems and could save the other half. Without cars, many roads in city centers could be reclaimed into public squares, or planted.

With todays Public Transport I couldn't simply go visit my friend 3 hours away on his farm. I can in a car.

Until Public Transport can match the quite amazing "go anywhere" utility of a car, it isn't going anywhere.

With money, engineering and creativity it could be done. And I hope it is. But even if it starts today, I won't live to see it in full action.

There’s always going to be something that is hard or unreachable by public transport. The key here is multi-modality: you reach the edge of the city by public transport and then switch to car sharing.

> then switch to car sharing

This presumes the existence of cars, which is exactly what is ostensibly to be eliminated in the public transit strategy.

I am a pretty strong car-hater my self and I can only speak for myself, but I think that nobody wants to ban cars everywhere. There are lots of places though that would be much better with no or minimal cars.

I agree with this. If you have self driving cars in particular then this is a quite likely one part of the solution.

I still fantasize about sitting in a standardised car-cabin-like box IE seats(maybe facing each other), aircon, windows, media.

And having it shuttled around like a packet on the network. Automated trains, trams, trucks, cars, drones even - all working in harmony to get you where you want to go.

That way I'd own my space. But all the moving parts can be communal and benefit from best engineering practice for efficiency at economies of scale.

Forget about the farm. With todays public transit you are lucky if you can get to work, which is the easiest transit market to serve. If you need groceries it is just fine to transit managers if you drive.

I took a bus to a train to a bus to a tiny village in the countryside in England. Nothing in view for miles except the pub at the bus stop and a farm.

You could absolutely go visit your friend on his farm if we had a decent public transit system.

Also how is your specific case a refutation of the GPs argument anyway? Everybody always loves to argue against public transit with some weird special case that's somehow "possible". It's quite tiresome.

How about some imagination instead. Is it such a stretch to image a rural bus route that goes by your friends farm? How about a few mile bicycle ride from the nearest town's train station? How about renting a car ala Zipcar? I am sure there are many other ways to solve this non-problem.

Weirdly, I think we're largely on the same side here. :-)

Lets break this down:

1. I took a bus to a train to a bus to a tiny village in the countryside in England. Nothing in view for miles except the pub at the bus stop and a farm.

1A. Cool. I can't do that. I did write a convenience comparison [train, all day regional bus, unknown last mile effort] vs [car] but it was lengthy with predictable results, especially when travelling with wife and toddler.

But I am absolutely not against trying to make it better.

2. You could absolutely go visit your friend on his farm if we had a decent public transit system.

2A. Ok.

3. Also how is your specific case a refutation of the GPs argument anyway? Everybody always loves to argue against public transit with some weird special case that's somehow "possible". It's quite tiresome.

3A. I didn't think I was refuting? I like the idea of decent public transport for all. I mean, there wasn't even any specifics mentioned. Just a general "goodness" of it. I like goodness!

But many people take for granted the miracle of convenience a car provides. It certainly isn't some weird special case.

It is a huge task to match that with Public Transport, just via engineering and technically. Let alone doing it in such a manner that it is socially accepted by the public at large.

4. How about some imagination instead. Is it such a stretch to image a rural bus route that goes by your friends farm? How about a few mile bicycle ride from the nearest town's train station? How about renting a car ala Zipcar? I am sure there are many other ways to solve this non-problem.

4A. I did say "With money, engineering and creativity it could be done." And it really isn't an all or nothing endeavor either.

But it is a HUGE endeavor to match the convenience of a car. And my example was merely trying to demonstrate that.

Well given my experiences on public transportation in a couple US cities (being threatened by some delusional guy and sitting beside people who smell like they haven't bathed in weeks) I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's gonna be a while. I think autonomous private rental cars/vans will be much more doable.

Yet areas that have been able to limit their use always seem so vibrant.

Well that's been the fact for thousands of years if you can get enough humans in a centralized location, specialization and trade starts happening so it's kind of orthogonal to modern life. Not everyone wants to be told where to live and what to do.

It does when you don't live in an autocracy and people still like cars. Unless you plan on herding all the rural people into cities.

Yeah, when I lived in an apartment facing a pretty busy street, the white railings on our balcony always got a nice thin layer of black grime, the smell of which I recognized as brake dust. Nice toxic particles floating into our windows and onto our balcony and outside walls 24/7, I guess.. :(

EVs produce about an order of magnitude less brake dust.

Nice, that's great to hear. I'll look into this as I saw this mentioned elsewhere, so now I'm curious :)

Even brake pad wear is greatly reduced with EVs, thanks to regenerative braking.

Maybe a good time to fuel research into new material ?

A new material for what?

brake pads

Perhaps I missed something, but if we are using brake pads even less because of regenerative braking in EVs, why do we need a new material for them?

to get to even lower particule levels nothing else

Tires.

OECD published a report[1] on EVs lately. I haven't read it but according to various press sources it claims that EVs might make things worse, e.g.[2]:

"The report assumes that diesel and gasoline-powered cars are going to be replaced with electric vehicles, eliminating tailpipe emissions, but that problematic PM emissions will remain or even increase."

[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/non-exhaust-partic...

[2] https://www.treehugger.com/electric-cars-wont-save-us-from-p...

I’m very skeptical of that claim.

Correct me if I am wrong, but fumes from tires should not be a problem with EV's ?

Why wouldn't they be? Are they using different kinds of tires to ICE cars?

EVs have must less brake dust because they rarely use the brakes. But EVs don’t fully solve tire dust yet. HOWEVER, they make it a problem worth solving. When you’re comparing to diesel particulates (which are actually an enormous problem...) and fossil fuel smog to tire dust, solving tire dust doesn’t seem very pressing. But it would if we switched to EVs.

And there are possible solutions to tire dust. Changes to tire formulation, better road maintenance and mitigations, possibly relying more on tunnels (which we should do anyway in cities, even if it’s more expensive... and EVs make it much easier). Once fossil fuels are solved, it makes tire dust the next problem we can tackle.

So don’t use tire dust as an excuse to not transition to electric vehicles. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the much better. (And public transport can also generate particulates... tire dust, dust from rails, brake dust, and especially diesel particulates from buses.... we need to electrify everything.)

EDIT: And I don’t want to use this an excuse to NOT do public transport, only to argue it actually has much the same problem, but in case you don’t believe me on the rail dust thing: https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/1996-... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...

EVs + autonomous (true autonomous) driving are going to be a god send if it ever comes to fruition.

As an asthma sufferer, I went from needing my rescue inhaler several times a day to not touching it for several months during the pandemic. The only thing that changed was I was biking and walking through empty streets compared to navigating through a sea of exhausts for most of my trips.

Infrastructure that doesn’t encourage driving everywhere, and a switch to EV’s in cases where you ‘just have to’, can’t come soon enough.

No such a thing as "have to". To walk everywhere you need to would take hours in a day it's impractical.

Only if where you work and purchase necessities is far from where you live. If you live close or work remote, then it would be easy and convenient to walk.

Neither your comment, or the other 2 have any bearing on the reality in which i live and that i know many others also live. The cities we live in are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The idea of that a 15 minute city has any bearing on real life is sadly laughable. I'm sorry to have to say so, but it's true.

Cars didn't exist hundreds or thousands of years ago, so your statement can't possibly be true.

Well planned communities can be close to car-free, at least for day-to-day activities. The problem is we haven't prioritized being nearly car free, choosing instead of externalize the costs of car culture (pollution that generations will have to deal with, health impacts on some community members today, depletion of fossil fuels and the impact of digging them up, vast swaths of land dedicated to flat tarmac for car storage).

Not defending the post you reply to, but while well planned communities can require close to car free, the modern life is such that people are aware of - and cars enable easy access to - the greater world much more so than otherwise.

They want to see sights 90 minutes drive away. 3 hours drive away. And be home again that night.

I support "local living without cars as much as possible", but I think cars are here to stay for most of us.

People driving to see sights is really not the issue with cars that we have.

Nowhere did I ever claim people shouldn’t have access to cars. I own a car. My wife owns a car. I drive 12k miles/year doing just what you described - day trips or weekend trips. But, I have the option to leave the car parked most of the week and it amazes me that more communities aren’t planned similarly.

Hundreds or thousands of years ago, most people would be born, grow up, live their entire lives and die within a few miles of where their parents were born. We're not living in that kind of society today and I don't think it'd be possible to go back to it short of the total collapse of civilization and technology and death of almost all of the world's population.

Sure, but that's not what was said above:

"The cities we live in are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The idea of that a 15 minute city has any bearing on real life is sadly laughable."

The two sentences don't make sense together. Those old cities were "15 minute" cities by necessity - easy long distance travel wasn't a thing until the industrial revolution. We've since redesigned many of them for car use, and in some cases realized the mistake and redesigned them again (Amsterdam, for example).

The fact that the 15-minute city will not work everywhere does not mean that there is no place it can work. I live in a major city on the east coast of the United States, and I have it now. There are other cities in which it could be implemented. There are regions of my city in which it can not be implemented. But it's worth doing where possible.

There will be various solutions to our energy and pollution problems, and some of the variations will depend on the region the solution is being implemented in. I don't think solar power will be as big in Canada as in, say, the Sahara Desert.

I am curious which city we are talking about. This sounds very nice.

Only because we structure our neighborhoods to require cars to do anything other than walk the dog.

And even then some folks need to drive to their dog walker.

I worked near a gym a few jobs ago. I would see people circling the block trying to get a “good parking spot” presumably so they didn’t have to walk very far to get their workout.

More likey to be people who want to minimize the amount of time they're walking alone to prevent victimization.

A personal data point: My wife and I used to live about 20 blocks from the gym we used. She would drive because of the vagrants and street people who would follow and harass women. Cycling wasn't an option because anyone who left their bike unattended would have it stolen.

> The ‘15-minute city’ idea hit the headlines when Anne Hidalgo made it one of the driving issues of her re-election campaign. “The concept of a 15-minute city, in a nutshell,” explains Carlos Moreno, professor at the Sorbonne and scientific advisor to the Mayor of Paris “is to design the city within a distance of 15 minutes by foot or by bike to enable the six main urban activities for living in cities: to live, to work, to supply, to education, to health, and to enjoy.” After Anne Hidalgo’s election last summer, the wheels have started turning to bring the idea to life.

https://eurocities.eu/latest/parisians-will-live-within-a-15...

"To health" I presume means to see a doctor. But if I need to see a doctor, I may not be in a condition where I can walk or bike there.

It’s not to say there would be zero taxis and certainly not zero ambulances.

Perhaps, but (based purely on anecdotes) most medical visits are the type where you walk in. I expect check-ups are far more common than open heart surgery, simply because every major operation requires a precautionary followup or two.

One problem with this is that we've distributed our families and social circles. I would love to ditch my car, but then I wouldn't be able to get to my parents, siblings or friends.

That's where public transport comes in.

I have another comment referring to Canberra, Australia. They failed on the public transport front. They are trying to do better.

On the whole, I think city planners should design everything around public transport and it should be seen for the societal value add, rather than as a public expense.

Sadly, in Canberra it is buses, often once an hour. And most people feel as though if you catch a bus, it is a social signal that you are not doing very well.

Doing public transport well is hard.

But Canberra laid a good foundation for great bicycle riding!

A bus once an hour is the backup of a backup plan for those who have no other options. It means the blind don't have to bother their friends for a ride as often.

What it isn't is in anyway useful to anybody. It shouldn't even be called public transit, be honest and call it last ditch option.

Real public transit needs to run more often. Half hour service is marginal public transit.

Canberra, Australia, lived 19 years there as adult.

Designed and planned from the beginning, founded in 1913.

Has several "town centres" with the similar idea of "close to everywhere you need to be".

But imbalances of distribution through all the various factors of life mean one town centre has better [X], another has better [Y], your [Z] hobby group may be mostly in another area and your friends and family end up all over the place.

And so you travel everywhere anyway.

I haven’t owned a car in several years. I can walk to my local grocer, pharmacy, gym, dozens of restaurants, job, extended family, and many more places in less than an hour. I just biked to get my Covid shot at a place 4 miles away. It took me 25 minutes to get there as I breezed passed gridlocked traffic on the way up. If I had taken a car it would have likely cost $20+ and taken over 40 minutes.

If you think ‘need to’ doesn’t needs quotation marks, try sitting through a few local community board meetings focused on re-allocating free parking for anything more useful :)

Do you live alone?

I can't imagine doing weekly shopping for a family without a car (we buy from both a grocery store, and a wholesale warehouse store)

I don’t live alone. I have several grocery stores within 5 minutes of me, and a farmers market and a Whole Foods within half a mile which all serve me well and allow me to get a few things at a time without making me going out of my way every week :) I find that’s nicer since you can get things fresh and you never have too much sitting around.

I lived downtown Toronto for several years and I had to replace my car battery three times because I drove it so infrequently that they died. I understand that living downtown isn't an option for everyone, but I strongly believe we can build dense "city centers" even in the suburbs that offer similar conveniences with larger units for families.

what kind of car uses $20 in gas driving 4 miles? even if you're idling most of the time (which actually uses surprisingly little gas compared to moving)

Bull manure. That's a choice you've made for yourself, not some larger truth about life.

I live in the suburbs (20 miles west of DC). My office is 1 mile away and I walk. The schools are 1 mile away; if I had school-age kids, we'd walk. I can walk or cycle to the grocery, the brewpub, coffee shop, post office, and burger joint (all 0.5-2 miles away). I rarely use my car during the week; the vast majority of my mileage is weekend trips to the mountains.

Your last sentence is interesting.

Even having it all sorted for day to day living. You still have a car to go somewhere else.

I feel the same here in Australia. Much of our day to day living doesn't need a car. Some of our friends though are in small country towns that would be a big hassle to visit without a car.

I’d love if I could take the train to the mountains, but the US (and Australia) is a large place with low overall density, so cars make sense for some travel.

But few American communities are planned with minimizing car use as a key tenet. I’m lucky to live in one that is.

I've lived in multiple places where I could walk to everything I needed to walk to within 15 minutes. Why do you think it's hard for you to imagine this could be true?

yes, i live this way in the middle of LA, as do a number of my neighbors, because parking is such a hassle and most of us aren’t rich. grocery/retail, schools, entertainment, medical care, etc. are all walkable, and farther amenities are usually just a scooter/bike/bus/lyft/train ride away. this lifestyle is totally within reach in many places if desired. the ties that bind aren’t much at all, once scrutinized.

Yeah I'm in suburbia but I live within 15 minute bike ride of a large grocery store, a couple spas, hairstyling place, a couple bars, gas station. the only thing missing is a theater and warhammer 40k/comics store.

5 minutes in my old job, 50 minutes in my new job, I usually cycle there because it is faster than both car or subway.

Reminds me of my talk in 2013 at The Guardian's Activate here in Singapore. Many cities around the world especially in Europe and Asia do not require cars for most of one's daily routine. The American model where living, working, and shopping spaces are distinctly separated into Suburban, Industry/Tech parks, and Malls are fortunately not the norm here.

"As an asthma sufferer, I went from needing my rescue inhaler several times a day to not touching it for several months during the pandemic."

Perhaps that indicates you live in the wrong place - it shows you what is possible! Obviously the world is not ideal and you may be tied to where you are but it sounds like you need to reconsider where you live.

I was a smoker for about 30 years and gave up just over three years ago. I did some damage to my lungs but there you go - mea culpa. In your case it isn't your fault but I have an idea what it is like to have some difficulty breathing. It's different for me and you but I understand: my mum was asthmatic (had some episodes that ended up in hospital) and suffered from awful hayfever - a bit crap for a farmer's daughter but then she still managed to become a Captain in the WRAC (Women's Royal Armoured Corpse! Ok Army, oh alright Corps)

Anyway, why not consider moving to somewhere more rural? I remember after about a fortnight after deciding to give up the fags, I stood outside my office without a cigarette in my gob. The air tasted and smelled fresh and pure. At this point I was trying to enforce positive experiences as an enticement to help giving up. It is quite hard to give up smoking. Then a diesel car drove past nearby and the smell was horrendous, really horrendous. I suspect you know that as well or better than me.

Take care mate.

As much as I love the idea of being out in nature, the thought of leaving the city I was raised in, my entire family behind and of the opportunities, experiences and quality of life that come with living in a place that for the most part prioritizes people, is a non-starter. I’ve lived out in more suburban places for a few years and I couldn’t imagine going back to needing a car to do practically anything. I’d much rather dedicate my energy advocating for solutions rather than leave everything I have behind.

And if everyone lived in nature, there would be no more nature.

indeed. and that "rural" lifestyle really often involves driving far and often, therefore pushing your fossil fuel & auto (ev or otherwise) externalities on other people.

i think we should remove the cars from the cities, not remove the people from the cities. People were there first after all

Agree!

>Perhaps that indicates you live in the wrong place

Perhaps that indicates that we as a society are doing it wrong.

Back when I bike-commuted, I used to pick routes and times for biking based on smog levels. I'd rather double my time on the road than arrive coughing from breathing exhaust.

I get hay fever, so I moved to a coastal location which usually has an onshore breeze. That has helped me a lot, although obviously can only work for some people and depends on your job location.

I have had days when driving into town has hit me badly because of the pollen loads, and other days when the breeze has changed to coming from inland which have also been yucky for me even at home.

Wouldn't this mean you should look somewhere else where your quality of life would be much better? I mean I know people like to be in this place or that, but life often isn't fair. I like some nothern cities but it literally wrecks my skin (cold weather in place like the north east and upper midwest). Dries and cracks it and makes me miserable and gross. I never found a solution so I moved to the sun belt and have lived in various cities here for the past 20 years, I would rather live in the northeast but it's not possible with the weather there 4 months or so out of the year.

None of those are "economical benefits. Unquestionably social benefits, but increased longevity is hardly a boon to the economy.

Increased productive years are, though.

I would think healthier populations improves the economy. The people with the most disposable income are usually the ones who either never had kids or whose kids have all grown up.

More people alive spending money helps the economy.

One possible second order effect: when people's parents are alive longer, they feel happier and more connected to society and are more productive.

There could be many other potential second-order effects (and third-order, etc).

When it comes to economics there are also downsides for many people. For example, there are many people who work on car parts today that don't have a corollary in electric cars. Electric cars have fewer parts. This is going to negatively hit the economics of people who design, build, and service car parts.

Some things are a trade-off.

I wonder how society will help them transition to other things well

Just like the automobile displaced all those employed in the horse and buggy businesses, which was apparently massive given pictures of 19th century cities.

They'll be fine - EVs still have suspensions, brakes, and other serviceable parts.

The other day a friend of mine bought his first car - a 2008 Honda Jazz.

Stuff that needed to be replaced from the get go:

-front stabilizer link rods.

-front discs

-brake pads

-AC pump

-12V battery

-front lights

Regarding combustion-related parts there's the muffler and oxygen sensor, but that's it.

His case is fairly typical.

Also there's a more immediate danger looming - newer diesels are so sophisticated that quite often repairing them is uneconomical. The same will happen sooner or later to gasoline, because usually it's the costly stuff like injectors and the flywheel that fails.

Those poor buggy whip makers.

One issue - real estate prices going up is not 'economic gain', its a drain on productive population. Nothing is actually produced in the real economy

Imagine we talked about anything else like that: 'bread is getting more expensive by the minute in Germany" - thats not a sign of doing well.

We all pay for this real estate not just in rent, every time we get a coffee a good chunk of that price is paying someone else's rent. In wages.

Just because you are a homeowner does not mean its in your interest for realestate to go up, any more than if you own a fridge it would be in your interest for fridge prices to go up. Anyone who ever plans to trade up to a bigger home, has kids that will need to buy a house, or needs local economy to function does not benefit net from house prices going up. The only time you profit is if you are a massive landowner or real estate business.

Its literally blood-sucking leech

The economy is doing well when neccessities of life such as housing, food, etc. Are as cheap as possible and then you do not spend 90% of your effort and income just to keep wolf from the door.

This disconnect between how we thing about housing and other goods is like a collective madness of oursociety

This is not quite true. The price of real estate is a function of demand. If more people want to acquire the same property (whether to live there, or to work there, or to grow something there), then the price of the property will go up. This is a good thing because over time it ensures that properties are used for the most desiriable and profitable purposes.

This is not a good thing, because people need to live somewhere, and this is likely not the most profitable thing to do with a given piece of land.

On the contrary. Businesses need employees, and if there are fewer people living in an area then the cost of the employees goes up and the profitability of the businesses go down.

How does that in any way prove that housing is the most profitable thing to do with that land?

Starbucks in London is staffed with poor sods who travel for 2 hours from outside the city to take their shift for hardly above minimum wage.

Minimum wage is a distortion of the market. Without that, this Starbucks would have to pay a higher wage than a Starbucks in a cheap-housing area.

For jobs that pay above minimum wage, that's what already happens.

You're saying that minimum wage is somehow providing a ceiling? This is nonsense. It's a distortion in that if Starbucks was allowed to, Starbucks would pay less, not more. If they had to pay more to attract employees, they would pay more -- nothing's stopping them from doing that today. The fact that they're paying minimum wage means that the clearing price for Starbucks labor is at or below the floor already!

If the minimum wage were lower, then the Starbucks could open a store 2 hours away from the city. The employees there would earn less than the employees in the city, but they wouldn’t have to commute two hours each way either. As it is, the customer base in that location outside the city cannot support the minimum wage that Starbucks is required to pay. (Not to mention all of the other costs that Starbucks has; wages are not the only factor that keeps them out of small towns and villages. Starbucks is really a luxury product compared to an inexpensive coffee machine.)

Yes, but that would mean the employees that work at this out-of-the-way location would be paid less than the city centre, not that those in the centre would get paid more. The issue is that even in the city centre, the labor clearing cost isn't high enough to afford for its employees to live in the city centre. If its employees were paid less, they would have to live in even more undesirable locations -- and there is a floor on how bad living conditions can be, so a rural Starbucks' labor clearing cost would be below what would be required to live anywhere.

That’s only because of a _different_ distortion in the market . Both of them were created by the government in the name of helping people, but it should be fairly clear that all they really do is hurt the very poorest people.

I certainly agree that it would be nicer if everyone could live in as nice a house as they wanted, located in as nice a place as possible, and if they could always eat all the food they wanted without regard for prices. We should aim as much as possible to build our world along those lines. But we must also recognize that it will only happen once we’ve built a Dyson swarm so that we have enough energy that it can be given away, and we’ve developed actual Star–Trek–style replicators (using nanotechnology, most likely, rather than teleportation) that produce as much food as people want without consuming any time or effort on the logistics of growing, preparing, shipping, and preserving food. But most everyone would still want to live in the big city, so land prices would still be a factor.

On the other hand, with a growing Dyson swarm we can start making as many O’Neil cylinders as people want. Even so, there will always be some places that are popular and crowded, and others that are almost empty and peaceful.

Even in novels like the Culture series, where free energy and free living space abound, there is still scarcity and economics. You might have heard of a really great place to live on the other side of the galaxy, but do you really want to pay the price of moving there? Sure, you wouldn’t have to buy any property there, or pay someone to move your stuff (in these books anyone can just hop on the next passing space ship and make their way to wherever they want to go, because those ships can house millions or billions of people.) But you would still have to pay the cost of the travel time, potentially years of it. You would eventually lose contact with the friends you have, and the place you grew up. All of these things are scarce, and it will cost you some or all of them to move across the galaxy. It would be nice to live in a civilization where those were the only costs, but it’s important to recognize that we haven’t built it yet. We can’t just legislate that people are not allowed to be poor until after we’ve eliminated the scarcity of physical goods.

You're conflating minimum standards of living (a room to sleep in, food to eat, clothes to wear) with an end to all scarcity with maximum consumption. We actually don't need that much. The USA absolutely produces enough to feed, clothe, and house everybody -- we've simply decided that the market is more important than doing so. It's nonsense. Make sure everybody is fed, clothed and housed first to a minimum standard, then if you want to have wealth accumulation, fine, if you must.

Minimum wage provides a floor function to make sure people can at least maybe put a roof over their head and food on the table. The market fails quite often because all the true power is in the hands of the 0.1% the only counter balance is either democracy or rebellion because those actually allow regular people to have a bit of power in what goes on in a given economy.

As long as there are people willing to subject themselves to that, then Starbucks will continue to employ them. But each minute of commute you add removes more people from the pool of potential employees. The more skill the job requires, the smaller that pool will necessarily be. At some point a business will find itself unable to hire for any amount of money they can offer, and they will either go out of business or move out of the city. Then the companies that don’t need much skilled labor, such as Starbucks, will either close down most of their locations, or open them elsewhere. The result will be less demand in the city center, and more elsewhere.

You could accelerate this by making employers pay for time spent commuting to and from work, but that will not be a panacea; it will eliminate some jobs that people rely on. The person in your example might end up completely unemployed, and given the choice they might prefer to commute for four hours per day than to be completely unemployed.

"As long as there are people willing to subject themselves to that, then Starbucks will continue to employ them"

Historically some people sold themselves into slavery, should we bring back the good old days?

Also, how does any of this prove that having people travel 4 hours a day is economically productive?

No, it’s relatively easy to prove that all forms of slavery, even voluntary ones, are less efficient than simply paying wages. This is because it removes the capacity for future choice. An employee in a low–paying job today can leave for a new opportunity whenever one appears, a slave or an indentured servant cannot. Societies which use slaves or indentured servants will have less economic success over the long term than ones without.

> Also, how does any of this prove that having people travel 4 hours a day is economically productive?

It’s manifestly more productive than being unemployed. It might be a bad enough job that you can barely tolerate it, but that’s better than starvation. An employer whose employees are this close to the edge is taking a very large risk. If any alternative opens up, or if the job conditions get any worse, then they will suffer fatal turnover. They’ll either have to pay higher wages or improve conditions (or both) to survive, or their competitors will do it for them.

Well blame it on London for not building more housing and having ornery zoning laws not on Starbucks

The price of food is a function of demand and supply. If there is a famine, price of food goes up.

This is a good thing because it ensures that food is used by the most productive and profitable citizens, right?

We have more empty houses than homeless people. Efficient market my ass.

Currently the most profitable use of land in London is building luxury apartments that are bough by Saudi and Russian billionaires who never live there or even let them out. They wait for their price to go up even more.

During covid 700,000 people left London, but real estate prices grew.

> The price of food is a function of demand and supply. If there is a famine, price of food goes up. This is a good thing because it ensures that food is used by the most productive and profitable citizens, right?

Increasing food prices cause more food to be grown and food to be shipped over longer distances, lessening the impact of a famine. It also causes people to spend less on luxury foods that cost more per calorie.

> We have more empty houses than homeless people. Efficient market my ass.

Have you bought an unused home and given it to someone homeless lately? There are many that are quite inexpensive out there.

On the whole, I agree that our current housing and property market is not as efficient as it could be. One reason for this are our building codes; they raise the cost of housing making truly inexpensive homes illegal. There is definitely a lot of benefits to living in a properly–built house, but that is always going to be more expensive than a shack you built yourself on land you claimed from the wilderness at the edge of a growing population. When governments eliminate that possibility, they cause people to go homeless. I suspect that you will want to “fix” this by having the government step in and buy a house for everyone who wants one.

The bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

>Increasing food prices cause more food to be grown and food to be shipped over longer distances, lessening the impact of a famine. It also causes people to spend less on luxury foods that cost more per calorie.

Yes, this doesn't work with land.

It does in places with reasonable zoning laws. Taking a lot with one 1-story house on it and replacing it with two 2-story houses (or, say, a 4-story apartment building) is essentially "growing" new land. And higher housing prices cause people to reduce the square-footage they occupy as well.

> It does in places with reasonable zoning laws

I don't know why anyone would believe that. It doesn't even work in places with no zoning restrictions at all. Building up gets you more housing, sure, but it also costs way more cash per square foot, it inherently drives the price of all nearby housing higher.

> higher housing prices cause people to reduce the square-footage they occupy as well.

This is just "famine" being spun as a benefit. "Bread prices at $10,000 per loaf and rising is good, actually. It will help those silly obese Americans lose weight!"

There are places with extremely lax zoning laws and very high population densities where housing is still incredibly expensive.

Your point is apriorism and not supported by evidence.

Hahaha.... someone that has never lived through an actual true food famine. (I have lived through two).

Price controls don't work, except for short term periods.... when you have a temporary disruption of few weeks (for an earthquake, weather, etc).

In long term famine, food that is price controlled disappears from shelves and almost never makes, and is resold in black markets at 3x the price (or whatever the market is).

He never mentioned price control.

The price of houses is determined by the ease (or difficulty) of acquiring debt. Not much more than that. If you want to know what the average price of a home will be in an area, simply find the average maximum mortgage that a financial institution will provide for the average income in the area.

Interest rates go down, housing prices go up.

What people are buying is not a house, but a loan. The cheaper the loan, the more they buy.

That is also true! However, in a hypothetical world where loans didn’t exist, then the effects of demand would still exist. There would be a lot of other problems in that hypothetical would though; loans are a very important tool for economic growth because in their purest form they allow someone with money to put it to good use while sharing the profits with the person they loaned it to. I think the real problem isn’t the loans but rather the government putting their thumb on the scales.

What you describe would be a healthy form of lending (lending out money you otherwise have sitting around, so it can be put to good use). Unfortunately, this is not actually how our global financial systems work.

I think most people would be shocked to learn that when a bank lends out money, they are actually “cloning” their money many times over: each dollar from their reserves actually gets loaned out multiple times over, to multiple people (such that e.g. 100 people all have claim to the same 1 “real” dollar that exists, although it’s not actually tracked that way). But because almost nobody uses physical cash any more in large quantities, no actual cash needs to be printed to cover this. Then, if/when the loan is later repaid (which again is not a physical transaction, but occurs as numbers being updated in balance sheets), the repaid “clones” get “erased” from circulation, and only the real original reserves remain [1]. The banks keep the (greatly multiplied) interest paid though as profit.

You (as a mere peasant) are not allowed to clone your money and lend/invest it out, but banks are (in fact, this is essentially what makes a bank a bank), and it’s called “fractional reserve banking”. Some argue that this is very unfair, and argue that this is actually the root cause of a lot of financial problems and wealth inequality in the world.

For example, this system inflates prices (usually starting with investment assets like land, stocks, etc. but can later trickle down and in very delayed way start to inflate food prices etc. too), due to this expansion of the money supply (commonly called “money printing” even though no actual printing needs to occur) being funneled through financial institutions and into various investment assets and derivatives.

[1] Note that in practice, the total amount of outstanding debt tends to increase over time, because old debt just ends up getting replaced/refinanced with newer debt of even larger size (e.g. due to decreasing interest rates). This creates a system where the global economy is essentially “addicted” to perpetually increasing amounts of debt. The official stance though is that central banks should be able to unwind this debt when we are in good economic health, but this is debated; for example, I don’t know of any case in modern history where overall money supply has actually been decreased without markets immediately panicking and starting to crash (after which the central banks always quickly give in and reverse course, usually re-inflating the money supply far more than even before).

This is an important distinction that you correctly point out. We may imagine the current housing related issues endemic to California may worsen given homeowners will have even more incentive than currently to impede housing development.

You're absolutely right, but it doesn't negate OPs point.

They should have said that the value of houses in smog-ridden areas will go up, which is independent of their price.

I always thought inflation was a dangerous potential side effect of a booking economy, and that deflation was much more dangerous. If the baker can't sell their bread unless they charge pennies for it, it's probably a sign that people can't buy much of anything else either.

IANAE

> IANAE

I'm not sure professional economists are either...

Debt is what makes deflation hazardous to people. A non-indebted baker may have to sell his bread for pennies, but the things he then needs to buy would also cost pennies so he'd end up in a similar position.

However if the baker is paid in pennies, has cost-of-living in pennies, but owes the banker £1000000 for his bakery shop, this causes problems. Same with back taxes etc.

On the other side, inflation is hazardous to creditors: the lender gets back less than they originally gave out (creditors also include those holding bank deposits)

If you owe the bank $10,000 you have a problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000 the bank has a problem. Seems like the creditors are potentially unhappy either way.

Debt aside, I would maintain that if people can barely afford bread, they are likely not buying cars, washing machines, or other more expensive items. That seems like a recipe for a vicious cycle where society ends up regressing towards individualism and barter, with less economic strength.

Honestly i do not see why the 10x mentality being applied to things like EVs and other stuff can not be applied to houses/cities. Build a highly vertical and optimized city from scratch with its own energy & water sources and attract people and businesses. If you can undercut existing cities by a factor of 3 or more i am sure new people will come.

Some incentive to avoid typical real estate inflation where investors jump in first needs to be put in for a successful experiment with goals that are beyond monetary concerns.

> Build a highly vertical and optimized city from scratch

Are you aware that continuing to build tall buildings murders the planet, and thus humanity? [1] [2]

Does your proposal include any sort of mitigation for the environmental impacts of building tall buildings and using cement (as revealed by researchers in the articles below), or is this Silicon Valley "technological solutionism" [3] together with a belief in "The Californian Ideology" (both of which posit that any problem can be solved with a technological innovation, instead of by actually addressing the underlying socio-economic of the previous solutionist strategy), by someone who has unfortunately fallen victim to the fallacy of transferable expertise?

[1] https://theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-most...

[2] https://theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/11/skyscrapers...

[3] https://technofilosofie.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Cours...

The words "per capita" or "per apartment" are not in the article.

I completely buy that skyscraper have higher fixed costs then lower buildings. It can be true that the optimal height from energy expenditure per capita would be 5, 8 or 12 stories. Or it can be false and sckyscrapers are the best energy investment per square feet of living space created. Your links don't provide any evidence either way.

True. Yet the original comment wrote:

> If you can undercut existing cities by a factor of 3 or more i am sure new people will come.

> Some incentive to avoid typical real estate inflation where investors jump in first needs to be put in for a successful experiment with goals that are beyond monetary concerns.

and then you wrote:

> Your links don't provide any evidence either way.

Your comment and the original post do not provide evidence to prove any of your points either (either way).

I am saying: why hasn't a strategy like this been tried before if it seems so obvious to you both?

I see it as a sign that an expert in one domain believes they can solve a complex issue in another domain without much effort. In other words, as mentioned above, I see them/you as having fallen victim to the fallacy of transferable expertise: believing they/you can solve domain specific problems in a domain in which they/you are not an in expert in - as made obvious by the fact that this proposal is stated without any links to current research/plans (which undoubtedly do exist).

I think the above is important to point out, mostly as someone who fell victim to both, and who wants to warn others who might still be unconscious perpetuators of the Californian Ideology. It's dangerous. This excerpt does a good job at explaining it (although for a proper tl;dr version/critique, the best part is probably the 'As the Dam Bursts...' intro):

"Across the world, the Californian Ideology has been embraced as an optimistic and emancipatory form of technological determinism. Yet, this utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends upon its blindness towards - and dependence on - the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born. Despite its radical rhetoric, the Californian Ideology is ultimately pessimistic about fundamental social change. Unlike the hippies, its advocates are not struggling to build 'ecotopia' or even to help revive the New Deal. [...] Interpreted generously, this retro-futurism could be a vision of a cybernetic frontier where digital artisans discover their individual self-fulfillment in either the electronic agora or the electronic marketplace. However, as the zeitgeist of the 'virtual class', the Californian Ideology is at the same time an exclusive faith. If only some people have access to the new information technologies, 'Jeffersonian democracy' can become a hi-tech version of the plantation economy of the Old South. Reflecting its deep ambiguity, the Californian Ideology's technological determinism is not simply optimistic and emancipatory. It is simultaneously a deeply pessimistic and repressive vision of the future." [1]

[1] http://www.comune.torino.it/gioart/big/bigguest/riflessioni/...

edit: I also enjoyed this https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...

Compared to sprawl and commuting, no it doesn't. So either build up or start euthanizing people because they use more concrete and still the more of us there are.

Real estate prices going up is a "net gain" because it promotes new construction. Those new constructions were built out of thin air (Well, perhaps some raw materials and labor), but regardless new value is being created when real estate prices increase.

> We all pay for this real estate not just in rent, every time we get a coffee a good chunk of that price is paying someone else's rent. In wages.

Beautifully put. This is a point I don't see often enough. Why should a system allow one person to own two homes and then rent one of them out and use it to pay off mortgages for both.

Housing is a human right. Vienna is a beautiful example of this: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/12/vienna-housi...

Because we don't live in an autocracy. There is plenty land to build new houses if you're so inclined. Someone is still living in the second house.

This is beautiful only if you're not affected by unpleasant consequences. These may be (1) reduced number of available rent-able spaces (i.e. less offer on the market) due to the capped/reduced profit which cause a decrease in the number of listed properties (it's not worth renting), which rises the demand for the remaining available listings, then (2) little to no opportunity whatsoever for new renters to access desirable locations, as those are already occupied.

A system involving rent controls may be easy to sell because it's a solution designed to satisfy existing tenants on the expense of prospective tenants. That doesn't make it a more fair system than one that operates on free market. Then if that's not enough, we have to be aware that when the market laws aren't the one that rule, other things are. For example, in the communist setting housing were provided "fairly" to anyone, so that the desirable locations had in them apparently all kinds of people. Only that many times the selection were far from random and you could bet value (in various forms) had to be exchanged under table. So Vienna? I wouldn't be surprised if on a closer look I'd find something gaming the system at some level. Let's say, (hypothetically) that some club rents out properties to its members, and whereas rents are regulated, club membership fees aren't.

Are you an absentee owner of (residential) property? Do you own other people's homes, or aspire to do so? It sure does sound like it to me.

I'm curious to understand why you aren't talking about the issue of people being unable to own their own home. Would you yourself really want to pay rent to another human your whole life? Probably not, right?

The fact that you focus on the market (and seeking a perfect calibration within the current capitalist system), and not on the original parasitic nature of absentee ownership and the bourgeois hoarding of capital (in this case housing stocks), already quickly shows me that you might not be very in touch with your fellow human beings and that you don't understand the real (and diverse) systemic oppression many people face (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4 [use yt1s.com to download if not in US], and also in the global south: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I).

> For example, in the communist setting housing were provided "fairly" to anyone, so that the desirable locations had in them apparently all kinds of people. Only that many times the selection were far from random and you could bet value (in various forms) had to be exchanged under table. So Vienna? I wouldn't be surprised if on a closer look I'd find something gaming the system at some level. Let's say, (hypothetically) that some club rents out properties to its members, and whereas rents are regulated, club membership fees aren't.

Your critique contains many unfounded assumptions, as well as generalizations, which distort what is really happening on the ground. The exact same argument you've made here could also be made about the current capitalist organization of housing: e.g. "I wouldn't be surprised if on a closer look at the capitalist organization of housing I'd find something gaming the system at some level." Capitalists game the system with the help of the bourgeois state, and collude to violently force people to work within capitalist production using capitalist-owned means of production (in the case of a software engineer/knowledge worker, proprietary software/hardware systems). When capitalists withhold this means of production it leads to the division of labor and alienation (this reaction to exploitation, this alienation, being something that unfortunately capitalists gaslightingly weaponize and label as 'individual failures', and calling it 'depression' [1]). Capitalists, together with the capitalist state that enforces bourgeois laws (which benefit only a very tiny minority), coerce laborers to forever pay them to rent their homes. They are to be kicked out and made homeless unless they participate in the bourgeois property system and the bourgeois production system. You're suggesting that the status quo, and the rules of the game, are somehow fair, yet we live in era where there is an incredible gap between the rich and the poor, the dynamic between capital-owning capitalist exploiters and exploited wage laborers. [2]

Why do you not talk about people being able to own their own home? Would you yourself want to pay rent to another human your whole life? Probably not, right?

Alastair Parvin from Wikihouse has a great take on the origins of this weird thing called 'rent':

"The origins of our land system

Like all journeys forwards, we have to begin by going backwards.

So where did our land system come from?

Weirdly enough, the land system that we have today has its origins in a problem specific to medieval kings, which is ‘how do I fund military campaigns and defence, without paying to keep a standing army?’

And it was William the Conqueror who perfected the answer. It was a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper was basically an agreement between the Crown and a noble, saying ‘if you provide men for military campaigns when I ask, in exchange I will grant you a monopoly over your own private fiefdom, where you can levy as high taxes as people can bear to pay’.

So effectively — rent is the original tax, paid via lords to the King.

In fact the word ‘feudal’ derives from the latin word feudalis — for ‘fee’. In other words, rent. So the whole system of government by which the Normans ruled over the Anglo Saxons was based on rent.

If you’re a King, there’s only really three groups of people you’re scared of: other kings, your family, and your nobles. So over time landowners managed to engineer a set of concessions, whereby increasingly taxes were levied directly on people and business, leaving them (the lords) as the owners of a monopoly right to extract privatised land tax.

So what you’re left with is a set of power relations in society: an enforced system of servitude and control. As the economist Henry George pointed out, it is essentially a diluted version of slavery.

“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”" [3]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth...

[3] https://alastairparvin.medium.com/a-new-land-contract-684c3b...

Higher real estate price doesn't necessary mean higher rent.

Why it is not in my interest if I can resell my fridge with upside after several years of using it?

You will want to buy a new fridge.. but new fridges are now more expensive.

New fridges are always more expensive, no matter of fridges price trend.

I agree with number 1.

I don't think number 2 is necessarily true. Lifestyle and diet are much bigger influences. My grandparents lived in a town with coal as a heat source and for the trains moving through town. That's a lot more pollution than cars today. This is also the generation that walked places (for miles) and worked hard because they had nothing. They were a healthy weight and ate fairly healthy diets. They lived into their nineties and never went into a care facility.

I don't see how number 2 and 3 could be true together. One of the major theories on the increasing cancer rates is that people are living longer and this increases the chances of having cancer at some point. My grandfather had cancer, but didnt get it until he was 91 - then he beat it. The other theories tend to focus on environmental toxins not from car exhaust. Usually it's based on household chemicals and indoor air quality from items in the home.

The ever increasing wildfires will dramatically overwhelm any health improvement. When you are breathing ash for weeks on end every year, you’re taking years off your life.

I agree with point 2 and 3 you are making. As another commenter already pointed out real estate prices going up is not a net gain for the economy. Moreover, the direction of the price movement will (also) be decided by the state of the local economy which inturn drives the demand. Real estate prices in Houston, for example, may plummet because a major driver of the Houston economy is the oil and gas industry. Some companies and businesses may successfully transition to the low carbon economy, but it is unclear at this point how most may be affected.

"2. People will suddenly start living much longer lives with more quality years at the tail end "for some strange reason."

While this is a good thing, it is an economic drain, not a boon.

> 1. Real estate prices in high traffic metros like Los Angeles and Houston will increase further because the return to clear skies from smoggy days and fresh air will be a bonus.

Do you own real estate there or something? Are you aware that many people are homeless? Why is an increase in property values a good thing when it has never been more difficult and more expensive to buy a house than ever before? This increase is in large part due to the disgusting financialization of the housing market.

A documentary called ‘Push’ (2019) does a great job at laying out all the facts, while at the same time showing the impacts of these changes on working class people the world over: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4

For people in Europe or elsewhere you can use http://yt1s.com to download it if it’s region blocked. You can support the filmmakers and rent it too: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/pushthefilm

>This increase is in large part due to the disgusting financialization of the housing market.

Greed, period. Owning an investment property is seen as easy money. When I was a kid it was essentially unheard of to own a second property for rent. Now a substantial number of people I work around own one (or more) rental properties. I know "just a guy" that owns 5 AirBNB condos he rents for $250-300 per night in the summer season, that sit vacant the rest of the year.

I have no idea why we allowed this to happen.

> Owning an investment property is seen as easy money.

Sure beats working for it.

> When I was a kid it was essentially unheard of to own a second property for rent.

Sorry but that’s flat-out wrong. Owning a second property for rent has always been a thing. How would you have known, you were a kid!

Case in point: my family was middle class. My parents were a college professor (new grad from graduate school, not a big deal) and a stay-at-home mom, living in suburban America. They owned a second property for rent. I didn’t even know until 20 years later that they had owned it!

Lest you think I’m some kid who grew up in the 00’s: no, I grew up in the 60s and 70s.

It appears we have a trifecta of evil materials in our environment:

1. Diesel/Petrol/Thermal Coal - air pollution

2. Plastics and Phthalates - hormone disruption, land and sea pollution

3. Sugar - obesity

If anyone has any surplus energy, money, or political power, we would strongly benefit from these ingredients being removed as much as possible from human environments.

Haven't cancer rates been dropping for a while now?

Not just fossil fuels are problematic. An article in The Guardian last month [1] with the headline and sub-heading, Wood burning at home now biggest cause of UK particle pollution - Fires used by just 8% of population but cause triple the particle pollution of traffic, data shows is an eye-openeer.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/16/home-woo...

Is the particulate pollution universal for wood burning stoves? I was under the impression that modern designs burned quite efficiently.

I really don't know about the type of stove; things I've read about this refer to the type of fuel, and in this case specifically problems with burning wet wood rather than seasoned wood. (It's possible that some stoves or chimneys that vent them have some sort of particulate removal systems, but if they exist, they must be an absolute nightmare to unclog/clean etc. Having said that, I did find this site - https://woodstovefilter.co.uk/ - which seems to offer a solution ... but the product doesn't exist yet; it says "Expected to be ready for commercial sale early 2022". EDIT TO ADD: Actually, there seem to be a few companies selling "strap-on" systems to fit to chimneys that work on electrostatic removal of particles, such as Enervex [2], but again that's not to do with a stove type.)

The Guardian article points out that wet wood sales are to be banned from May this year: "The government is not planning a ban on wood burners but a ban on the retail sale of wet wood will come into force on 1 May, as will a ban on bags of house coal, the first such restrictions since the clean air acts of the 1950s. Wet wood has not been seasoned and produces higher levels of pollution."

The article also links to the UK Govt announcement [1] from last year, which as far as I can see has nothing to say about stove type, only fuel.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-takes-action-t...

[2] https://enervex.com/systems/particle-filter-system-for-stove...

Modern stoves do have a particulate removal system, either via a catalyst (just like the catalytic converted in your car), or via a secondary air system that causes the particulates to burn up before they exit the stove. You can't buy a new stove without one of these two systems due to emission standards.

Always good to test these things if possible. PM 2.5 detectors are pretty cheap.

For instance I used one to learn that fume hoods on stoves are basically inadequate. (Windows are more effective)

A good test “can you smell the thing you are cooking”. If so, your ventilation is not adequate.

I’d avoid using gas stoves at all unless it was inside a lab style fume hood.

Do you mean pm 2.5, or other stuff? I think a smell test is pretty good, but in my experience it is only a burning or dry cooking smell that sets off pm 2.5 meters.

So for example if I am frying chicken in a well oiled pan, and smell chicken, pm 2.5 does nothing. But if the chicken is browning and I smell....I dunno, the smell of browning chicken, that raises the meter.

Is this due to having a gas fueled stove or is it the food itself?

That is the food itself. Though it really depends on the method. Most cooking, including frying, won’t raise pm 2.5 levels.

But if something goes wrong and you can smell any kind of burning, then generally the levels will rise to between 150-500. I’m including small things, like a speck of food getting out of the fry pan and onto the burner. Or not enough oil in the pan, or anything producing a maillard reaction. The line between “nothing noxious” and “whoa that is dangerous” is very thing in my measuring experience. And the best way to deal it when it happens is opening windows. These should clear it out within 15 min or less in most cases.

Never had a gas stove so never tested for pm 2.5. Am guessing it is higher, and co2 as well.

Wet wood is especially bad. The co2 released from burning is not much of an issue but it sends out huge amounts of unburned particles.

In my country outside of the city center (where most homes have district heating or gas), wood burning stoves are the most common way people heat their homes. Coal never really caught on here, but there are abundant forests and not that many people, so there is always plenty of firewood that is easy to find.

That combined with low temperatures during winter (somehow it causes pollution to stay low to the ground?) means the government usually issue air quality warnings to stay inside a few times during the heating season.

There have been some attempts to improve the quality of the fuels used, e.g. funding to push upgrading to automatic pellet stoves which burn much cleaner, but most of the issue (which is also the case in the UK) is that older homes are simply poorly insulated and waste a lot of heat. The problem is by 'older homes' I mean anything more than 10 years ago, when the EU started pushing for lower energy use in housing. In the US that means today, for homes built to minimum building codes - which the majority of new housing is.

We are building a new 160m2 home - to modern insulation standards - and even the smallest 5kW wood burning stove would produce too much heat for the house. We probably won't even need to turn on the heating (electric heat pump) until it gets close to 0c outside.

The temperature effect on atmospheric circulation is called an inversion. Basically, air near the ground is normally warmer than that above it so rises buoyantly, mixing the atmosphere through convection. When the air near the ground is colder than the air above it (the gradient is "inverted") the air no longer rises, causing polluted air generated at the surface to linger. There are several circumstances that can lead to colder air at the surface than above it, including cold, cloud-free nights.

Thanks, that was really interesting! I never thought about it like that but it makes sense.

I rarely see any talk about moving from long haul trucks to freight trains. The latter burn far less fuel, and steel wheels don't create synthetic rubber dust.

They also don't leave PM10 floating in the city as much, by virtue of not being distributed widely throughout the city ubiquitously close to schools, hospitals, homes. So apart from just emitting less, they emit less, specifically close to where people are, compared to trucks

My impression is that there’s a huge integration problem where rail freight is mostly set up to work with the sea-oriented container system, whereas truck LTL works on the pallet.

Or, framed another way: trucks are just too cheap. Truck operators and truck-oriented logistics firms don’t pay for their negative externalities, so there’s no cost benefit in going to the trouble of routing your load through a rail freight exchange on both ends. It’s pure complexity and schedule risk with no upside.

This is a topic that is talked about in academia quite a bit (I have a master in supply chain management)

The main problem with trains is that you - naturally - have low flexibility in terms of where you can deliver goods. You are relying on trucks for the last-mile pick-up & delivery for the majority of trips. You might need to load/onload 4-6 times going from truck > train > truck. Because of the time & costs associated with switching mode of transport, these intermodal alternatives become uncompetitive compared to a single door-to-door delivery via truck, even for fairly long distances.

The logistics providers will optimize for lower cost over lower pollution, so intermodal transport via train can be hard to justify unless the customer is willing to pay for it in terms of money or time.

this is an example of how our economic choices are altered for the worse by negative externalities. we need to properly internalize the cost of pollution from fossil fuels, roads, tires, weight, miles, etc. so that economic choices are appropriately rationalized.

Trucks don't pay for much of their costs. For example, most of the maintenance of highways is the result of the heavy trucks slowly braking up the pavement.

>Trucks don't pay for much of their costs.

And IIRC companies like Linfox donate billions to both main political parties, which I'm sure has no effect on the decision to keep truck registration costs so low.

Do remember that damage to the road from tires scales exponentially with weight (per tire). So those trucks are doing huge damage to the roads (and not paying for it directly). Here's an article with a nice graph about it: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

> You might need to load/onload 4-6 times going from truck > train > truck.

That sounds strange to me. It implies that the US doesn't have a rail network, just rail lines that don't connect to anything.

Something gets made at a plant domestically. It gets brought to the train station to be shipped. Truck -> train. The train carries it a few states over to the wholesaler's mega warehouse. Train -> truck. Wholesaler breaks it down, groups it with other things to send out, Truck -> Train. Regional distribution center picks it up from the train station and takes it back to their distribution center. Train -> Truck. Then it gets put out as individual orders in the region. Truck -> Store.

If you're needing the truck to take it back and fourth from the train station, you may just find it easier and faster to just have the truck carry it all the way from the port to the mega warehouse, then to the distribution center, then to the actual delivery site.

The "few states over" is what should go on the train. It's the same idea as container shipping.

"Regional" here still encompasses a few states and several hundred miles for a trip. In the US "regional" distribution centers may cover the same geographic area as France+Germany+Belgium+Netherlands. Its not uncommon for New Mexico+Texas+Oklahoma+Arkansas+Lousiana to be one "region", if you're set up in Oklahoma or Texas each of those states is pretty much just one state over. Albuquerque to Memphis (the East-West stretch of this region) is 1,000mi.

We still very much use freight trains. But they don't go everywhere, and managing a network of train traffic has its own overhead. Each car in a train has to go to the same place. To transfer to another train to take a different sub-route takes time. Then, you also have to unload the payload at the destination and still complete the journey with a truck.

The load/unload should be as simple as picking up the semi (sans the cab) and putting it onto a flatcar.

It's never that simple. Freight trains are extremely long and have to have massive yards to park in. Then you have to shuffle them around to get to the car you need. Then you have to have the Semi Truck in a position that a crane can access to mount the payload. It's a very difficult problem to solve at scale and certainly not economical for every city in America.

This is not a complex problem, as the rail yard is a completely controlled environment. It is not a major engineering problem to have the train move slowly past a point where a crane can pick off the trailer and put it on a tug. The tug then parks the trailer somewhere in the yard. When the truck shows up, the tug retrieves the trailer and brings it to the truck.

Think of a moving assembly line. It's the same thing.

It doesn't have to be economical for every city. It can be done profitably in an incremental manner, starting with the highest volume lines.

Yes it is. Your long slow moving train is now blocking other long trains from passing (since rails are rarely two way). Nevermind that the train would have to stop entirely and lose all the energy efficiency in the process). Constructing new rails is expensive and difficult since rails have to be nearly level with very low grade.

You are handwaving about something you know nothing about and I suggest you read more into civil engineering, civil construction, and rail construction. Union Pacific will spend billions just to get roads reconstructed to move under or over train tracks so they can save a couple minutes on a delivery route. It's extremely difficult to build roads around or near freight rails because of these constraints and vice versa.

Have you even compared a map of the freight rail lines in existence and their current stopping points versus the interstate and US highway system?

Trains can be electric.

In france almost all the main railways are electrics.

I don’t know where you live, but for instance in Argentina this conversation never happens because the union of truck drivers is so big that they stop every single attempt to increase trains.

This is very common for cargo movement in the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggyback_(transportation)#Rai...

Warren Buffet talks about it every once in a while. He has talked about the efficiency gains in terms of how much it takes to move a ton of goods a mile. I have seen stories about what types of investments are needed in the Chicago areas to unblock bottlenecks between the East and West coasts.

What is with this confidence interval? I’m wondering what kind of uncertainty would result in an interval where potentially 10s of millions of lives are saved by burning fossil fuels.

“ We estimate a global total of 10.2 (95% CI: −47.1 to 17.0) million premature deaths annually attributable to the fossil-fuel component of PM2.5.”

The most important thing is that it includes 0.

This is not primarily about cars, as some would've concluded from the headline

Yup. It isn’t broken down in the abstract but I would almost certainly expect most PM2.5 fossil fuel pollution to be coming from coal power plants. And to the extent it’s about vehicles, it would primarily be from diesel trucks.

I don't understand how air pollution isn't the absolute number 1 issue for the Chinese government, and I'm not just saying that rhetorically. Maybe the CCP is a corrupt authoritarian kleptocracy, but the elites have to breathe the same air as everyone else, right?

Most people are motivated by other things besides extending their own lives. What they do with that life is more important than how long it lasts, and rightly so.

I'm sure a CCP elite spends very little time actually breathing the air in Beijing. Probably spending most of their time inside, and outdoor time spent outside the city like our elite in cities like NYC. They probably figure no matter what happens with climate change, their children and grandchildren will be rich and comfortable and immune to it all. They would probably be right in the end, too.

How does one write "Perri-Air" in Chinese? Might be a good startup opportunity there.

It has become a concern in recent years, they've made some strides in protecting their environment.

> Pollution from fossil fuel combustion deadlier than previously thought

But... Remember that the lifestyle improvements from fossil fuels greatly extend life. We (currently) need fossil fuels for our food and medicine supply. Just think of how many people would die if there were no fossil fuel ambulances or electricity to run hospitals.

That, IMO, is the real reason why we're in the climate change mess. The lifestyle that fossil fuels enables is irresistible and too lucrative to accelerate the change to clean energy.

I always had this in mind when i lived in London. In my experience i found the combination of vehicle exhaust pollution and pollen unbearable. Somehow the vehicle exhaust particles combine with the pollen and exacerbated my pollen allergies. I had zero allergies growing up and developed a very bad pollen allergy in south west London, then i moved to rural Dorset and i don’t have any allergies any more. Still get tons of pollen (i.e rural Dorset) but less pollution. I wonder if anyone has analysed the combination of vehicle exhaust pollution plus pollen?

Here's the paper http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/publications/2021/vohra_2021_ff...

This has models layered on models layered on meta-analyses of transfer functions and there appears to be no validation at all. I wonder if this is anything beyond hypothesis grade work.

Our grandchildren will look at old films of people blithely walking around next to internal combustion vehicles and laugh in mild horror, much as we look back on images of parents puffing away on cigarettes next to a child.

My dad smoked 2 pack a day, I hated it. He was an early riser and by the time I got out of bed there was a haze hanging in the kitchen/dining room, everyday for most of my childhood.

On the bright side, I wanted nothing to do with cigarettes from a young age.

I took the family to Europe in 2019, in terms of smokers and smoking it was like going back in time compared to the US.

That depends very much on which country you visit.

It does, if you count Sweden at 8% of adults.

I figure it's because of snus, which is smart on them; I'll always have a soft spot for the stuff, because it got me off cigarettes.

Every other country in the EU has a higher adult smoking rate than the 14% in the US; second place is UK at 17%.

It also depends on where you come from. As an example, US is also 14%-ish smokers.

Well, it also depends where in the US you come from.

California is 11%, West Virginia is 25%. I'm sure the disparities are even greater when you look at smaller populations (e.g. county, metro, city, etc).

https://www.cdc.gov/statesystem/cigaretteuseadult.html

There has been a remarkable decline in the UK, I assume it's similar elsewhere:

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...

I almost took up smoking so I could get into a higher vaccine phase. The irony of smoking for my own health! Thankfully I was able to find a clinic that had an unexpected opening and no arm to put the thawed out shot into.

> I took the family to Europe in 2019, in terms of smokers and smoking it was like going back in time compared to the US.

Last time we went back to France, we took the kid to the playground and adults were smoking a few meters away from the slides. After double-checking that there was indeed a sign indicating that smoking was forbidden, I told them to step and they did, but apparently nobody else cared.

I haven't see that happen yet in the SF Bay. Obviously though, we get wildfire smoke for several months, and right after that people start burning wood in their open fireplaces for winter, so it's not all rosy either.

Go to a car show and get a whiff of some pre-1970s cars driving around. Now imagine if every car on the road was like that. I can't imagine the stench of a city before the introduction of catalytic converters.

Looking at pictures of highways from before caralytic converters and you notice that each lane had a pure black stripe from the exhaust.

Worse the gasoline was leaded. Plus gas stations did not have vapor recovery systems and gas stations were pretty stinky places.

You should have gotten a whiff Baton Rouge in the 1970's.

With the large refinery making fuel for far more vehicles than this one moderate-sized city could ever use.

And with orders of magnitude more emissions than the same noticeably smelly facilities today.

Since I wasn't able to read the study in question: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

I wonder how much of this pollution has already been addressed by the EPA in the USA. Which types of combustion are the worst/lowest hanging fruit? How bad is it, really?

Public dollars pay for research that gets locked behind a paywall. 8(

[Edit] Also, what about particulates caused by tires and brake pads, etc.?

And can we finally get the lead out of AvGas?

You can find the paper on author's website: http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/publications/2021/vohra_2021_ff...

Thank you.

So it turns out that the study attributes 69 of 672 deaths due to lower respiratory infection in the USA to fossil fuel combustion within larger error bounds. (Table 2) in the PDF.

I already thought so when they killed led fuel back in the days.

People are always hating how electric cars aren't more environment friendly, but outsourcing "the bad parts" from our cities is actually a win.

Hiding stuff under a carpet is never a win, not in a long term.

They are more environmentally friendly, but still bad for the environment.

In net terms, burning fossil fuels creates life.

This is bullshit. Open fires and burning wood is extra deadly.

"Three Billion People Cook Over Open Fires"

Everyone can't be dying from air pollution.

Step One is get people burning wood to fossil fuels. It's a no brainer.

Or just reduce PM2.5 fairly. Help the worst effected then move up.

In the ultra rich countries like the 1% who are mostly HN yes, fossil fuels near people are possibly the next step, but also dust and pollen and wood fires. Whatever is PM2.5

Those three billion people don't live in too close proximity. One fire's worth may not be too bad, but you can imagine 1000 people doing it will start to add up real quick.

> Those three billion people don't live in too close proximity.

Apologies if I misunderstood your point but I would think many of those people do live in close proximity.

My view is from anecdotal evidence not research, but its common to see wood/charcoal/dung fires when you see how people cook in slums all over the world. These people are tightly packed and very much using wood or similar to cook alongside gas/metho type stoves.

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