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Comment by Glench | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget there's also the millions of people dying from fossil fuel-based air pollution every year! https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/david-wallace-wells/ten-...

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Great point. There'd be compelling reasons to stop poisoning ourselves ASAP even if we weren't boiling ourselves alive in the process.

Ontario phased out coal electricity for a mix of natural gas and renewables in the early-mid 2000s. Climate wasn't the primary motivator. Regular air pollution was. Smog has essentially disappeared from Toronto. I haven't had burning eyes and a scratchy throat on what would have once been bad summer days in almost two decades personally (atmospheric NO2 levels): https://files.ontario.ca/2086-figurea35-en.jpg Atmospheric mercury levels alone have fallen by 40%. I didn't even know so much Hg in the environment came from coal ash!

> An independent assessment conducted by Toronto Public Health in 2014 suggests that improvements in Ontario’s air quality have translated into significant health benefits for Ontario residents. Toronto Public Health found that improvements in Toronto’s air quality from 2000 to 2011 have reduced air pollution-related premature deaths by 23% (from 1,700 to 1,300 per year) and hospital admissions by 41% (from 6,000 to 3,550 per year) in Toronto alone.

This argument is mostly against cities though. Nowadays humans don't need to be tightly packed into pollution centres. Efforts should be made to make city living as expensive as possible since it's harmful for the environment. Internet has made cities pretty much obsolete anyway.

Sure, if you're fine with

- never having a medical emergency

- driving 30 minutes to get food

- never going anywhere you can't drive home from

it's not an argument against cities if we can get rid of emissions in cities. and we can.

That's... completely backwards? City dwellers have the smallest environmental impact.

Air quality within cities is actually a totally different issue from whether living in a city is in and of itself harmful for the environment.

As the OP mentioned, reducing fossil fuel usage within city centers (both power generation and vehicle usage) can dramatically reduce smog and improve air quality within the city. While even more dramatically reducing the city dwellers' environmental footprint.

Living in the suburbs is reliant on largely fossil-fuel burning vehicular transport, which even if electrified, is substantially less efficient than mass transit, cycling, or walking, all of which are much more feasible within a city. Not to mention the sheer land area used for pavements and stormwater drainage and such in spread-out areas.

I’d suggest that dense city living without the suburban sprawl would be the ideal. Pack the people in, and free up as much open space and agricultural land as possible.

In cities, there's less need to drive with walkable areas, and a scale that better supports mass transit. Smaller land footprint, and smaller homes take less energy to heat or cool. Economies of scale in providing goods and services. Ships release less CO2 than trucking, and lots of cities have ports. If you don't like cities that's one thing, but the environmental impact is pretty unequivocally less than suburban or rural living.

It's a little more complicated -- if living in a city means that you switch from a car to public transit, that's a major environmental win. If living in a city means you switch from a free-standing house to an apartment building, that's a smaller but substantial environmental win. Sewers are generally better than septic tanks, trash collection is more efficient when people live closer together, and so on.

Cities concentrate pollution and completely overwhelm the local environment's capacity to absorb human impacts. However, they generally reduce overall pollution when compared to suburban or rural living at the same income level.

I find there's something fishy about talking of "millions of people dying from pollution".

It raises a simple question that isn't easy to answer: what do we mean when we say someone died of something? Under what circumstances do we say that? If someone gets hit by a car, they were killed in a car accident. If an 80 year old dies of cancer, cancer killed them, but it's a little different than a car accident (and also different than a 15 year old dying of leukemia). Even more different is something, like pollution, that is a factor in someone's death.

When it comes to pollution, I think a better framing would be to talk about pollution lowering life expectancy. That seems more honest unless these people are choking on smog and asphyxiating.

A similar argument can be made about cigarettes and lung cancer. One cannot point at a tumour, even in a heavy smoker, and say with certainty "well, that's from the smoking", as opposed to air pollution, or just bad genetic luck. (Or quite possibly a synergy of all three.) When you look at it statistically, it's like what you say, smoking lowers your life expectancy on average.

Yet if you took two large and matched cohorts, one smoking and one non-smoking, after 50 years the smoker population would be much smaller than the non-smoking. On the population level, I think it's reasonable to attribute those missing people to having died from smoking, even though individually we can't say much.

The way these things are usually talked about is "QALYs" - quality adjusted life years, which count time spent with debilitating chronic conditions less. If lost QALYs / average lifespan > 1 million, then characterizing it as "millions of people dying from pollution" is probably not unfair.

It's worth noting however that this kind of accountancy can lead to mathematical conclusions that make us uncomfortable - e.g. it is better to murder a child than to cause everyone in the world to wake up 1 second late (3 times better in fact) since the total lost time to everyone exceeds the expected lifespan of the child.

This is something people who oppose EVs seem to forget (or ignore). Especially in cities, the air would be so much cleaner if only EVs were allowed. Every time someone lectures me on the CO2 cost of producing electric cars I explain this, but nobody seems to care about cleaner air.

Sounds frustrating! I totally agree — I used to bike around the city and the pollution was pretty noticeable — smelled terrible in congested areas and seemed to make it harder to breathe. I really value the nourishment of clean air and I'm sure many many more people will too as we wean ourselves from fossil fuels.

I'm also wondering if you're familiar with or would like this book by a climate scientist living in Texas who's documented what's worked for her in talking about climate change with people who are resistant: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Saving-Us/Katharine-H...

People tend to ignore or simply not care when the death is spread out. It is why Fukushima scare people more than coal power plants, or why an airplane crash get more focus than the constant car crashes on the motorway.

Risk perception is a topic that should be taught in schools.

If you remove vehicles EV or not, you win on all sides. I guess those who are against EV think about. As someone who suffers from air pollution, I'd welcome EV happily, but knowing that it's just a part of the (very) long term solution.

I remember that Trump was not much in fighting about climate change but much more into fighting against air pollution. On that account he was not completely wrong. Air pollution kills many people as others said.

Trump being into fighting air pollution is a new take I have not heard before. Policy-wise, his administration was vehemently anti-regulation[0] and rolled back many air quality regulations protecting us from toxic substances like coal ash[1], which contains heavy metals like mercury and arsenic.

The most egregious example in my opinion was the attempt to end California's legal authority to set its own, more stringent, emissions standards[2]. The edict was even opposed by a majority of automakers.

Luckily many of these rulings have been rolled-back or are in the process of being reversed.

Air pollution even from tires and brakes, let alone from gasoline, is a large health problem and should be discussed more.

[0] - https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/what-is-the-...

[1] - https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2017/12/coal-ash-rule/

[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22404403/california-tailp...

> I remember that Trump was not much in fighting about climate change but much more into fighting against air pollution

You are going to have to source that. Trump championed coal, eviscerated the EPA, rolled back air quality regulations, etc.

EVs are cleaner in more ways than just the exhaust too. They produce much less noise pollution for one. Another advantage is that because EVs can use regenerative breaking they wear through much less brake pad material each year, and brake dust is a huge issue in city air quality, especially since brakes are still manufactured using asbestos.

On the ground there can often be a conflict between air pollution and climate goals.

Widespread adoption of diesel engines (in place of gasoline) has increased particulate and nitrogen oxide pollution. Wood burning (compared to other fossil fuels) is a similar story.

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