Polluted air cuts global life expectancy by two years | Hacker News Reader

Polluted air cuts global life expectancy by two years

phys.org

142 pointspseudolus102 comments

For those looking to change something today, for themselves, consider indoor air pollution and your contribution to it inside your own home with various household "cleaning" chemicals and "fragrances".

I have been to several communities which are entirely fragrance free, including entire towns (rules for public spaces) but it's still behind the threshold of public awareness outside of "canaries" and their allies and a few NYTimes articles. Google is your friend on this issue, WHO and EPA have information pages about it.

I've always been a proponent of fragrance free products, had a disdain of 'air fresheners' etc. I need to find some sources to try to help convince my GF. WHO and EPA it is! Thanks.

Europe is doing the best to mitigate the pollution, but Europe produces only 8% of global pollution. China and India should do something, but instead they’re doing almost nothing.

They've outsourced the vast majority of their air pollution to India and China, but still somehow produce 8% of global pollution.

One way to fix this is to change international trade agreements to place producers under the environmental (and human rights) jurisdictions of the places where their goods are ultimately sold. It would force a race to the top instead of the current race to the bottom.

"We did all of our polluting in the past and achieved our industrialization already, why doesn't everyone else just choose to stay poor?"

Industrialization can be achieved with less pollution today than two hundred years ago. You're allowed to skip some steps and immediately start with clean technology.

And where are Europe's cheap goods being made?

> fragrance free

> WHO and EPA have information pages about it.

This is wrong.

Where does WHO say this?

EPA: https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/indoor-air-quality

> Cleaning supplies, paints, insecticides, and other commonly used products introduce many different chemicals, including volatile organic compounds, directly into the indoor air.

> Health effects associated with indoor air pollutants include:

> Irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat.

> Headaches, dizziness, and fatigue.

> Respiratory diseases, heart disease, and cancer.

=====

WHO: https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/156970/...

> Many air pollutants in the indoor environment are present in mixtures at low concentrations of each of the compounds, thus providing simultaneous multiple exposure. This is typically the case with volatile organic compounds (VOC). Indoor air sam- ples may typically contain 50 VOC each in concentrations of 1-100 mg/m’>.

> Few of these VOC are covered by air quality guidelines. Fur- ther, such guidelines mostly refer to the health effects associated with cach individual compound. No general procedure exists for setting such guidelines for the indoor environment. Also, no pro- vision is made for assessing combined exposure to mixtures of VOC and for predicting the health and comlort effects originat- ing from such simultancous multiple exposures.

> Given the increasing concern for the quality of indoor envi- ronments, which is triggered in part by the large number of build- ings in which occupants report health and comfort problems, adequate methods are needed to assess the effects on health and comfort of exposure to multiple air pollutants. Three types of procedure can be envisaged for such assessment.

> One approach is the use of sensory effects, such as odour and sensory irritation, as substitutes for possible health and comfort effects. A second approach could be to add together the risks of causing health and comlort eflects for each individual compound (as for the occupational environment). These approaches have not yet been developed to a level that can be recommended for general use in indoor environments.

i think this is a missed opportunity when it comes to convincing more people about the advantages of switching to clean energy, especially in developing countries (at least from a marketing pov).

for example my dad isn't really convinced about "climate change", but would love for the air to get cleaner. and for this reason he installed solar, a battery, even got a hybrid car.

Oh please. I live in a 'developing country' (don't like that term because I have doubts that it's actually developing). A substantial portion of the population lives in houses heated with coal furnaces. Except that for the past few years coal prices went up somewhat and many people went to burning trash: rubber tires, old rags soaked in motor oil, pieces of bitumen, old plastic bottles, you name it.

In winter air quality is simply horrible (my Grafana instance shows an average of 240 µg/m³ PM2.5 for January of this year). I have a t-shirt that was hung out to try at the beginning of this year and it still smells of burnt coal and rubber.

The government spent a pretty penny subsidizing installation of natural gas furnaces. Guess what, almost nobody is actually using that now since coal is noticeably cheaper, so people went right back to burning it. I understand they don't care about anybody else, but in winter their own kids breathe air that is literally black and reduces visibility to a few dozen meters. Good luck trying to convince them of anything.

The solution is to make natural gas cheaper than coal, even free.

But the West reacts violently to "installing carbon-emitting natural gas in developing countries" and it doesn't happen.

Why would you subsidize gas, of all type of energy we could subsidize?

Because the problem is literally people burning coal at home for heat, and burning natural gas at home for heat is way less polluting, and if you price it right they'll jump at it.

If instead you try to build solar or wind and provide electrical for heating, maybe some of the rich will do it, but most everyone else will continue to burn coal (or tires).

Not necessarily subsidize gas. You can also tax coal for its special danger.

I wouldn't, but it seems somewhat plausible to do it if you really care about costs.

Solar and wind costs much less than gas, and we can still increase the % of intermittent energy sources by a lot before we actually need to install stationary storage.

Of course people will oppose gas when we have a better and cheaper alternative.

How does the intermittent nature of solar/wind work for the usages described in this thread (ie. heating, hot water, cooking)? Heating need is anti-correlated with renewables, because it's used at night. I suspect the same applies to hot water (spike of showers in the morning/night), although it's less of an issue because you can save up hot water. Cooking is concentrated around certain time periods (ie. breakfast/lunch/dinner), so that's also a bad fit for renewables.

The coefficient of power of current heat pumps is over 4 in most operating environments.

It doesn't solve the storage problem, but it increases the price differential between electric and fossil fuels. That differential could be used for batteries, solar water heating, etc, etc.

Cooking off battery and using a heat pump water heater is pretty feasible at this point (feasible == cheaper than fossil fuels).

Heating the house and charging vehicles are the big energy hogs. Unfortunately, they're also big polluters.

I don't think the problem lies in the West. Nobody is going to burn natural gas in our own country when it can be exported at prices that internal buyers would never to able to pay. By diverting it to our own market and subsidizing the price further the government would be losing insane amounts of money. But even building more coal-based power stations and connecting more houses to central heating would go a long way towards improving the air quality (since they use scrubbers to remove particulates from emissions, and the only thing you have to be afraid of are things like SO₂). Nobody seems willing to do even that, the situation keeps getting worse.

The solution is population reduction through medical and social encouragement of having fewer or no children. Its not realistic to expect to modernize 1.3 billion Indians into a fossil-fuel intensive lifestyle.

The infrastructure and sophistication also just doesn't exist for highly insulated and heat-pump conditioned homes like in the West.

The population of India in 1965 was 500 million. Getting back to this level would dramatically increase the quality of life and resources available to each person.

India isn't a place that needs furnaces for house heating.

They're in the former USSR, population is likely not an issue.

When 50% of the west is obese/heavily overweight and under exercises I'd be hard pressed to think people care about living longer.

Isn’t a hybrid the dirtiest to manufacture? You have batteries AND an ICE.

The difference in fuel consumption more than makes up for that small battery and powertrain.

That's at least two metric tonnes of fuel saved over the lifetime of the car compared to ~150kg of additional components. The process of making them would have to be especially dirty to reach the environmental footprint of such an amount of fuel.

> The difference in fuel consumption more than makes up for that small battery and powertrain.

Does it not depend on the driving style?

Less than in a regular ICE car. I've found that at least in my case average speed and use of accessories in heavy traffic is a better predictor of fuel consumption - I suppose it's due to regenerative braking.

The "dirty" battery build pales in comparison the the cost of extraction/transport/burning of gas in the hybrid.

I have yet to see any EREOI impact study of gas vs. battery electric that shows gas vehicles to be anywhere close to hybrid or electric.

Apparently it all depends on the driving style? So it seems to require an eco-conscious driver?

Not at all - you can drive with a lead foot on an EV and still be better off than gas by miles.

I wouldn't think so. I can't imagine that manufacturing a small ICE engine is particularly dirty compared to a much larger battery pack. With a PHEV, it would seldom need to run as well, negating the emissions of a purely ICE vehicle.

Hybrid does not imply a small engine. For example, 2023 Toyota Sequoia has an option of a hybrid V6.

That's fair. Not all hybrids are created equally. With larger vehicles, the larger gas motor is almost essential, tbh, as otherwise the total power output will sometimes be limited by the maximum output of the gasoline motor.

The i3 was an extreme example of that.

> Isn’t a hybrid the dirtiest to manufacture?

not sure, could be. with a hybrid he was happy that he got to spend less money on fuel, and in turn produce less pollutants. he would've bought an ICE (and charged it from their own solar), but those were much, much more expensive than the car he got.

nonetheless the point was that some people might not be convinced by climate change, but a lot of people want to breath cleaner air.

And everyone wants to save money - even "coal rollers" will buy a hybrid truck if it's cheaper to operate in the long-run.

This is miles from the truth. Installing coal rolling equipment actually costs money. And the act of rolling is a lower efficiency combustion.

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

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

Making people in developing countries poorer is not a “missed opportunity”, is not realizing the true context. Because, yes, trying to force people in developing countries to “buy an EV!” (or equivalent) when they can barely purchase a 10-year-old SH car from Germany will make them poorer.

> Making people in developing countries poorer

who said poorer?

> trying to force people in developing countries to “buy an EV!”

who's trying to force anyone?

i'm sorry, but what i wrote has to do with convincing people (via marketing for example) that it's much better to switch to clean energy because of clean air. and i was referring to "developing countries", a huge list: https://www.worlddata.info/developing-countries.php, aka a huge opportunity.

I think that confuses two potential problems in one: pollution from particulates and pollution from carbon dioxide. If you don't really think carbon dioxide is that big of a problem, or can be managed effectively, the priority should be on filtering out particulates from the burning of fuels. This can be accomplished with much less disruption to the economy than trying to eliminate fossil fuels, which will likely backfire anyway, as countries such as China and India will continue to use it without regard to either problems.

hmm, interesting, i think you're right, but i also think that focusing more on "clean air" than "climate change" in certain countries could alleviate both of the pollution problems you mention.

it's interesting how we are fine to let GDP drop considerably to reduce the impact of Covid, but we are perfectly fine to let millions die from air pollution because we don't want to impact GDP.

Dying slowly vs dying quickly. As a society we seem fine with letting people destroy their health in any number of ways from smoking to eating a pound of sugar a day, but we will go to great lengths to prevent people from committing suicide.

"Living" is another name for "dying slowly".

True, but I'd prefer to die as slowly as possible.

You've got the premise backwards; you should try to live a full as possible, not die slowly. An extra few years at the end are worth a lot less than in the middle.

I can do both I think. Unless doing specific life extending activities like exercising is considering not living a full life. I wonder if exercising for a minute can extend your life by 1 minute or if it's mostly a waste of time in that regard.

Over the past 50 years, the US has invested massive economic resources in reducing air pollution.

The covid response cost way more than ending climate change would.

This is not just gdp or some fat guy getting rich, the fact is that industrialisation has raised millions out of food poverty and allowed us to support a population never before dreamed of.

Robbing billions of that to theoretical gain 2 more years (calculated in a strategic vacuum) is foolhardy in the extreme.

I don't think anyone quite grasps what potentially going backwards really means for humanity. Without industrialisation there will be significantly large portion of population being made unsustainable.

This is a strawman.

You don't need to reduce energy to reduce air pollution.

You do need to increase costs though.

That's not even true now, even if you set aside $100Ms to bribe Manchin, etc.

While I don't disagree, it's educational to visit a place like Delhi, India or Jakarta, Indonesia, which have terrible air pollution but are not particularly industrialized. The main culprits in both appear to be farmers burning their fields and emissions from vehicles, not factories.

And those places are where we should focus our efforts - an electric car in the USA may reduce carbon emissions/air pollution a bit, but that same amount of batteries used in vehicles in India would offset a much greater amount.

That's true, but the main reason is the lack of cadillac converters on their vehicles. Which generally only cost $1,000-3,000 per vehicle. Which is much less than a full electric car. So if they can't afford cadillac converters, how are they going to afford 40k+ electric cars?

Then perhaps we should buy catalytic converters for them - there are 300 million vehicles in India, so that would be about 900 billion dollars - is it worth it? Would the pollution reduction be that great? Probably a better use of a trillion dollars than the war on terror, at least from a pollution standpoint.

Buy catalytic converters for them? Buy them for ourselves first - park a Prius in any big city overnight and you’ll observe the scarcity first hand.

Ah yeah, like in the article where it says China went "backwards" and cut their pm2.5 pollution gaining an average 2 years lifespan. All those Chinese are now poor and starving.

Very few serious people suggest "going backwards". Clean energy and clean transportation are a step forward.

> This is not just gdp or some fat guy getting rich

And yet:

- 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions (1)

- most of them belong to less that 30 billionaires

- many of them have been caught multiple times lobbying to reduce emission regulations

- many of them have been caught manipulating public opinion with advertising, research etc to deflect responsibility

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

Do the products/services that result in polluted air extend or reduce life expectancy?

Could those products/services be provisioned as broadly as they are if all potential pollutants were eliminated?

Is pollution a necessary step function on the way to a higher standard of living?

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

I like to recommend what we did as young parents for the past many years:

Get a large room air purifier to simultaneously (1) generate a large spectral range of white noise while also (2) keeping plastic etc. dust out of their lungs (for almost half their life while they sleep so much).

I also got a few of the Airthings View Plus boxes, one for each floor of the house and one in the bedroom specifically. Learned some very interesting things, such as that when the A/C comes on at night, the VOCs and CO2 spikes so we were able to address this properly. As an SRE style person, the idea was that without observability into the current state, we didn't really know where the problems were or what we should do to fix them (though perhaps the solution is always just "buy an air purifier").

>Get a large room air purifier

Better start removing the main sources of air pollution. Manufacturing and powering air purifier adds to pollution (and global warming) so it should definitely not be the priority.

These are different contexts; in terms of global air pollution, sure, but in terms of in-home exposure to pollutants and microplastic stuff, something that filters the air might help in the place you spend 1/2 or more of your life at.

On a slightly meta note, things like this show how "letting the free market do its job" isn't really a great idea unless you explicitly also have a pollution (Pigovian) tax/Coase's property rights to handle such externalities.

Externalities and market freedom are completely different concepts.

A free market does not allow you to dump your garbage on public property, and no economist has ever argued that.

And yet that is kind of what has happened for centuries. The most obvious example is the pollution of the rivers.

Incredibly non-capitalist systems also have people dumping garbage in public places and it’s against the law too.

How much does the free market charge companies that discharge CO2 into the atmosphere?

It differs from country to country. This is one system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading

Oh, but it does as long as you can pay the fine. If a fine isn't significant enough or it is cheaper than getting rid of the waste, it simply becomes a cost of doing business. It doesn't matter that "no economist" has ever argued that.

Spend a few minutes on mises.org and you can probably find one.

Offtopic, but is mises.org considered a "smart" site, by libertarians? Like, I can tell that they think they're smart, or at least present themselves as if they think that, but is that considered true by lots of libertarians?

AFAIK, Mises.org is generally well regarded among libertarians.

Libertarians generally argue that externalities should either be illegal or taxed, when there are no other practical solutions. Here's a video of Milton Friedman on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YGfwSvLkC0

maybe, but at least one ecologist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Hardin pretty much argued that was the end result of public property.

on edit: huh, I didn't know about British economist William Forster Lloyd, mentioned in the article, so I guess at least one economist has argued that it will happen (not though, that it is 'allowed' by)

In a completely free market there would be no public property, by definition.

Are you confusing "free market" with "capitalism"? The former just means the government isn't meddling in the market by doing stuff by setting prices or quotas. It's "capitalism" that deals with ownership, but even that doesn't exclude public ownership because it only talks about private ownership of production.

Very true, I think that since Industry/Free-market enterprises don't tend to specialize into certain domains, from a profiteering stand-point, the efficiencies do not take into account other external factors, unless they impact the enterprise itself. Therefore, that is out of scope for that particular "Free market".

We complain about Government inefficiencies, and that is certainly an area that can be enhanced, however since the Government's enterprise is the entire Nation-state itself, they are better situated to determine the solution. In order to solve these macro issues, I believe we need a better resourced, accountable, efficient and competent government. At this point that would require a fundamental change at all levels though.

Governments have been pretty good about regulating local pollution. If you try to dump cyanide into a river, the government will come stop you pretty quick.

However, no government really cares about global pollution. Ie. greenhouse gasses... Or mercury in the ocean. The benefits of the polluting activity are local while the downsides are global.

For that you really need some global government which is going to take a worldwide view when deciding what is illegal/taxed. Unfortunately there are big downsides to worldwide governance too.

There is no “free market” unless you have no rules at all. Markets and capitalism can only work properly if they are regulated.

Generally a free market is one where the rules are arranged voluntarily by participants. Not sure what you mean by “work properly,” but there are plenty of examples of people successfully producing goods and trading them free of coercion.

I’d argue working properly includes appropriate consequences for negative externalities which by definition is impossible in an unregulated market. If you make it free to pollute you get a lot of pollution and that’s much worse for people than a $1/unit increase in the cost of some things.

That's just because the market is not encompassing everything. A free market is inconsistent with a government and publicly owned resources. Governments don't care if rich companies bribe them and will happily let them pollute until people are pissed enough.

Look at plastic and that recycling government propaganda bullshit.

They sold us to the oil companies and now we literally eat and breath microplastic.

If a polluter is polluting on your share of the shared sky you'll sue them into oblivion.

>If a polluter is polluting on your share of the shared sky you'll sue them into oblivion.

In what court?

If you actually implement being able to sue polluters into oblivion for polluting you don’t get checks and balances on pollution leading to less pollution you get Rothbard-style deindustrialization libertarianism. You reduce things to the point where people can’t drive a car or produce electricity without being sued to oblivion.

Isn’t that the libertarian dream? You can whatever you want if somebody doesn’t like it they can sue you. We also need way more judges and courts in a libertarian society. After a while they will realize that all the suing is not efficient and invent the EPA to set some global rules

Participants include in this case those that breathe in the polluted air. When it comes to the environment everyone in it participates.

Indeed, and millions of people face the choice between working in a polluted city or being unemployed in the countryside.

Far from being "free of coercion".

I never agreed with my neighbor that I can’t live in his house or eat his food. I am being coerced into not using his car.

Incorrect. A baseless conjecture.

If there was only free market, no government and public property was private and owned by everyone living in a radius - then people would just bring a lawsuit in an independent court to the polluters and either veto (pollution slowly killing you) or get financial compensation (think for things like a noisy airport next to your house).

As it is the polluters just need to bribe the correct government official and it's all kosher.

> As it is the polluters just need to bribe the correct government official and it's all kosher.

Citation?

> Polluted air cuts global life expectancy by two years

Two normal years or two leap years ?

I'm sure if everyone lived absolutely sterile and risk-free controlled lives, average life expectancy could be much higher, but I don't think that's a direction me or many others want society to take.

Ever think about day to day health? It is not just a life span of 78 vs 80 years. Living in pollution has many other negative effects including biology other than humans.

I'm not sure breathing polluted air is the sort of risk humans choose to take by weighing up their preference for the fun of imbibing fumes vs the possible downsides though...

It doesn't have to be a (false) dichotomy though. A 50% reduction in particulate matter and pollutants would still provide significant benefits.

But we could improve the environment and live longer, higher quality lives without going so far as to create "absolutely sterile and risk-free controlled lives."

Agreed. Why are we obsessed with keeping people alive for as long as possible? QoL after 80 is garbage compared to before 80, if I live that long please just let me die.

Wow! You're so unique and edgy!

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