Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Yes, table saw accidents are terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (SawStop), and fingers are useful for many other things.
Yes, lung cancer is terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (energy from renewables + nuclear), and the innate immune system is useful for many other things.
That won't necessarily solve this problem.
[edit] One more source. There are tons though. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/4a4dc6ca-en/index.html?i...
So. It depends. It's sometimes slightly better, sometimes slightly worse. But it doesn't really solve the issue.
The true change we need to make is drastically reduce car use, to a tiny fraction of its current use. This is a hard social problem, however, particularly for the older generations who tend to wield power in most governments. Younger folks seem pretty excited to allow more biking and walking and rolling, though.
Anyway. Cautiously in agreement with you, but it depends a lot on where you live. Western Europe, at least at present, is blessed with a fairly mild climate. Less so than North America which seems to alternate between harsh winters and hot and humid summers. And it's a bit much to ask everyone to move somewhere nice. We probably need to figure out how to make braking systems and wheels less polluting.
Quoted this Douglas Adams once on New York when this came up... "In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do, that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very equable, but it's quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet's orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin's bubbling." [edit] (aside, my theory is the Frastrans live on an aging neutron star like in "Dragon's Egg" ;) )
And really the situation gets worse a few states down. :) To say nothing of Texas or Arizona.
Only tangentially related, but I'd assume that most of the emissions from ebikes would be related to brakes, as stopping from higher velocity would wear down brake pads faster.
One interesting thing that hybrid and electric vehicles do is that they do regenerative braking, which ends up with less wear on brake pads (and emissions) from slowing down. Justin from Grin Technologies (an ebike part shop focusing on DIYers) has done a presentation on how that works on ebikes, and mentions that he's barely using brake pads now that he's using regenerative braking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYCj4asp9pE&t=970s
(rider mass / vehicle mass is a lovely shorthand for vehicle efficiency, as it says a lot about how much acceleration you're 'wasting' on the vehicle. Braking, of course, produces a negative acceleration, so lower mass ratio ~> better efficiency. Aim for a ratio of < 1.0...)
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/4a4dc6ca-en/1/3/2/index....
Government leaders in the states can't imagine this reality or, if so, can't imagine it changing sufficiently in their lifetimes to invest the political capital in. The US will never change.
And honestly, I take it back, there are nearly as many older folks punching for changes to city design to allow waking and bikes as young people. But in genera the older generations have the time and money needed for local political involvement in a way that younger generations do not, so we tend to get a future shaped by those who do not want change from the status quo (which is a radical departure from the eta of urban growth focused on cars).
The difference may not be age; it may be having kids and dealing with the practicalities of that.
Cars and kids are an absolute terrible combo.
I'm not sure if you've seen the huge rise of cargo bikes that I have seen, but they are nearly all parents with kid seating on the back in my town. We are trying to make do with terrible infrastructure and city planning, but it wouldn't take much change to make it all very much better.
- it's desirable, so property prices in places that enable this are higher, if there is even a location that could fulfill this
- expensive bikes aren't affordable by most people who also need a car
- there's a large window where kids are too big for a cargo bike, and still too young to go off freely
We do all sorts of things that increase property value, why is it suddenly only a problem when bikes are involved? And the problem is only because we do a little amount of transition and not a lot? This is a completely fabricated concern in my estimation, the type of thing that people come up with instead of simply saying "I don't like this and don't want it."
Similarly, the concern about the cost of bikes is completely invalid, as bikes are always cheaper than a car, even brand new cargo e-bikes are only a few months of car expenses at most.
And I haven't seen that window where kids can't bike on their own or ride with another parent, and I know families that bike with kids of all sizes and ages.
> And sorry if it comes across as as a strong critique, I don't mean any of it personally, but have heard people say these same things but never from people that actually bicycle with their family.
As I already said, we have built cycling into our lives. Our kids (4 and 6) cycle to school with one of us. I cycle to work. And I am saying this.
> We do all sorts of things that increase property value, why is it suddenly only a problem when bikes are involved?
That is nothing to do with what I was saying. Property is finite; schools, clubs, and employers are too. A car is one of the few levellers that allows people to live somewhere cheaper and access places they need to get to. Places that are close enough to schools to cycle them to school and then cycle to work are expensive.
> Similarly, the concern about the cost of bikes is completely invalid, as bikes are always cheaper than a car,
That only works if you don't need a car. If you need both, which, see previous point, is extremely likely, then it's an extra expense, not an alternative one.
> even brand new cargo e-bikes are only a few months of car expenses at most.
An admittedly quick Google and I'm not seeing any for less than £2.5k. That's years' worth of car services, tax and MOT. On top of the cost of the car they almost certainly need.
> And I haven't seen that window where kids can't bike on their own or ride with another parent, and I know families that bike with kids of all sizes and ages.
Here's an example of what I mean: nursery is in one direction; school is another. How do we get our 4 year old to nursery and 8 year old to school? Should the 8 year old cycle on his own? Or is he in the window where he can't cycle far enough by himself, but too heavy to be safely steered on a cargo bike?
Broadly: if Facebook's taught us anything, it's the power of being in a social circle and thinking that must generalise to everyone, or even most people. Having a job where we can work from home, or rock up 20 minutes late, where we can afford to live in a nice location that has good access, and where we can afford expensive secondary transport, is all great. Wonderful, even. But having grown up in a reasonably deprived area, I believe that's not most people's experience.
My wife cycled me around in her cargo bike, and a couple of other adults (not at the same time). I'm not a light chap, fairly sure I'd outweigh both your kids together. Steering on those things is pretty good, they're not light in and of themselves.
edit: we actually cycled both our kids to school in the cargo bike when they were 8 and 5. I'd forgotten, it was a few years ago.
On the cargo bikes, I have thought about it but I'd probably steer clear til they have some safety standards attached (I think there's a German standard, but nothing else I've seen).
The only time a Tesla needs to use brake pads are for emergency stops and for the parking brake.
For some reason I can't understand, they tried to imitate ICE automatics that don't stand still if you don't have your foot on the brake pedal.
Even more annoying, as an owner of a Nissan Leaf that does this, is that the behavior is what I consider to be a bug in automatic transmissions. Manual transmissions don't do that, and there's no good reason for automatics to do that (and a hundred really good reasons for them not to). It's an artifact of the viscosity of the fluid it turns in, and it annoys me that my EV is bug-for-bug compatible with a device the car doesn't even have (a transmission).
They obviously are not and cruising through stop signs (and sometimes killing children!) is the norm. If EVs encourage this driving style that is another strong point in favor of "electric cars can't solve the problem of cars."
You reap what you sow. A grid of 4-way stops where the traffic flow is not appropriate for them is a textbook perfect way to train drivers to habitually roll stop signs.
I swear sometimes it seems like urban planners are hellbent on re-learning everything they learned in the 1920s.
Also, it is a stretch to call some of that planning “learning” or “science.” As a general example, parking regulations for uses tend to be arbitrary, oversized and wildly out of date; most US retail parking lots are not full even on major shopping days like Black Friday before the advent of online, and now online is making all that space even more wasted.
The civil engineers also like absurdly wide turn radii to accommodate 53 feet trailers and large fire trucks even in residential streets, so you end up with comically wide roads even for dead end suburban streets. https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/suburban-street-2779407.jpg
Other drivers assume max regen settings will bring max benefits and end up taking more out of the battery to accelerate only to get far less back (regen braking is ~70% efficient in any EV) when the car regen-brakes, when braking was not really required. Many times coasting is far more efficient than regenerating regardless of what pedals you're using.
Last but not least, all regenerative braking systems are combined with hydraulic braking at low speeds because the torque applied to decelerate is not enough in any of them. So at low speeds the car will actually combine it with friction braking and eventually not regen at all. Take the Zoe where there's no regen at all below 15km/h (9 mph). Emergency braking from high speed is the same. City driving will see a lot of those situations.
So whether you realize it or not, when you are coming to a standstill you use the hydraulic brakes. There may be options to break at low speed with no friction at all but they will not be called regenerative because they will inevitably use energy to do it.
If you have trouble reading or understanding english then I apologize and of course please continue to get the information this way if that is best for you. I mean this seriously and not as an insult. I had a TBI once and had a hard time parsing information like this for a couple years after.
This might be underselling it. I hardly use the brakes on our EV at all. In a journey yesterday of 180km, I only touched the brakes at the end, when pulling into a car park.
NOx emissions kick in as the main pollutant much earlier in such places.
The future will likely be upper middle class folks walking around in habitat bubbles with VR suits across a toxic desert of miasma.
Where does that stuff come from? Well, it’s created in the atmosphere via secondary reactions between agricultural NH3 emissions, SO2 and NOx emissions from shipping and industrial activities and power generation, and NMVOCs from industrial processes and consumption of solvents.[1]
Those reactions seem like an interesting area of study and those chemicals involved are far less-often discussed as sources of air pollution even though they seem to combine to form the biggest source
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223101...
Propublica plotted a "cancer map" of elevated cancer risks, and you can see how it drops off as you go away from certain points.
but this is likely a very small factor for nearly all people. cars (oil) and electricity generation (coal and gas) create most of the harmful particulate matter in the air (and water and ground), so that's where we should focus our anti-pollution efforts first and foremost.
...or perhaps, it doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things, and you're worried about it because you bought a measurement device and started measuring something you hadn't measured before.
This isn't a minor point. It's a recurring theme in biological and medical science where researchers start to measure things for the first time, discover a previously unknown level, declare it significant or "alarming", and ignore that there's no causative link to any known harm.
When you measure things, you find things, but most things you find are uninteresting.
For what it's worth, the same particulate counter will also spike off the charts when anyone takes a shower, but as far as we can tell those salt pm's aren't dangerous.
PM2.5 particles are not all the same, nor are periodic exposure levels in a household kitchen in any way comparable to those used in a laboratory animal study.
> For what it's worth, the same particulate counter will also spike off the charts when anyone takes a shower, but as far as we can tell those salt pm's aren't dangerous.
Yes, exactly. You are perfectly illustrating my point. You have just as much evidence for this claim as for the kitchen one (i.e. none), but you assume one is fine and the other is not.
It's probably not a bad idea to open a window or run a vent (depends on where you live, I guess), but I wouldn't panic or deploy a particle meter, or stop cooking if I couldn't do it, either.
Cooking fumes are the primary pollutant in my life, and honestly is one that I struggle with since I have severe asthma but love to cook. I do what I can, but this is something I wish was taken more seriously in society because there's a huge economic hill to climb to solve it yourself vs having to deal with what's available on market.
I suspect such a setup doesn't have to cost much. In return I enjoyed many years of cooking, summer and winter, without mostly without the odors & humidity.
I missed it as soon as I moved here ... although the vent is up-through-the-roof vertical, it's very ineffective ... and I can no longer cook most things I once took for granted.
It blew my mind seeing this as an Australian, where externally venting fans are standard.
Dense cities themselves are the real problem. I have started carrying portable air sensors around (they are surprisingly cheap and measure a wide variety of things from particles to VOCs and CO2) and simply not being in or near a large city dramatically improves air quality. But hey, lump everything in and bash cars while you are at it - double bonus :p
EVs will help some but honestly these days, a lot of particulate pollution cars put out comes from sources like the tires and brake dust. EVs are heavier vehicles overall and would produce more of both for a given class of vehicle. The best thing to do would be to improve service quality of bus transit in order to move more people with fewer vehicles; giving busses signal preemtion and their own lanes would go a long way to make them more convenient than cars for more people. Bike lane networks would also help people feel more confident riding a bike in cities to more places. Not enough people take the lane while biking, certainly.
> "However, the biological basis for how air pollution causes cancer has remained unclear. Unlike smoking or sun exposure, which directly cause DNA mutations linked to lung and skin cancer, air pollution does not cause cancer by triggering such genetic changes."
This work provides a mechanism for how this happens, where air pollution promotes the transition of cells into a malignant state, without directly damaging DNA.
There are MULTITUDES of particles in circulation everywhere everyday. If the impact of only some these are especially dire, we should be able to triage each particle simply by: 1) looking at who suffers most from 'lung cancer of unknown etiology' and what environmental particles they were exposed to, and to a lesser extent, 2) looking at who is exposed to each type of particle and whether they suffer from it.
It'd be nice if we had some clear hypotheses in mind before charging off in all directions.
I know the data would be messy, and if released to the wild it could lead to sensational news stories that affect the sock market, but surely there is some value in collecting up all this data? How long did it take for glyphosate to be linked to cancer? How much sooner could it have been caught?
We do, to a degree. If you have air purifiers at home that does help. I can’t recommend them enough.
Does it? Or does merely having them make you feel more comfortable. Anyway it also means that I would have to live in a tightly sealed building, but I rather like having the window open.
Also put another way:
Oh yay.. more anti-car/mobility propaganda.