Decades of air pollution undermine the immune system
cuimc.columbia.edu
cuimc.columbia.edu
It’s why I find it perplexing why so many people in the US want to do away with EPA regulations. Not only was pollution rampant in many Americans lifetimes, it’s completely observable how bad pollution is elsewhere in the world for people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an...
Great Barrier Reef is another prime example, pollution is causing a lot of issues, but you only hear of coral bleaching because of climate change.
The reduced supply of land drives up prices within the urban area surrounded by the greenbelt.
This in turn just encourages more sprawl on the outer edges of the greenbelt, where land can be cheaper.
Those living in these new developments often commute into the urban area for work or other reasons, and now have to drive much farther each day as they pass through the greenbelt two (or more) times.
Infrastructure development in and through the greenbelt becomes bureaucratically challenging, preventing public transit or more efficient road infrastructure from being built.
Environmental regulations can too often have unanticipated (or ignored) environmental impacts that negate many of the supposed benefits.
Cities already have a ton of land where they can+should be allowing more housing but aren't (ex: the vast majority of residential land in Vancouver bans townhouses+apartments+condos). With the exception of maybe some parts of Richmond, I don't think there's much a case that the ALR is the problem here.
"What about lithium mines" ignoring the various oil disasters and the effects of drilling
"What if the vaccine had a 2% chance of killing me" ignoring the probability of dying from covid (made up numbers here)
I'm not claiming which side is right but these are often framed as the choice between the cost of the change and no cost.
> "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax_an...
This joke asserts that climate change mitigation measures would be justified even if climate change was a hoax. And that joke only works if you assume that those measures are free, or at least very cheap.
There are limited resources. If we spend on X, it means we don't spend on Y.
If it turns out Y is the bigger problem? Well, we missed a massive opportunity to make the world even better.
Can you tell me why my grocery store stopped giving out free plastic bags by charging for them, and now phasing them out for paper, but they still sell plastic garbage bags and I can't reuse the grocery store bag for my garbage bag now?
Can you tell me why bunker fuel for cargo ships which is a major driver for pollution isn't being stopped? Seems like there are a limited number of large ships creating a massive amount of emissions that would be go after.
Can you explain why the phrase "Climate Change" is a better mission that "reduce pollution", which seems easier to understand and get behind for everyone?
Climate change (because people were too stupid to use the phrase "global warming" without making fun of the "warming" part whenever it was remotely cold) encapsulates the need for people to care about pollution with the understanding that it may be future generations will reap the benefits in a way that "reduce pollution" does not.
> Seriously, factories have been working for centuries and nothing has gone wrong, so why should we regulate where they can pour their waste or make them pay for environmental nonsense like carbon capture?
Pardon? Factories have caused all sorts of problems with discharge, intentional or unintentional. Here's some from the top of my head:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster (mismanagement at a pesticide factory causes an explosion, poisoning many people and permanently contaminating the surrounding landscape).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease (a factory discharged mercury into the sea for years, where it interacted with anaerobic bacteria in the sediment to become incredibly deadly organic mercury and poisoned an entire town)
Keep in mind, these are from the top of my head and I am a nonexpert; we have environmental regulations because people have been hurt or killed by pollution numerous times.
Here's a quote that I hope will emphasize just how powerful pollution can be on an industrial scale:
> Pollution was so heavy at the mouth of the wastewater canal, a figure of 2 kg of mercury per ton of sediment was measured: a level that would be economically viable to mine. Indeed, Chisso did later set up a subsidiary to reclaim and sell the mercury recovered from the sludge.
They literally dumped enough mercury into the river to turn it into a mercury mine. If that doesn't convince you that factories haven't simply been operating with "nothing going wrong", then I don't know what to say.
https://history.com/news/epa-earth-day-cleveland-cuyahoga-ri...
I think climate change works better anyway, as global warming caused other changes, not just a rise in average temperatures
If the general public needs to be convinced of a project to save the planet climate change is not good messaging!
But a direct scientific link to ... well, almost all of those fears is totally acceptable because we love our cars?
The world... is insane.
Perhaps you could suggest a place where the pollution taxation approach has worked and the enforcement has teeth, which you would be happy to see implemented here even though it might come with short-term costs.
Taxing pollution, particularly consumer-facing taxes, has a long history of political failure, whereas subsidising clean technology has a long history of political and technical success.
The consumer should pay, because that will reduce demand.
It’s funny to see a government encourage a carbon tax to reduce fossil fuel use (high gas prices drive consumers to look for alternatives), then turn around this year and either cut gas tax or send out checks to consumers to offset higher gas prices.
Not sure any politician has the Will to follow through with it.
Then they'll be the ones overwhelmingly paying the pollution taxes.
And it doesn't mean the rich will be paying a fair share, just that they will be paying more than the poor.
You ever tried to put the drippy nasty stuff in a paper trash bag?
The cargo ship owning class of wealthy people don’t not care about laws.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-shipping-environment-imo-...
And I wanted to reply to that to say that we did used to be able to see exhaust fumes, and things were added so that we can't see them.
I have often thought that "the school run" would be different if everyone could see the cars pumping out exhaust outside the school, but history suggests that what would be different is people wouldn't want to see it, rather than being inconvenienced by getting rid of it. And that's a pattern which comes over from elderly care problems, homelessness and mental health problems, poverty problems, where the actions taken are often closer to sweeping under the rug than trying to solve the root causes.
> "Millions die prematurely from air pollution every year."
Especially including the radiation in the emissions from coal burning power plants, which kills more people every year than any nuclear power plant accident.
I once did the maths, Chernobyl was on the order of 100 times Chinas current yearly nuclear emissions caused by coal burning.
Particulate matter and nitrogen oxides are the real issue (and sulphur dioxide where it’s not filtered out yet).
For the rest, yeah.
Also La Hague emits about 1/20th of a chernobyl per year.
CO2/NOx/SOx/particulates from coal are still worse.
Linking Climate to life-threatening scenarios like Hurricanes (that hit you in-your-face) and food crisis, are more apt to rattle us into panicky action.
Slow, inconspicuous, decades-in-the-making ill-health (but not sudden death) inducing chemicals in our water, air and food will never make it through our current processes of media and political decision-making.
I also know a lawyer at the EPA and she tells stories about how, for example, she/EPA is suing 80-90 year old people that owned car washes in LA in the 60's and 70's and had contaminated the soil. I figured that is what Superfund funds were for but I guess those funds are just to clean up corporations that have disappeared, not individuals that owned a small business 50 years ago and can be tracked.
[1]http://publiclandscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/End...
The EPA and other orgs are responsible for the cleanup of thousands of polluted areas and superfund sites created by negligent businesses who wantonly polluted and then abandoned their responsibilities leaving it up to their kids and their kids' kids to clean it up.
It's like blaming the dentist for scratching your gums while repairing a cavity. A big dose of, "Well sure, but if you had listened to them in the first place.. "
Terrible analogy. The EPA knew there was heavy contamination in that mine, and yet decided to drill into the side of the mountain regardless knowing full well the implications of the heavy water getting released. There were other ways they could have gone about measuring and keeping tabs on the toxic build up. Yet they chose the most expedient riskiest solution that backfired spectacularly.
In your analogy, this is akin to the dentist taking a 1/4 inch drill bit to the side of your tooth to measure the cavity damage and spilling about a pint of blood on the floor in the process.
I don't think it's unexpected that an agency in charge of cleanups like this is going to have some blunders. Should they have handled it better? Fine. But that's not much of a statement.
I think you'd have to make a claim about the EPA's net impact/value to say something interesting here.
But interesting, the mine wasn't polluted in the sense of the company dumped chemicals. The mining process simply exposed rock that when it reacts with water, turns acidic. It's a natural process that is simply amplified by the mining process.
Do you agree?
I wish we treated people and government like baseball hit stats. Hitting above 600 is a win…
The EPA is in charge of these horrible mines because the previous owners abandoned them to destroy the environment after the profitable stuff was pulled out of the ground.
That mine is an environmental disaster. Some entity needs to be tasked with containing it or mitigating it--doing nothing is NOT an option. That failure could have occurred whether the mine was under the auspices of the EPA, the Department of the Interior, or the Army Corps of Engineers.
Even minor construction and infrastructure projects can end up needing costly environmental assessments or studies prepared by "qualified experts", for example, even when the environmental impact is obviously negligible.
Activists and others opposed to development projects will sometimes raise specious environmental "concerns" to try to derail those developments by getting them tied up with red tape.
Even something as simple as trimming or cutting down a tree on private property can become a huge hassle in some municipalities, requiring permits and other bureaucratic headaches.
Of course reasonable people will push back against such regulation. The economic costs that are imposed often far outweigh the environmental benefits, if any benefits even actually exist.
I don't think anyone in the US is pro-pollution. There are people who are against whatever the people they don't like are for, so if one side is for regulations controlling pollution, then by gosh they're against it.
At one point in the early to mid-1900s most of the working class was united politically in one party against the ownership class. Sometime around the Civil Rights Era, the two party system in the US executed a maneuver which split the working class vote against itself by pitting working class prejudices against working class self-interest. One party is the party of the ownership class, and this party throws red meat to the working class prejudices, while the other party espouses policies that benefit the working class economically while supporting socially progressive policies that the broad sections of the working class hold in disdain.
As a result we have big chunks of the working class enthusiastically voting against things that obviously serve them, like the right to clean air.
How many software engineers are doing mental gymnastics justifying their work in adtech so they can afford to live in the SF Bay Area?
Working class white people were in the Democratic Party… mostly. This was because of the New Deal which was very pro white labor, and also pushed women, children, blacks, and immigrants out of the labor market.
The parties were slowly realigning after the new deal until the civil rights act finally cemented the realignment.
Reading the annual party platforms from about 1910 to roughly 1964 is fascinating.
The city where I live was ranked the most polluted city in the USA a few decades ago, but people forget what it was like, and newer residents never knew what it was like, so they get very upset about Their Freedoms being encroached upon by EPA regulations and such.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/world/asia/india-china-ai...
What I see is a very different knowledge on air pollution. For example there is a pretty high awareness on the dangers of PM2.5 in China and some South East Asian Countries (e.g. Singapore) but relatively low awareness in the Middle East and some Eastern European countries.
When the rain returned, all my symptoms disappeared.
As for the EPA regulations, they go about it the wrong way, using what in engineering we call "bang bang valves". Bang bang valves are full on or full off, nothing in between. EPA regulations are the same - 100ppm is dangerous and illegal, 99ppm is legal and safe.
This is just idiotic.
The regulations also target the rate of pollution, i.e. ppm, not the amount of pollution. A person can emit 99ppm all day and be golden to the EPA, while another can emit 100ppm for 5 minutes and be illegal.
The correct approach is to simply tax the total amount of pollution. For cars, this can be done with an annual emissions test. The rate of pollution in the test is multiplied by the number of miles driven in the last year, multiplied by the tax rate.
By and large, they don’t. Trump’s efforts, for example, were focused on repealing incremental efforts during the Obama administration that hadn’t been in effect for long, and risked disproportionate impact on coal, oil, cars, and farms.
Very few people think we should get rid of rules that require factories to use emissions control technology. But rules that shut down coal plants in favor of renewables implicates a different set of political concerns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA
Likewise, virtually nobody wants to go back to the days of factories dumping untreated waste into waterways. But many farmers are upset when they suddenly need an EPA permit because the EPA declared some pond on their property a protected water body: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/more-widespread-support-epa...
We wasted a decade in the 00s, we've mostly wasted a decade in the 10s, and we're starting off by wasting a decade in the 20s. You can keep ignoring late notices on your bills, but sooner or later, they do come due...
"While most things that clearly improve health are well known, one is insanely underrated: Fixing your air. I suspect this is often the most effective health intervention, period. Nothing else is so important while also being so easy to address."
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
However I don't think people know where the pollution comes from. I personally think smog was ONLY tackled because people could SEE it. Nowadays I think there might be more harmful pollution from car tires and jets flying overhead than tailpipes.
also regulatory capture is a thing, and has a high ROI for big polluters.
why do you say that?
> LN tissues were obtained from [...] LiveOnNY, the local organ procurement organization for the New York metropolitan area.
which makes it sound like the samples came from residents of NYC. NYC air quality probably isn't great, but those lymph nodes looked so bad that I assumed they must have come from a hyperpolluted megacity like Beijing or New Delhi!
Cars truly are the worst addiction our society has stooped to.
If any of those things happen, there will be very strong taboos against anything that would begin to lead down the same roads again.
Zoning often puts more dense and therefore cheaper housing near busy roads. I think a lot about who can afford fresh air and who can't, and the compounding impacts of that quite often.
I don't know your friend but for some people they can afford air purifiers, running the A/C, and keeping the windows closed, but they feel it's not worth it. It's seen as a wasted expense. Especially true during Covid when many doctors could have retro-fitted their practices with HVAC filters. I think we really need an educational campaign.
It also gives you some protection outside, which is nice.
https://www.amazon.com/BROAD-Rechargeable-Electrical-Purifyi...
In one room, plausibly reduce it by 99% for a one-off $70 air purifier and $30/year of electricity costs and replacement filters: https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier/
I've started being far more aggressive with air filtration in the house and my office. Get an air quality monitor that shows you PM2.5 and PM10, you'll be horrified by how high those levels are often enough. I've been using "filter boxes" for the most part (a 3-4 furnace filter box around a box fan or similar) and they do a great job of pulling the PM out of the air.
I can fairly regularly keep PM in the sub-5 ug/m^3 range, even during smoke season - though it's a lot of airflow through the filters.
While my friend is used to it, I have an acute response. I try not to visit places with even moderately high AQI.
The images of the dark lymph nodes by age remind me of the shocking images of lungs of smokers printed -by law- on cigarette boxes in certain countries. What they do is to make the hidden danger of the small partciles visible.
I will use the images from this study in some of my presentations in future.
It seems that the lung tissues analyzed come from an organisation in New York. So most likely people living in this area. Comparing pollution data of New York City [1] which -globally seen has relatively good air quality- to a very polluted city like New Delhi [2] makes me wonder how much worse this health effect is actually for people living in higher polluted countries.
Increasing awareness on air pollution is one of the key reasons why we offer a popular open-source / open-hardware version of our professional air quality monitor so that people can easily build am affordable and accurate monitor [3] themselves. Similar to above images, it is another way to make the invisible particles in the air visible and helping quantifying the risks from fine particles in the air.
[1] https://aqicn.org/city/usa/newyork/ [2] https://aqicn.org/city/delhi/ [3] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/
Is there a way to test this when people are alive rather than waiting until an autopsy.
Is there any way to remove this? I assume this is a hypothesis, should this be conclusive can it be fixed? Yes cleaner air is the better way to go, but there’d be billions of people with a clogged up immune system, perhaps unaware that would benefit from getting this removed?
Are there animals that have mechanisms to overcome this issue? I doubt many live long enough for this to be an evolutionary driver, but some may have an inadvertent mechanism.
How big a role is smoking, or passive smoking in this?
I fear these questions are proffered to a waning post.
but when watching air quality in my region, i’ve been finding myself more and more frustrated by a complete lack of explanation of what causes the plummeting air quality sometimes.
during wildfires the reasons are obvious, but outside of wildfire season i have fairly regularly seen the air quality just plummet and we’re just completely left in the dark why its happening.
Of course that isn't a great test, but may have some merit.