EPA proposes to strengthen air quality standards | Hacker News Reader

EPA proposes to strengthen air quality standards

epa.gov

158 pointsahaucnx225 comments

Interesting that the EPA proposes going from 10 μg/m³ to 8 - 11 μg/m³ for the annual PM2.5 exposure and proposing to leave the 24h limit at 35 μg/m³ whereas the WHO air quality guideline that came out last year set much lower standards at 5 μg/m³ for annual exposure and 15 μg/m³ for 24h.

Both argue with science and health based research. I wonder if the EPA is going far enough?

> Both argue with science and health based research

What benchmark are they using? Assuming PM 2.5 being too high harms health, and PM 2.5 being 'too low' has no negative impact on health, then it really is one of those 'lower is always better' things.

There is no 'safe' amount - There is some amount below which the harm is unmeasurable with current techniques. This is the case with many pollutants, and the more such pollutants there are, the harder it becomes to measure the impact of low levels of any one, meaning everything can look 'safe', while in fact you are in fact being killed by a million cuts...

These kinds of measures aren’t objective. It’s like asking what is the safe amount of lead to consume. There is no safe amount. The science says you should have 0. The reality is you have to pick an arbitrary cutoff point that’s good enough.

Is this a sustainable mentality?

Yes, perfection is the enemy of the good. In fact the most sustainable mentality is for the epa to provide information only, and allow people to choose how risky they wish to behave.

How do you think this would work with airborne or waterborne pollution?

That isn't what I asked. I was asking if this policy/mentality is sustainable for our planet, not for my own personal life.

The only thing that isn't sustainable for our planet is that the Sun will eventually expand and consume it, permanently.

How do you figure the PM2.5 level is tied to the sustainability of the planet? Or even the ecosystem we enjoy?

The planet gives precisely zero fucks what happens on it, let alone whether it's "sustainable".

As already mentioned elsewhere too, the Sun will eventually grow fat with helium and nom the planet along with a couple more.

This completely sidesteps the issue. No one asked if the planet was alive. When an educated person says or hears "the planet", they should, unless context dictates otherwise, interpret it to mean the entire biosphere. This is a question of morality and fairness to all life. This anthropocentrist mentality is short-sighted and selfish.

And just because the sun expands in a few billion years doesn't mean I shouldn't be nice to my neighbor today.

Considering the Earth was much hotter and colder with vastly different concentrations of atmospheric gasses at given points in time than it is today, yes it is "sustainable". The planet and life at large do not give a damn.

The Earth will continue to orbit and spin and life will go on, until one day the Sun decides it's time to get fat and eat a couple planets.

Does the planet not give a damn, or do you just not give a damn?

The planet gives no damns, mainly because the planet can't and won't give any damns.

Didn’t see the response til now. It’s odd though: the lead comes from the planet, there’s a set amount of it. the most humans do is increase it’s entropy. So I’m not sure talking about lead levels in the planet makes sense: they’ve been about the same planet-wide. Meteorites I guess? Hardly a man-made mechanism though.

Sayings like "no safe amount" makes for great virtue signaling and worse than useless public policy.

While "no safe amount" may technically be true from a scientific perspective in a world where we can measure infinitesimal amounts of things a policy line needs to be drawn. At some point the average net effect of the poison is going to be so far below the noise threshold that caring further is a wash or of negative benefit.

> Sayings like "no safe amount" makes for great virtue signaling and worse than useless public policy

People that are rolling coal and clinging to their cars are also virtue signalling, just in the other direction

I’ve found non-ironic use of the phrase “virtue signaling” is a good indicator of bad faith. You wouldn’t presume someone else couldn’t possibly be acting on principle unless that’s your mode of operation.

You're certainly not disagreeing with the person you're replying to, so why the combativeness? You're literally saying the same thing (no amount is perfectly safe, we choose what level we're willing to take by analyzing costs and benefits).

Worth keeping in mind that the targets the WHO is setting are likely temporary, and they’re just goals we should aim for, because the air pollution is currently higher than the goal. There is a historical pattern of these goals being adjusted toward zero.

There isn’t a single threshold either, there are several graded tiers they recommend cities and countries aim for, depending on how bad their pollution currently is. Ultimately, you’re right, 0 is the ideal. That said, one small nit: the cutoffs aren’t arbitrary, the WHO’s lowest level (“AQG”) is set to the “lowest levels of exposure for which there is evidence of adverse health effects.” This value was adjusted downward last year because we’ve accumulated new and compelling evidence of adverse health effects since the last time they set AQG guidance in 2005. Chances are high they’ll adjust downward again the future as we gather more evidence.

Science does not say anything like that. You can certainly have a small amount of lead an lead and not experience any observable increased risk to your health.

The science says that any amount of lead is correlated with negative outcomes, particularly in children: https://www.ifm.org/news-insights/low-level-lead-exposure-im...

Sure. And yet extremely small amounts have no observable effects.

Did you read the article? Exposure levels measured as low as 3.5 mcg/dL in blood are associated with negative effects. Thats reaching the lowest levels that can be easily measured. We’re talking about a few micrograms here. Literally specs of dust. How much smaller can you get?

Smaller, obviously. The claim was that there is no level of lead that is safe. You can’t refute that by putting a minimum smallness.

The minimum level of lead we can measure is dangerous. Your claim is that there is some level that is safe, but there is absolutely no evidence for that. Each time we get better at measuring smaller and smaller lead levels in people, we find a correlation between lead levels and negative outcomes. There is literally zero evidence that supports a "safe" level of lead.

We also understand the mechanisms in which lead acts on the body. We know it's harmful in any amount. There is no safe level of lead.

My claim was that with small enough lead exposure there will be certainly no observable risk to your expected health outcomes.

Take your correlation, straight line it as a linear effect, and find the point where the effect size is less than we can observe. Ta dah.

> It’s like asking what is the safe amount of lead to consume. There is no safe amount.

The reason this is stated is because lead is cumulative, that is not really the same thing as breathing particulates. Presumably, particulates do not accumulate over a lifetime.

If they don’t accumulate, then why is more exposure worse than less exposure? There must be some type of compounding factor at play.

Above a certain amount you get inflammation, that's it. Small amounts are dealt with by the slime covering all your internals.

They are basically a lottery ticket for cancer. They don’t accumulate, just the more you are exposed to, the worse your risk. The ideal amount of times you want to risk cancer is zero, realistically that’s impossible, but less is always better.

It’s not like something like salt where some amount is fine or even good but too much could cause issues.

This sounds like bullshit to me, it's mass accumulation resulting in inflammation. Below a given threshold inflammation does not occur at all.

EPA estimates that if finalized, a strengthened primary annual PM2.5 standard at a level of 9 micrograms per cubic meter, the lower end of the proposed range, would prevent:

up to 4,200 premature deaths per year;

270,000 lost workdays per year;

result in as much as $43 billion in net health benefits in 2032.

Well why don’t they just lower it to zero?? As usual, no consideration given to the costs/downsides.

> As usual, no consideration given to the costs/downsides.

> Well why don’t they just lower it to zero??

Because this is the point they concluded would maximize the benefits relative to the costs and downsides.

Primary standards are meant to determine healthy levels, including for vulnerable people like children and the elderly. They are not intended to determine what levels are economically efficient. That's handled during implementation, not when setting the primary standards.

So the EPA does consider it, they just do it in a later step. "Garbage in, garbage out," so you want to make sure your medical science is accurate when it goes into the economic analysis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376218

The cost function is exponential. Ie getting the last 1 microgram out costs as much as getting down to the 10 micrograms before that

> Well why don’t they just lower it to zero?? As usual, no consideration given to the costs/downsides.

For the same reason we haven't dropped fossil fuel use overnight: It's not practical. You can't just wave a magic regulatory wand to elimination all air pollution without expecting (severe) economic impacts.

OP is here trying to point out that we're only told of the benefits of this proposal, not the costs.

Which gives a one sided view of the issue.

This is not because there are no costs, but because the EPA doesn't want to talk about that, and the reporter can't and/or won't do the work to figure it out.

> Well why don’t they just lower it to zero?? As usual, no consideration given to the costs/downsides.

I don't understand this: isn't the fact that they didn't lower it to zero strong evidence that they performed a cost-benefit analysis? Where's the evidence that they gave it "no consideration"?

The point is that the costs aren't detailed.

Not only is there a cost detailed, it's incredibly detailed, but instead of talking about how it was (obviously) detailed if you bothered to click two links, I'm wondering what cost 4,200 premature deaths would you consider not worth the change?

$4 trillion dollars. Even $100 billion.

For 4000 lives saved, and at a valuation of roughly $7 to $9 Million/life (US) to be consistent with US gov’t engineering practices and regulations, perhaps $30 to $40 billion to be consistent with other US policy initiatives.

Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States

If you even spend, say, $100 Billion on this environmental concern (implicitly valuing $25M/life), you will underinvest in other governmental activities (e.g. DOT) that valued life at $9M/life, so reprogramming funds from air pollution to DOT would be estimated to save more lives. At first SWAG (linearity/hand-waving) implicitly accepting an additional 6000 lives lost due to such a misinvestment.

Fantastic, it's below both of those values.

467 pages. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-01/naaqs-pm_...

The clean air act prohibits the EPA from considering the cost. Whitman v. American Trucking Associations

> As usual, no consideration given to the costs/downsides.

Just to be clear here not only are costs considered, but they are considered to an absurd degree considering the upsides. The parent just didn't bother to click two links.

With how much time everyone spends inside, you'd think they start addressing that for a larger impact.

People should be taxed for driving ICE in my view, the area where I live, people just drive around all the time for any reasons, I think mostly from boredom: down to the store, to buy a tool, just constantly driving around, because it's "cheap".

All the money from these taxes should go to planting forests, renewables projects etc.

They are: excise tax, sales tax, gas tax.

Only one of those is valid: a sales tax affects electric and ICE vehicles equally. The gas tax _is_ the excise tax (unless you have another example?).

But yes, the gas tax is exactly what the prior commenter is looking for. It's just far, far too low. US Federal gas tax, last raised in 1993, is 18.4¢/gal. Compare this with Europe, where the average is ~$2.47/gal [1].

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/gas-taxes-in-europe-2022/#:~:text=....

if you add up the subsidies (even if you don't include building and maintaining the damn roads) it's still much more subsidized than it is taxed

Electric vehicles use the road too.

yeah...

These don't even cover the cost of roads, much less all the negative externalities.

> I think mostly from boredom: down to the store, to buy a tool

How exactly is buying a tool or grocery shopping (what I assume is meant by "the store") driving out of boredom?

But to your point, a tax on driving ICE vehicles may indeed incentivize different behavior in areas where there are other transit options. Proposing such a tax is a very urban-centric view, however. Anyone in an even somewhat rural area would immediately realize how impractical it is. For example, if I personally wanted to use public transit I would first need to walk 5 miles each way along a 50mph road without sidewalks to get to the nearest bus stop.

Of course increased public transit options are a piece of the puzzle here, but there are huge areas of the US that have a population density far too low for any type of public transit system to make sense. These areas also tend to the be the areas where buying an electric car is far out of reach economically as well. Like it or not, ICE cars aren't going anywhere for a while.

Proposing such a tax is a very urban-centric view, however

Except I live in a rural area and that’s where I see all the wasted trips, in cities people just get an elevator downstairs and buy food.

I’m talking about just encouraging basics like, planning your shopping for the week, instead of going to the store everyday to buy milk, eggs etc.

Planning your jobs better so it’s two trips to the hardware store and not ten.

The cost of being sloppy is too low imo and it just means people drive around a lot more than required.

Personally, every time I think about staying my car I think if there is another way to accomplish my mission without the vehicle, or I bundle my trips / get something shipped.

It's not a personal choice thing most of the time, it's just the way our infrastructure was designed. I couldn't walk to the grocery store even if I wanted to.

And even if I could: I'm not lugging around several bags of groceries and other sundries that entire distance back to my residence.

The way shopping for groceries works here in the US is that we buy enough goods to last us a week or two. That simply isn't happening with just two hands and feet, or even a bicycle.

I see plenty of people using dolly carts at my supermarket.

I'm not saying it's practical for everyone, especially large families. But there are more options than people may consider at first, simply because everything in the US is so car centric by default.

The process is a feedback loop though. People drive because everything is so spread out. The corner stores die because people don't walk past anymore. Rinse and repeat.

Electric cargo bikes are the last bastion of hope here. https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA

You can load a bicycle with cheap pannier bags easily with a lot of stuff. There’s also trailers and on the luxury level cargo bikes if you have more stuff to transport. Buying enough goods for a week or two is not an issue with bicycles.

If you go to the store once every 2 weeks, you're not the kind of person I wrote the comment for, I'm talking about the majority of people I see who seem to always have a reason to be driving to the store, pickup ice cream, pickup milk, pickup blah blah.

Where we live, we'd really have to drive to the store, that's it; However, we go once a week maximum to avoid more trips.

A blind tax on ICE would be regressive as hell.

You'll be punishing people who can't afford an electric or hybrid which would in turn reduce their employment opportunities, either by taxing the fuel at a higher rate or by making their vehicle more expensive upfront (so they either don't want to put miles on it or they're forced to get a cheaper vehicle which is more prone to issues) -- and let's be honest, public transport outside the major city centers is a joke in America and probably always will be because of how spread out we are.

Rural residents (frequently low income) often don't have a stable enough grid to charge electric vehicles reliably either.

Don't get me wrong, I think we need to make the shift but there are still a lot of unresolved practical issues. I expect there's a lot more room for technological improvements in the next 5-10 years which will drive the cost so low that people won't even want an ICE unless it's really necessary for something. Honestly, there's bigger fish to fry with carbon emissions anyway.

Can you elaborate? I didn't realize there were places in the US without reliable electricity (other than during storms or whatever). How common is that, outside of people who are willingly "off the grid"?

There are quite a few places in densely forested areas. But it's not just a matter of uptime (which is an issue), but of capacity. If you live 50-100 miles out of town in a small community, the community can't afford to upgrade those lines. The county won't pay for it, and neither will the state or feds. That kind of range also means you need to charge fairly often.

Unless you are talking about fast DC chargers, an EV's current draw is comparable to a households appliance, such as an electric range, dryer or furnace.

I'd be surprised to hear of a community with trunk lines that actually can't handle 1-2 EVs per house.

Yes, but these things are the big electric consumers so adding a new class of high load appliances on a mass scale is a big deal.

Is the hardware limited by peak usage or just overall daily consumption? If people mostly charge at night I can't imagine it'll impact peak consumption that much

For us (SF bay area) PG&E didn't manage 2 nines last year or the year before, and it is already mathematically impossible for them to get 2 nines this year.

Edit: Having said that, we are in the middle of an extended outage, so I just charge the EV in town. There are fast DC chargers in grocery store lots and near restaurants, so this isn't inconvenient at all. Our ICE pickup wouldn't fit well on the (often one bidirectional lane) roads this week, due to slides, debris, and rerouted heavy equipment / repair trucks.

The EV has 135 mile range (more like 100 in current conditions). EVs are fine in rural areas (probably up to abput 100 miles from town, assuming a car with a 300 mile EPA range). Also, we'll be buying a generator, ASAP, for other reasons. We could use that to charge the car on cloudy days after a Puerto Rico style grid collapse.

Is it one 3 consecutive day outage? Or a bunch of 2-3 hour outages here and there? I think the latter is not a big deal, especially if it's localized and you can just drive into town to use a charger (like you said).

1) The meme that gas tax is regressive is an Exxon propaganda plant.

2) It is extremely simple to make a progressive gas tax. You set the tax at a high enough level to establish a consumer incentive. Say, $2 per liter. Every month, everyone gets a check for their share of the revenue, divided among the whole population. At current rates of consumption this would be $160/month/person. For anyone who burned the average amount of motor fuel, it's a wash. But for people who used less fuel than average it's profit, and motor fuel consumption is proportional to income so it is naturally progressive. If you make the refund taxable income then it is even more progressive, because the median person doesn't even pay income taxes.

With the above plan suddenly everyone wants to use less gas than the average guy.

It’s a neat idea, but is this really true?

> motor fuel consumption is proportional to income so it is naturally progressive

Counterpoints:

- Older, cheaper cars are less fuel efficient and use more gas.

- Rent is cheaper further from job centers, meaning long commutes.

- Places where rent is cheaper tend to have less investment in walkability and public transit, meaning cars are used more often.

I don’t know why you are posting these suppositions when the government measures this directly. The spread between the lowest and highest income quintiles in terms of motor fuel consumption is 300%.

“ The highest income quintile (making at least $95,000 per year) spent slightly more than $4,000 on gasoline in 2013, while the lowest income quintile (making under $18,000 per year) spent about $1,200 on gasoline. Higher-income households also have more vehicles: 2.8 per household for the highest quintile compared with 0.9 per household for the lowest quintile.”

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20772

In Vancouver, Canada they already have that. Taxes amount to something like 38% of your bill.

> People should be taxed for driving ICE

They are. Heavily. In California, right now with gas at $3.59 (Costco), gas taxes are adding around 50% to the price of gas. ($1.15 of fixed fees, plus sales tax)

> All the money from these taxes should go to planting forests, renewables projects etc.

Those types of taxes get passed, but eventually end up in general funds or borrowed against to fund general funds. But people still keep proposing these like next time it won't happen.

> They are. Heavily. In California, right now with gas at $3.59 (Costco), gas taxes are adding around 50% to the price of gas. ($1.15 of fixed fees, plus sales tax)

Now look at how that still doesn’t come anywhere near paying just for the roads, much less the other subsidies like parking or the cost of all of the extra healthcare needed.

Unfortunately, I've got some really bad news for you... There's nothing unique to ICE cars that makes particulate bad. The worst part of cars for particulate is their weight, and EVs are heavier than ICEs. So in some ways, they are actually worse because of the way they wear down tires.

You want to get rid of particulate, gotta go fewer cars altogether.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...

Or change the formulation of the wear elements of tires. Tire manufacturers complain that tires aren’t viewed as items that most drivers are willing to invest in, much past the minimum. They’d be delighted to make premium tires that reduce the airborne particulates, although that would probably worsen the perceived comfort and actual safety of the vehicle. But maybe an 80-20 would get most of the environmental benefit with minimum impact to the driver and their safety. It’s a mature technology, but also a new challenge.

Or road sweepers that wash the road and collect the tire dust, not just the trash.

I mean, the problem is that the nature of tires is to have maximum traction so you can take advantage of rolling friction. Which means that you'd have to find some magic material that could really take a beating. Also, road sweepers don't solve the problem. When you drive by someone, you are creating these particulates for them to breath.

Machines with moving parts don't last forever. This is more true under more load. Also, if you wanted to change the number of pollutants, you'd really need everyone to get these new magic tires, so it would have to be a cheaper product, and specifically not a premium product.

It's also worth noting, that the person at risk for all of this is not the driver. The person at risk for all of this is anyone else. You're not kicking up particulates for yourself, you're kicking up particulates for everyone around you.

I'm in a rural area that also turns into snow and ice one third of the year. I am not opposed to riding a horse into town, in fact I would prefer it. If adding penalties for ICE vehicles then I would expect first there to be more places I can tie up my horse and I suspect the local town will have to implement dumping stations for all the horse poop. I guess there is also horse-gas emissions to consider. I can feed them things to reduce gas.

Another option would be an EV albeit sub-optimal. I've been looking at getting an EV side-by-side. [1] There are several street legal options. Many here use side-by-sides to go into town.

The EV cars have a long ways to go before I will consider one. Highly dystopian telemetry, standard features sold as subscriptions, battery tech is still ancient in my opinion, too many features and too many attempts to make the cars self driving and the tech just isn't ready. The EV side-by-sides are still a bit pricey and it would be entirely useless for going up into the mountains as the range / battery tech is still ancient. Producing this EV also emits a lot of emissions. To be carbon neutral might take a lifetime, especially when having to replace the batteries. It gets really cold here so I would need batteries that can handle it and Lithiom Ion requires heat pads so I will be using more solar/grid power. I do not get much solar power here. I am starting to see EV's as shiny luxury golf carts but that is just my take.

I could just walk. It's only a few miles into town but then I would have to make many trips and pulling a cart of groceries through ice and snow is much harder than one might imagine. Even pushing a shopping cart 50 feet when I have a few bags of oats and the store was too cheap to clear the ice from their parking lot is quite comical and quite a workout. Walking along the highway is super dangerous in the winter. There are no buses or trains anywhere near me and I doubt that there ever would be. People here are expected to have snow capable vehicles.

I've thought of e-bikes with super-fat snow tires. It turns out those don't work so great. I have a neighbor that tried it and they just went back to using their truck.

[1] - https://www.polaris.com/en-us/off-road/ranger/2022/ranger-ev...

So you expect that the world the cost of your lifestyle choices at no cost to you?

Why shouldn't you pay for the cost of your choice to live in a rural area?

So you expect that the world the cost of your lifestyle choices at no cost to you?

Absolutely, yes. I chose the path of freedom as in governments, geopolitics, philosophy and ethics keep to themselves for the most part. I could not in my wildest dreams make a dent positive or negative on the global air quality even if I bought the biggest diesel engine, deleted all the emissions systems and drove up and down the highway twelve hours a day. That said I do not do that. I rarely leave the house.

Why shouldn't you pay for the cost of your choice to live in a rural area?

The cost of living in a rural area is having to be more self sufficient which I am making a significant effort to be so I am doing my part. I see no reason that big city cultures should impose their lifestyle choices and fallout from their mistakes upon me. Air quality in big cities is horrible and I moved away from that. I suggest everyone that can get out of big cities do so. Big cities are unhealthy in many ways, air quality being only one of them.

Big cities were important at the start of the industrial age. I believe we are leaving that age and moving into something else though I am not sure what to call it. In the case of tech it won't be long before people can live in just about any part of their country including in very rural areas. I envision a hybrid of industrial and rural agrarian lifestyles where people can be more self sufficient and also contribute to the whole economy. This pretty much as to happen as boomers are retiring, gen-x is tiny and that doesn't leave many people to contribute to the economy. People will have to get back to growing families and that is very challenging in cities whereas kids can be free labor in rural areas.

Meanwhile,

> EPA moves away from Permian Basin air pollution crackdown

> The oil industry pushed hard against the proposal to issue an ozone nonattainment designation, which would have required that companies reduce oilfield emissions.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/13/texas-permian-basin-...

LOL. I forgot all about that ozone hole and the mass frog-death (from fungal disease) that they tried blaming on the o-hole. I think before that their was the acid-rain and the "advancing sahara desert". At one point DDT was going to give the entire planet instant cancer... Will be interesting to see what other alarmist nonsense they can come up with next.

FYI, the ozone emissions we're talking about are separate from the Ozone Layer, which is where the "holes" are. Ozone in the upper atmosphere is good, because it blocks UV light. Ozone in the lower atmosphere (i.e. the air we all breathe) is bad, because it's harmful to humans and animals, especially to respiration. Ozone has a ton of precursor chemicals (collectively called Volatile Organic Compounds) which are roughly any organic carbon compound more complicated than ethane (so most things with 3+ carbon atoms), which the oil & gas industry in particular struggles to avoid emitting.

>Alarmist nonsense

The point of an alarm is to warn you of danger so you can fix things or get to safety. Scientists raised alarms about a hole in the ozone layer because there was (and still is) one. Because of that alarm, the world rallied around a treaty that phased out ozone-depleting chemicals. The problem is getting better because of that treaty.

Hooray for alarms.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

You don’t think acid rain is real? It will actually dissolve gravestones and buildings. Major cities in the US have dealt with it since like the 20s. it’s (one reason) why your car has a catalytic converter.

Does anyone have a recommendation on a quality air quality monitor for home use?

I use a CO2 meter. Dunno how quality it is, but it appears to work fine. co2meter.com

CO2 meters are good for detecting stuffy air. They won't help against things like NOX, ozone, or carbon monoxide from trucks passing by outside, which will also be impacting your health.

But it isn't worth measuring something if you don't have much control over it anyway.

You're right, CO2 meters are only good for detecting stuffy air.

> But it isn't worth measuring something if you don't have much control over it anyway.

Turns out you can do a lot about CO2. Open a window when it gets too high. With some fiddling around I determined how much to crack the window to keep the levels decent.

Particulate levels can vary a lot. It's why I try to live not next to an arterial. Even a short distance away makes a big difference.

IKEA sells a good cheap PM2.5 sensor which is fairly hackable (with a soldering iron).

Yes but keep in mind that the colored LED is still showing green when the air is very polluted. I wrote about it.

https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/blog/ikea-vindr...

We love our ambient weather station. I got the indoor PM 2.5/10/CO2 meter and the outdoor PM 2.5. The software reports (and graphs/archives) instantaneous and 24 hour averages that match the article, and also AQI.

Having a standard of "X" is clean and "X plus Epsilon" is unacceptable is just bad science and inefficient economics.

A much more sensible method is to assign a cost for a particle, and then tax the emitters of those particles that cost.

These kinds of ideal free market solutions sound good in theory but basically never get used in reality.

While all particles emitted are equally bad, they aren’t all as easy to cut out so we always end up with more specific laws which force the most capable of improving to move first.

Them never being implemented says nothing about whether they will work or not.

However, we do know that the ideal way to distribute scarce resources is by supply&demand. There's no reason whatsoever why this would not work to allocate pollution to where it is necessary.

In math we call the EPA rules "step functions", in engineering we call them "bang bang valves." They're simply very bad approximations to reality.

> Them never being implemented says nothing about whether they will work or not.

Real communism was also never implemented, lets try again?

> ideal way to distribute scarce resources is by supply&demand

Again, this is strictly false - Ideal process is perfectly informed central planning.

Competition is a wastefull process, thats literally what it means- someone looses and goes under.

Policing the market against fraud, insider trading, self dealing, etc. is a wastefull process too.

The fact that those ideals are unachievable should indicate to you that your entire line of argument is faulty.

> Competition is a wastefull process, thats literally what it means- someone looses and goes under.

Competition, since we’re talking about ideals, is the opposite of wastefulness — it allocates resources where they are most vitality needed. The wasteful uses get priced out of the market and everyone, as a whole, benefits.

If you make the (non-idealized) argument that all existing processes are useful because of the fact that they exist and competition causing them to fail is wasteful then…I don’t have an answer for that because that’s just absurd.

Of course, we don’t live in some ideal world so wasteful processes get protected and subsidized, useful processes get penalized and everyone thinks the all knowing AI central planner won’t just nuke all the irrational human “market actors” as an optimization step in the ideal resource allocation strategy.

Real economists study how competition creates waste.

An common example of waste induced by competition is advertising expenditures.

Competition doesn't allocate resources, price discovery does that.

The whole advantage of markets over central planning is they work in non-ideal situations, where planning is not practical. You got the whole thing backwards.

How would you learn about new products that will improve your life without advertising?

There isn't price discovery without advertising.

The advantage of markets is central planning has proven to be incapable of dealing with the complexities of markets. Making things worse in central planning is the problem of putting an inept person in charge. In a market system, the inept business goes out of business.

> Competition doesn't allocate resources, price discovery does that.

And price discovery is the result of people competing for scarce resources.

*scarce in the sense that it isn’t free for everyone like air, there’s no price discovery before you turn on the air compressor in your garage to fill up your car tire.

This only makes sense if all people have equal money to spend. In reality we end up with the rich efficiently riding jet skis and the poor wastefully eating and driving to work.

In this idealized argument it, like the real world, isn’t a zero sum game.

If someone produces enough widgets where they can afford a jet ski then what’s the problem with that?

Jet skis aren’t a product of nature, there’s probably a thousand people involved in the process of turning raw materials into a jet ski. Maybe more. People who are less poor because someone wanted to purchase a jet ski.

And, because I know it’ll come up, charity also exists in this idealized argument so people aren’t dying of hunger while Scrooge McDuck does backflips into his pool of gold coins while saying “let them eat cake”.

Agree on the economic approach and with a preference for cap and trade. Create a certain amount of emission billets and auction them off. Then restrict the amount each bullet allows over time. It has economics, planning and reductions all in one.

Even cap&trade is unnecessary complexity. Just tax it. Keep increasing the tax until the pollution levels drop. Use the tax revenue to offset the taxes on productive behavior.

I would like to see an auto-adjusting tax...

Eg. "The tax per gram of PM2.5 is $1. Each year, if average PM2.5 levels across America are above 5 ug/m^3, the tax will increase 10%. Otherwise, it will decrease 10%."

Then lawmakers once need to put in place the tax and set the target, and they never need to intervene again.

That's a far more practical solution that the usual EPA regulations.

If someone is flooding the area around them with high PM2.5 thus that everyone nearby has respiratory problems, but the overall rate of PM2.5 across all of the US is very low (because generally, it actually is) then your proposed scheme would ensure that areas (generally cities) are going to be completely unlivable, but there'd be no reason to change because overall the tax would remain low.

In fact they'd have no reason to improve anything provided that their projection for the cost of improvement looked marginally more expensive then just paying projected future cost of the tax.

Cap & Trade (as I understand it) would be the government playing referrer, and polluters/cleaners building a market place to exchange credits.

Taxing would involve playing referrer, collecting taxes for this specific issue, and then allocating that tax to either public or private parties to work on productive behavior.

Taxing sounds more problematic given how dysfunctional most governments are, especially when it comes to non-regulatory procedures. More failure points in the market generation.

A variable tax to disincentivize pollution combined with cap and trade would make the most sense to me.

It seems to me the complexity argument works in favor of cap-and-trade. While the global climate and global economy are both staggeringly complex systems, we can predict the former significantly more accurately than the latter. Thus it would be simpler to set the allowable emissions by policy and let the market work out the economic side.

We don't need to predict it. We tax the pollution at its source, then measure the results. Adjust the tax up and down to achieve the desired result. (This is done in engineering all the time, it's called a feedback circuit.)

Not needing to figure out the relationship between input and output is the beauty of feedback systems, and why they are so prevalent in engineering.

For example, one of my jobs at Boeing was working on the hydraulic actuators that moved the elevators up and down. The goal was to move the elevators in proportion to the control column movements. Nobody ever bothered to figure out how far the actuator would move for a particular input. How it worked was a mechanical linkage provided feedback so when the elevator was too far, the linkage would open the valve to move it back. If it wasn't far enough, the linkage would open the valve the other way, which would move it forward.

It behaves beautifully. It also makes the 3 redundant actuators work together, despite variations in tolerances.

People aren’t variables in some equation, if the central planners get things wrong people can literally die.

> People aren’t variables in some equation,

They are for many purposes.

> if the central planners get things wrong people can literally die.

That's a problem with any system.

If the true cost of bad air quality is a lower lifespan, what dollar amount makes it okay to contribute to the problem?

Although it may seem somehow unsavory, there is a long history of placing value on the probabilistic saving of human life (e.g. in highway engineering). We have limited resources in the world to save lives and doing the math is better than the alternative.

The value of a human life in engineering calculations is about $8M. Seems barbaric, but if you don't do it you have no way to stop adding safety measures to anything and thus cannot do anything.

For the US, that’s roughly correct. For one State in India, $640K.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#India

Although, given the expected lives saved from using modern agricultural equipment and practices instead of slash-and-burn for planting crops in the districts surrounding Delhi, I’m guessing the India number is a gross overestimate.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/11/25...

not necessarily, if the products/services produced that cause the pollution also positively impact lifespan, you have to take that into account to decide if it is a net benefit or not.

All endeavors have a risk of death to them, including getting out of bed in the morning. How many dollars are you willing to pay to get an extra hour of life?

It's time to end the trope of "no amount of money is worth risking safety for".

There is a direct tradeoff between money and human life. For example, you could go and dig a nuclear bunker in your backyard to keep you safe against nuclear attack. Oh? You don't want to spend all your life savings on that? Well you have just traded your safety for money.

Money and safety are directly exchangeable, and we should recognise the exchange rate so we can exchange one for the other when it is a good deal to do so.

Your example takes a tradeoff you personally have complete control over: whether or not you, by your own decision making, build that bunker.

Instead your employer is going to tell you that if you don't go stand under that load being crane lifted, then you're not a "team player" and will be fired.

We have social solutions for that too... When the risk and reward go to different places, someone offers to pay the other... "I'll pay you $200 extra to go do this risky thing for my benefit".

again, you have a choice to take that deal

The people that are being poisoned have no choice.

Apples and oranges. The EPA primary standard (which is they propose to change) is based only on health and not economics.

From the Regulatory Impact Analysis[1]:

(yes it's long, but the quote preempts a lot of the predictable replies here)

>The Clean Air Act (CAA) requires the EPA, for each criteria pollutant, to set standards that protect public health with “an adequate margin of safety” and public welfare from “any known or anticipated adverse effects.” As interpreted by the Agency and the courts, the CAA requires the EPA to base the decisions for primary standards on health considerations only; economic factors cannot be considered. The prohibition against considering cost in the setting of the primary air quality standards does not mean that costs, benefits, or other economic consequences are unimportant. The Agency believes that consideration of costs and benefits is an essential decision-making tool for the efficient implementation of these standards. The impacts of costs, benefits, and efficiency are considered by the States when they make decisions regarding what timelines, strategies, and policies are appropriate for their circumstances.

TL;DR: Primary standards are meant to determine healthy levels, including for vulnerable people like children and the elderly. They are not intended to determine what levels are economically efficient. That's handled during implementation, not when setting the primary standards.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-01/naaqs-pm_...

Do wonder whether they are using a threshold model instead of simple linear model for dose-response for particulates nowadays. Makes a huge difference when determining health effects at low doses, and back in the day it wasn’t clear which model was the clear winner. Assume a threshold model and most of your health effects disappear.

Probably buried in this light-hearted report (2000 pages).

https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/isa/recordisplay.cfm?deid=347534

Location matters a lot for PM 2.5. The health impact of a bonfire in the woods is very different than one in a city center.

What happens when these regulations are violated en masse? The state of Colorado for example is wildly outside of current standards. Why are federal agents not shutting down gas wells all over the state?

I would be much more interested in seeing good articles about the following than seeing a revised number per se:

EPA will work closely with state, local, and Tribal air agencies to implement the revised primary annual PM2.5 standard when finalized. Today’s proposal is the latest in a broader suite of programs under President Biden’s leadership to reduce air pollution that threatens communities. These programs include the proposed Good Neighbor Plan to address smog that affects downwind states, rules to address air pollution from oil and gas operations, including methane pollution, and other critical rules to reduce emissions from power plants and the transportation sector, such as the recently finalized Clean Trucks Rule that will slash smog- and soot-forming pollution from heavy-duty trucks. Additionally, funding from the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at cutting pollution from school buses and trucks, port operations, and electricity generation are also expected to reduce soot and other harmful air pollutants.

Revising the numbers: cool. But far too often, such things don't come with a firm plan for how to achieve it as a real goal.

The smaller the PM gets the worse it is healthwise. Unfortunately manufacturers meet more stringent PM standards by crushing the particles smaller.

If they were serious about cleaning the air and fighting climate change they'd have started next gen nuclear programs twenty five years ago.

You can't meet the the standards by crushing particles, it's a mass limit inclusive of all particles of the regulated size and smaller.

Yeah I'm really not sure where you're getting this from. You can't really "crush" particles to smaller than 2.5 microns, and to do so, you'd have to somehow extract it from the emissions stream. If you can extract it from the emissions stream, why would you crush it? Just ... don't re-emit it.

Manufacturers meet stringent PM standards mostly by filtering or by adding moisture, and sometimes by modifying the combustion that happens. Reducing your particle size wouldn't even help: The limit is on PM <2.5 microns. If anything, you'd be much better off somehow agglomerating your particles to be larger, which is one of the reasons adding moisture helps.

Wouldn't it be more politic, for bipartisan support, not to lead with a subtitle that sounds like partisan PR puff?

> New Standards Demonstrate President Biden’s Leadership to Reduce Air Pollution that Threatens Communities

To me (who is strongly supportive of environmental protection), this language sounded like it risks creating additional partisan opposition to this effort and other EPA efforts, which seems counterproductive. Or is 100% opposition already a given?

Or is there additional complexity that requires promoting/rewarding a politician/party, even if that hurts other subgoals?

Isn't the EPA under the leadership of the current administration? So by extension, would the EPA policies be the execution of the administrations play calling?

If the EPA were non-governmental, then sure, I might agree.

There are the interests of the public, represented by government institutions and individual public servants.

Those interests are separate from PR for politicians/parties, and sometimes incompatible, like perhaps in this case.

It's kind of under the White House but not quite.

Structurally, the EPA is an agency of the Executive Branch (aka the White House, POTUS, etc.). Organizationally the EPA answers only to Congress (aka the Legislative Branch) and the Supreme Court (aka the Judiciary Branch).[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...

So, like all of the branches of govt are in control. Huh?

EPA answers to Congress because they make the laws stating who and what EPA is.

EPA answers to SCOTUS because the courts decide how laws are understood and executed.

EPA gives the finger to the White House because they are an independent agency despite being part of the Executive Branch.

No you’re 100% wrong unfortunately. Congress is the part of government that creates laws. Over time congress has delegated more and more of its power to government agencies. This is of course anti-democratic.

These agencies are the real power structures in the country. No matter who is elected by the people, agencies get to enact policies that are in effect laws being created by people that are not elected.

However, these institutions maintain the power of the ruling class by virtue of being indirectly responding to “the science” elite universities arbitrarily choose to fund by virtue of wealthy donors and is normalized in prestigious journals so good natured folk like yourself not only accept it but justify it. This is how “current things” take hold.

You can’t really blame democrats or republicans for this as they both use it to enter an h power outside of democratic methods. Democrats have better utilized them to be sure but they’re 2 sides of the same coin minus some outliers here and there.

That's not how the current administrative state operates. The white house can nominate the head of the EPA (and a layer of bureaucrats beneath them) and the Senate must approve the nominations. These are political appointees.

The white house cannot say "fire person X" who works for the EPA but was not nominated, because there is (supposed to be) a wall between the political appointees, who must be confirmed by the Senate, and the professional appointees, who are supposed to be protected by a web of laws and whistleblower protections.

So while many people think that the President is the "head" of the administration and can just order it to do whatever he wants, that's not how it's supposed to work. The set of things the EPA is supposed to be doing is set by legislation and the manner in which it does things is also subject to oversight. That doesn't actually stop the politicization of these agencies -- e.g. the CDC studying racism as a public health crisis or gun crime as a disease, or having the IRS investigate conservative groups, etc. The boundary of this tug of war in which the President tries to order an agency to do X and his opponents sue him saying "you can't do this" is exactly the issue of lawfare and the constitutionality of various executive orders. Many such attempts at directing Federal agencies fail or are ruled unconstitutional, but the overall effects of appointing ideologues to leadership positions is felt in things like the newspeak so common now in public announcements.

This is first thing that jumped at me. I recently got emails regarding my student loans that had very similar language.

Instead of just delivering a message with information, it was borderline propaganda

Imagine if a fundamentalist Christian ran this agency and put out a press release justifying their goals (which may be good!) by referencing how Christ died for our sins and that a few bible passages clearly show why we are making the moral decision. It would be crazy. Not that a fundamentalist Christian would ever even be close to this level of power.

Social Justice is modern Gnosticism and the language used here is how it’s expressed. Even if the admin doesn’t believe in it they will use this language of the elite if they ever want to advance their career much like an atheist in Saudi Arabia would give praise to Allah even though he doesn’t believe.

It’s what you do to express that you’re not only right but that your are righteous.

There isn’t much that people can do unless car drivers realize how polluting their cars are. Any rule will be seen as some obstacle to freedom and lobbied into irrelevance—unless people wake up and look at their exhaust pipe differently.

I don’t know how to do it. It’s such a violent dissonance that bridging it will be hard: people know that if they are in a room with their car while it runs, they will die within minutes. This is a trope used without explanation in popular movies and TV series. Having someone stand near the same exhaust affects their health because they breathe a comparable dose. If you tell the same driver, they will curse you loudly. They will openly prefer their convenience over something they know intuitively is deadly.

That dissonance kills more people than anything else—besides eating fatty food and not exercising when you have a heart problem. It kills more young people than anything else. It kills more people than other car-related dissonances (1. most drivers think they are far better than others and drive dangerously, or 2. parents think having a tall hood that hides the children standing in front of your car is somehow protective of your children).

I’m not sure why psychologists don’t investigate those three problems more. The yearly deaths alone are staggering.

Unless car lobbyists suddenly lose their complete control of the media and car advertisers stop lying about how cars are used, no progress will happen in that domain. VW is trading after lying about killing millions of people with their diesel cheating device… The company is actually doing fine. What other group, what army could kill so many people and be welcome in polite society!?

I suggested to a local group fighting pollution in a small, time-limited area (a school pick-up) that drivers buy plastic bags to capture their exhaust gases. In that plan, organisers would also offer to treat the bag's contents for a fee.

That was to give people a sense of the scale of the pollution, not even the toxicity. How massive is the cloud of exhaust? It’s straightforward to compute the amount: RPM * engine volume.

That was a conversation with people who were openly complaining that kids were sick because parents didn’t cut their engine while waiting. I couldn’t imagine a softer, more on-board target. They refused.

No problem in human psychology is so deadly, and yet so frustrating to address…

> people know that if they are in a room with their car while it runs, they will die within minutes.

We'll also all die within minutes if we rebreathe only our own exhalations.

More to the point, without energy production, the billions of people on the planet will die. It's all tradeoffs, not absolutes.

That’s nowhere true at reasonable scale. People spend days (months even, in the last few years) in the same room without dying. You can’t do that with a car, even if the room is ventilated normally. You will die in 3 to 5 mins.

Sure, if you stand in an airtight coffin… but no one here is arguing for that. I really think that you presenting a straw man instead of my actual and then pretending you are a moderate by claiming its “all tradeoff” is the perfect illustration of how car lobbyist make sure their master can kill millions of people every year and think they look like the good guys.

It’s a scandal bigger than the holocaust by two orders of magnitude and you are there defending it like it’s a good thing…

It seems about the same amount of reasonableness/strawmanness as capturing the exhaust in a plastic bag and breathing that.

I think you’re missing the point here. The way I took the comment, specifically about tradeoffs, is that for many people the alternative to driving is dying.

If a household can’t acquire food at a minimum, death will result. For many people, a car is a prerequisite to food.

This is why IMO, only legislative action that includes new solutions to replace the need for cars will make a dent here, and trying to convince individuals will continue to be problematic.

Cars being a life line isn't strictly an American thing either. Any rural area will very likely have insufficient public transport, necessitating cars just to accomplish daily needs.

Japan, for example, faces a problem of elderly drivers in the countryside who can't (or won't) retire from driving simply because they need to drive to get to their farm, go shop groceries, and visit the hospital.

Standing in an enclosed space with a running combustion engine is, in fact, "arguing for standing in an airtight coffin" and equivalent to breathing "only our own exhalations".

If you have any doubts, the crew of Apollo 13 will be happy to give you a seminar about the dangers of carbon dioxide and by extension carbon monoxide produced by combustion engines.

The context is about strengthening emissions standards, not banishing all fossil fuel use, so I’m not sure where you’re getting any “absolutes” from.

It's about X is clean, X plus Epsilon is dirty.

No problem in human psychology is so deadly, and yet so frustrating to address

I'm sure everyone could probably live much longer and "healthier" if the government controlled every aspect of their life, but that's exactly the authoritarian dystopia that much of the population fortunately rejects. It's only a problem to those who want society to become that sort of sterile un-life.

We realise there are risks to everything, and that's just a natural part of life. You could even say that's what makes life worth living.

Not poisoning millions of people to death isn’t an authoritarian dystopia.

They might as well ban smoking then, but we know that's not going to happen (and I hope it doesn't, despite the fact that I don't smoke myself.)

>I'm sure everyone could probably live much longer and "healthier" if the government controlled every aspect of their life, but that's exactly the authoritarian dystopia that much of the population fortunately rejects. It's only a problem to those who want society to become that sort of sterile un-life.

Well, there's clearly a spectrum between 'the government controls everything' and 'it's legal to release chlorine gas into the vents of buildings'.

The bigger question should be whether or not it's a good idea for government to intervene in this issue with some specific policy rather than litigating whether or not government should be able to exercise any power at all. Is the concept of air quality regulation inherently dystopic?

More like - is the government even capable of the outcomes it wants?

COVID hit. Millions of americans, primarily obese, with multiple comorbidities, died.

The government closed gyms and kept mcdonalds open.

If the government instead forced everyone to go to the gym once a week instead of wearing masks, we'd solve the health crises of our lifetimes and had fewer deaths.

No, theres plenty that can be done without tilting at windmills. Air quality standards can be improved over time without hang wringing about massive impossible changes and one day things are just better.

Please do it.

That's what the whole post is about - they're doing it. They're changing standards and making things better. Honestly, I think that of all sources of pollution, cars are the ones that are seeing the clearest and most visible work. We can see it in the market - electric cars are increasingly taking market share. We can see it in government - California just banned gas cars completely as of 2035.

Yes, ICE cars are big polluters, but all the evidence seems to pretty clearly show that we're in agreement on that as a society and are taking active steps to get rid of them.

It’s already being done. Electric vehicles and solar are taking over because they’re cheaper and will continue to be more so for quite a while.

Longwinded emotional appeals that misrepresent truth aren’t necessary, just some patience. You want to help, invest in solar development projects after installing a few on your own residence.

Whatever outcome is going to happen is more or less already certainly happening, there aren’t many levers or much that can be changed. Fossil fuels being mostly replaced is inevitable, climate effects good and bad from all the carbon added are likewise inevitable.

> Whatever outcome is going to happen is more or less already certainly happening, there aren’t many levers or much that can be changed. Fossil fuels being mostly replaced is inevitable, climate effects good and bad from all the carbon added are likewise inevitable.

This is basically climate illiterate.c

Ebikes have saved more carbon emissions that all EV vehicles combined. All you need is to. make cities suitable for cycling, and habd out free ebikes, and you would save about a degree of planet-wide heating. Thats the difference between having a global famine and avoiding one.

>All you need is to

You up for paying for all that (and I mean /all/ that) and putting in the manhours (and I mean /all/ the manhours)?

One of the chief reasons I roll my eyes at urban armchair environmentalists is because they have an understanding of the human world very far detached from reality.

> You up for paying for all that

Oh, so my tax dollars should only pay for what you want, roads for cars, but god forbid they pay for what I want?

Typical car driver entitlement, the country spends tens of billions a year to build new roads and intersections, but propose a cycle lane and they come out in droves screaming its a waste of money. How dare you demand that 1% of public space is dedicated to other modes of trasport.

And when I take my cycle to the same damn road car drivers treat me like some unwashed illegal immigrant invading your private elite club.

I'm being serious: Are you willing to pony up the cash and time for "all you need is to"?

You put it like this is as easy as flipping a switch, when in reality it's probably harder than moving the Earth itself.

I am already ponying up the cash.

Do you, for some reason, think that car centric cities come for free and putting in a bike lane costs more that a highway does?

What is hard, bike lanes? Ebikes?

>putting in a bike lane costs more that a highway does?

Yes.

A proper bike lane requires:

* Expanding the road, which might involve demolishing some/many town blocks.

* Adding proper separators and dividers between car and bike.

* Changing the layout of the town so biking to destinations is actually practical.

* Slowly changing the minds of the residents.

This isn't as simple as painting some white lines and calling it a day.

This is a complete fabrication, nobody demolishes building to create bikelanes.

we take a lane away from motorized traffic.

Thanks for demonstrating your sheer lack of credentials on the subject.

Just taking space away from cars, painting some more white lines, and calling it a day leads to:

* Increased car congestion.

* Drivers annoyed at the cyclists disrupting car traffic, if there are any, and the bike lanes making driving in general hazardous and inconvenient.

* Cyclists (if there are any) fearful of the hunks of metal several tons heavy barreling around right next to them.

* Underutilized bike lanes because cyclists have no practical destinations to go to; a layout for cars is not a layout for bicycles.

Ultimately noone's happy, tons of taxpayer dollars are spent for naught, time is wasted. No thank you.

An example - California is banning the sale of combustion powered small garden appliances - lawnmowers, line trimmers, and so on.

A lot of these are still powered by two-stroke engines, which are literally thousands of times more polluting than modern (ICE) cars, and even the four-stroke versions are much more polluting than larger vehicles with pollution control gear.

Batteries are now powerful enough to be a satisfactory substitute for gas engines in these applications.

Other jurisdictions should adopt the same rules.

Another easy one is banning wood stoves and heaters in populated areas.

This is kind of conflating different types of pollution. If you breathed just the exhaust, you probably wouldn't notice the PM2.5 particulate as you would be too busy suffocating from CO2 exposure.

That’s not making the argument any less terrifying. You see that, right?

I mean it does make the argument less terrifying because it makes you seem less believable. When you are sloppy in your reasoning, you become less convincing since people will start to doubt the veracity of your other conclusions, even the ones unaffected by the slopiness, since if you are willing to be misleading on one point, why would you stop there?

The scariness of your argument depends entirely on how accurate it is. If you start playing fast and loose with accuracy it might be scary the way a horror movie is, but you lose the actual scariness.

[Which to be clear, is not to say the reality of the situation is not scary. Car pollution (in all its forms) is scary. I'm just saying the only reason i find it scary is due to things from outside this thread. This argument by itself is not scary]

You mention a lot of the negatives of cars and express frustration that people won't budge on the issue but the reason you run into so much opposition is because cars are the most empowering invention for the average person ever.

For most people the trade offs are worth it 100 times over.

My wife cannot drive due to her disability. Whenever somebody tells me you don't need a car I just laugh. Since almost everyone can do it, you don't really think how much you depend on it. Outside of maybe NYC, really good transit isn't a reality. Sure her life would be great if we had all this transit, but that's the way it is.

The first step is admitting that this is a problem.

right, but we don't have good transit precisely because of our car-centric society. You and your wife would likely live easier lives in much of Europe

In the US, the car industry has and continues to actively undermine efforts to fix our public transportation system

Right, and because we live in an area that is about as good as you get for the united states (east coast, between NY and DC) for public transit, she is able to get around somewhat. Mostly it's just me ferrying her around though, like a concierge! Think about how much of a non starter that is for someone in Oklahoma? I know many hackernews readers are on either coast, well, statically most americans are, but for large parts of the country - driving is an absolute requirement. If we lived in Oklahoma, she probably would have found a doctor willing to overlook Epilepsy as a risk because, without a license she would have been destitute

This is what the walkable city's crowd doesn't understand.

Cars are pure freedom. Mass transit is state biopower/biopolitics.

the state built the roads you need to feel that "freedom". It's also the one maintaining them

Those roads and their economic merit predate the state's involvement. The might be lower quality in some places without the state subsidy but those roads would still exist.