Where does air pollution come from?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Regarding the reduction in SO₂ emissions from shipping fuel, I’d love to see more discussion on how international regulatory pressure (e.g., IMO 2020) managed to enforce compliance in an industry notorious for cost-cutting. Was it simply a case of the alternatives being feasible enough, or did global coordination and monitoring play a stronger role than usual?
Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vacinity of the docks where cruise and container ships and moor. They sit there running their engines for power, churning out SO2 and other pollutants. These areas are some of the poorest in London.
The same was the case in industrial cities during the industrial revolution. The poor factory workers lived close to the factories, and their kids grew up breathing the smoke. The wealthy owners moved to the outer suburbs (often upwind) where the air was clear.
There was a bit of an uproar a few years back about how many premiership football players were using asthma medication, a higher rate than the general population. The implication being that they were using them as performance enhacning drugs. But if you take into account that they disproportionately come from poor inner-city areas (not all, but many more), the proportion with asthma looks much more in line with the background rate.
Urban air pollution is insidious. Unlike the dreadful smogs of previous generations that lead to things like the Clean Air Act and the banning of open fires in urban areas, today's is invisible, and so doesn't create the same political problems. In fact if you try to do anything about inner city pollution you can pretty much guarentee an angry pushback.
Wait, what? There are no container docks in London. The nearest container port serving London is Tilbury, near the coast. Occasionally a single cruise ship moors in the Pool of London against the HMS Belfast, but that's happening only one this month, for 12 hours on April 7, according to the Tower Bridge lift schedule: https://www.towerbridge.org.uk/lift-times
If there are a lot less docking then that's great, but there do still seem to be a number that dock there https://blackheathandbeyond.wordpress.com/2024/03/27/fairly-...
I know there was a push to develop a big new cruise port in the Greenwich stretch which was strongly opposed by locals for that reason.
Still it's 3 to 4 cruise ships a month according to that article and, while probably hugely dirty, I would be surprised if the asthma rates of kids in affluent Greenwich and Blackheath are among "the highest in London" because of this.
Hopefully with all the work on both improving the fuel used, and providing grid hookups so they can turn their engines off, that will have made a big difference. Hopefully the effects of the congestion charges have made a big difference too. A lot of the kids featured in the documentary had a really crap life because of it all.
Please pardon my pedantry but this is by definition what poor is : having less means to escape material woes. Rich people are the ones that can elect to live in healthy areas.
The rich don't need to understand that roads or ships generate deadly air pollution. They don't like living next to a highway or a container terminal, full stop. They do however love living next to a park or a lake.
In fact, so do poor people. But they can't afford it.
A very significant and underestimated source of pollution is burning of wood. BBQ, fireplaces and stove, even expensive modern 'ecodesign' heating solutions that burn wood: these all cause massive and dangerous air pollution. And it is often, in my country at least, somewhat of a luxury thing. As soon as you get out of the poorest of area's, you smell the burning of wood which can cause more than 50 percent of total pollution locally, even rivaling the effects of smoking.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/15/wood-bur...
That part can also be explained because asthma drug is used as masking agent when taking steroids and other PEDS, which is quite common at this level.
No asthma medications whatsoever have utility as a chemical masking agent, nor are there any plausible mechanisms for that to happen.
Beta agonists (mostly clenbuterol) have been abused independently in the past as a way to cut weight in weightlifting/cycling/etc., since they theoretically provide a marginal boost to overall metabolism - but the effects are marginal. They're de facto useless as a general PED.
Widespread doping in high-level sports is absolutely commonplace, and it's very easy to not get caught - but asthma medications have absolutely nothing to do with that.
See WADA masking agent list here: https://www.wada-ama.org/en/prohibited-list
Well-informed paper about real evasion strategies available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03037...
Check that out :
https://inrng.com/2017/12/chris-froomes-salbutamol-case/
https://sportsscientists.com/2017/12/brief-thoughts-froomes-...
The article you gave, they only state the principle of PEDS evasion tactics, some used a fake dick when it's time to urinate, some used compound modified, but it can't possibly tell every single way that scientists found to avoid detection.
Froom is an actual athlete that got caught, that speak louder.
Beside i heard it too in completely unrelated sport circle, running (sprint) and boxing from athlètes competing.
Someone else pointed out that there's very little shipping in central London now. It's all cars and buses causing this pollution.
> In fact if you try to do anything about inner city pollution you can pretty much guarantee an angry pushback.
See how bonkers people got over the ULEZ: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66268073
There is a dock in the Greenwich area, and another one further down the Thames estuary.
Or gas boilers, in the case of NOx pollution:
> Gas boilers now produce ~72% of NOx emissions in central London.
https://bsky.app/profile/janrosenow.bsky.social/post/3lltacf...
You can get asthma just from breathing really hard too much. Especially in cold climate. Due to this it is really common with endurance athletes.
For example https://barcainnovationhub.fcbarcelona.com/blog/asthma-in-el...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/26/cruise-ship-ca...
It turns out that the previous 2015 regulations around the USA and Canada were also largely followed, even offshore - this is despite there being little monitoring capability away from ports (I worked on this study).
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
I am not an economist, but I suspect part of the compliance is a case of 'as long as everyone is forced to do it', we are okay with it as everyone can/has to raise prices.
My problem with pollution is that… you need to measure it, and those who pollute don’t do it consciously. Anecdotally I often drive through a small town. You can smell pollution, a plastic smell. In winter you can see column of smoke coming out of chimney. Sometimes it’s milky white, sometimes it thick black. There are many like that. I asked shop keeper is it happening often, she confirmed and said that no one is interested in doing otherwise, installing sensors was directly opposed by town council.
The town is not on a pollution map. Nearby cities are with medium-high pollution but that particular region is supposedly clean as reported by a single sensor positioned somewhere on a hill.
It’s not like there is one town like that in the world. There are nations that pollute heavily and don’t care and don’t meter the impact. I would be curious if all the effort, regulations etc. are worth it when applied to average Joe versus huge polluters.
One way to address this sort of localism (where there's a significant risk that the owners of the factory are slipping the town councillors the odd brown envelope) is a national regulator. The Irish EPA, which was created to take this sort of thing out of the hands of the local authorities, has been very effective in reducing nuisance pollution; the local authorities used to be mostly pretty useless. Any industrial facility of this sort would be required to self-monitor, and would be subject to inspection; it would have to respond to any complaints, and if the regulator wasn't satisfied it could demand improvements, on pain of withdrawing its operating license.
This is in no way necessary, and is almost never what's going on. All that is needed is the factory owner quietly telling the town councillors that if they are forced to clean up their emissions, they will not be able to compete with foreign competitors who don't have to do the same, and will be forced to close. Then the town council takes a quick look at just how much of the wages and tax revenues of the town come, directly or indirectly, from the factory, and make sure nothing threatens it.
Now that tariffs are the issue du jour, I'd like to propose that any environmental regulations or labor laws should always be combined with an automatic tariff on any competing products produced in countries that do no have such laws. To not have that means that you are not removing the problem, you are just moving it to somewhere without such laws.
Thing is, they're usually _lying_ when they say that. A while back I was looking at buying a house that was near a local authority recycling centre, so went on the EPA's website to see if there were any complaints about it, and went down a rabbit hole of reading regulatory action documentation (everybody needs a hobby). A very common pattern was, basically, company says "if we fix this, we'll have to close", regulator says "don't care, it's the law, fix it", company fixes it, and unaccountably fails to close like they promised, life goes on.
There are exceptions, of course, but a lot of "following the rules will make us unviable, so let us ignore the rules pls" rhetoric from companies is just rhetoric intended to marginally reduce costs. See RoHS; manufacturers acted like it would cause the collapse of modern civilisation, EU pressed ahead anyway, and 20 years later somehow modern civilisation is still there, albeit with somewhat less lead and mercury.
The cars are basically some combination of the NTA's and the local authorities' fault; a massive expansion of Dublin's bus and commuter rail capacity, and a new metro system, are all years behind schedule, largely due to planning permission nonsense (though also due to disastrously incorrect government planning about 15 years ago, which assumed that Ireland would go back to its traditional perma-recession after the financial crisis, with the result that starting these expansions was delayed by about a decade).
These numbers highlight how air pollution isn't just an urban problem — it's a public health crisis in low-income countries where children are the most vulnerable.
Source: Baselight analysis using data from Our World in Data, originally supplied by the World Health Organization (WHO). https://baselight.app/u/pjsousa/query/top-10-countries-with-...
Not trying to say we shouldn’t consider this, but it seems like there’s bigger fish to fry first (assuming we can’t fry them all at the same time).
They don't seem low at all to me. And a quick search suggests that malnutrition probably causes fewer deaths [1] (note that it's counted for all people here, not just under 5).
And in places like India and SEA, where malnutrition and violence are less of a problem, air pollution stands out even more.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malnutrition-death-rates
That is properly fucked up for children under 5. They start with absolutely clean lungs and the damage compounds so much they die from it. Think about all the other age groups that have some other horrific numbers.
Not per 100k, per 1000.
That means that for every child that dies from air pollution, ~600 more die from some other cause.
To be fair, most causes seem related to terrible living conditions, so everything probably improves or degrades together.
https://www.amazon.com/Dust-Story-Modern-Trillion-Particles/...
It's quite possible to survive with friction tyres with the help of good traction control (especially from an EV) but there are vast areas of the country that do not get roads plowed in a timely manner, so it's "safer" to go with studs.
It's not really about roads not being plowed timely. More often than in the cities, country side roads are plowed faster and more often. This is simply because the road density is less.
In Finland, for example, there are a lot of dirt roads. These cannot be plowed bare in the winter as that would destroy the road surface, you want to build up a level of snow/ice on top of the road that you then maintain over the winter. If you drive on these types of roads daily you will need studded tyres, or you'll end up stuck at home ever year for multiple days when the weather goes above freezing and during kelirikko.
Even in towns, there will be conditions where friction tyres are completely useless. Heck, sometimes you should probably not drive at all. About once a year the sides of the main road near my house are sprinkled with cars, despite most people driving 30km/h or less (on a 50 road). On a very slippery march morning last year I counted 15 cars on an 800m stretch.
[1] https://lasko.com/products/lasko-air-flex-2-in-1-20-inch-box...
How did the shipping industry accept / manage / afford to switch fuels (presumably, to more expensive ones) in order to follow the regulation ; as opposed to delay / deny / deflect, or plain old lobbying the hell against the changes ?
Are we in a "Montreal protocol" situation, where the alternative was existing and acceptable and in the same price range ?
Or did one actor implement coercion differently ? Was a standard change made, that enabled drop-in replacement ?
(If we were living under Discworld-like physics where narrativium existed, I would understand _why_ the change happened : it's making climate change worst, so of course there is all the power of narrative irony.
Are we in a world governed by narrative irony ? That would explain so many things...)
I don't know the main actors here, but I imagine the leverage of shipping companies on western countries is incredible ? ("oh, you think our boats are too polluting ? sure, let's see how you bring "about everything that's sold in about all your shops but that is manufactured half a world away" without our boats.")
When maritime shipping quintupled in price during the pandemic it wasn't because ship operators suddenly figured they could fleece people like that - it was the ports' logistics which were all out of whack.
Ports could be the other player, but how would you coordinate the ~all ports?
It is remarkable how fast the wheels of progress turn when old money faces the prospect of their assets being washed away.
I suspect readings are quite dependent on the specific location of the reading device. E.g. if the air quality monitor is located in a claustrophobic city street with lots of motorcycle traffic (e.g. Nha Trang), air pollution might be through the roof, but 100m away on the beach it might be clean(ish) air. Similar for 'leafy' cities (e.g. Singapore), where 100m can make a huge difference in air quality e.g. near a park vs beside a busy road.
Curious to know if the science backs up my suspicion that ostensibly 'polluted' cities sometimes have unpolluted alcoves (and 'clean' cities have spaces with bad air), so your micro environment really matters (more than the 'average' reading for that city, anyway).
Large particles are probably a lot more localized, but pm2.5 are going to diffuse fairly evenly over a large area.
I'd guess larger particles and certain chemicals are more odoriferous as well.
but in absolute terms, pollution is so high in that street that even 1% of said beach pollution (which is already 1% of street) is already out of bounds of limits considered safe. Blue "haze" is pollution, not fog (water vapor).
Look, people do not understand scale, one motorcycle/lawnmower can have emissions of 300 cars equipped with catalytic converter. So in your street, there is 100 motorcycles which produce as much pollution as 30 000 cars in new york. this is not hyperbole to make a point. These ratios are physical reality.
electric cars have no emissions (except dust from tires which is same as fossil car). so why even use fossil transport is beyond me. also you can charge motorcycle from solar panel on your roof.
buses, vans, boats can have solar panels on their own roof to expand range of said vehicle. in malay or indonesia there is sun shining almost same throughout year. in europe /usa we have huge difference between summer and winter insolation and sun angle.
Also, electric cars are heavier. This means not only higher tire pollution, but also they are inherently less fuel efficient.
electric bikes, on the other hand,
can you burn anything in air without emissions, NO.
for me it is easy logic.
fossil cars are literally literally killing people. and live people is what capitalist needs to buy his products. so fossil cars are anti capitalistic.
Top marks for never curbing your consumption while claiming the superior virtue position.
Extra credits for wagging a damning finger at those 'polluters' that actually make and ship your stuff.
When you look at consumption based accounting for e.g. CO2, the list is very different, namely for 2022:
!. Singapore 2. United Arab Emirates 3. Qatar 4. Saudi Arabia 5. Kuwait 6. Brunei 7. Malta 8. Belgium 9. United States 10. Oman
source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Local reasons:
Belgium has a highly industrialized economy, with significant sectors like chemicals, steel, cement, and refining which are energy-intensive and heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Antwerp’s port, with very high and very dirty maritime transport, hosts Europe’s largest petrochemical cluster.
Belgium's car culture, company cars as a tax benefit, and a well-developed fossil-fueled freight transport sector. One of the most dense road networks in the world leading to heavy road traffic and congestion.
Belgium also hosts the capital of Europe. The diplomat and CxO consultant class flies in and out of Zaventem almost daily.
Second,the big role of tires in air pollution. Tyres shed particles as they wear down during braking, acceleration, and cornering, contributing approximately 6.1 million metric tons of tire dust annually to the atmosphere and waterways
Most asthmatics can live a long, healthy life - certainly not die at the age of 9 https://apnews.com/article/asthma-europe-london-air-pollutio...
I, along with other asthmatics, did notice a marked improvement in symptoms during the Covid 19 lockdowns as there was less traffic on the roads - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8011425/
This is the problem with "Well, these people are frail, and you have to die of something" assertions. See also, Covid 19 and "most people who died weren't healthy, they had other conditions!".
I'm not asthmatic, but last summer I had an eye-opening moment about pollution. I live in a very dense city, and I regularly go for short runs in a local park. Last summer I spent a few weeks at my parents' house, who live in the suburbs of the same city, only farther away, in a small town surrounded by fields and forests.
When I went running in the forest, I couldn't believe how easier it felt to breathe and how all-round easier my session felt, event though I ran faster and longer. I don't usually run so fast that I'm out of breath, but that particular time I felt a marked difference in how easy breathing felt. It was as if I needed to breathe in "less air" to get the oxygen I needed.
I had already felt a similar thing after the first covid lockdowns coming back to the city. I had sensation of something "rough" in my throat and had short bouts of coughing. This was a few days after the lockdowns lifted, and people were still weary of public transit so everyone on their dog were sitting in gridlocked cars on the roads.
I think it's the same thing with ambient noise. After some point, we just don't notice it any longer, but it does take its toll in stress and all-round irritability.
What point are you trying to make? I mean, you don't seem to dispute that pollution can and does kill people.
Which is why QALYs are such a good metric.
QALYs really shine when measuring a one-off risk, such as an operation or cancer treatment that might add lifespan but decrease healthspan. If QALY data exists for pollution that’s great, but I think we can easily extrapolate the impact in healthspan from the toll in lifespan.
What leads you to believe that's the case? And again what's the point of ignoring health risks because some victims might possibly have lower life expectancies?
But from my understanding most deaths attributed to pollution, specially indoors, relate to fireplaces, cooking, oil lighting or other "I'm making smoke indoors" activities which will cause lung issues later on. Even having candles on all the time isn't good for you.
The rest as far as I understand is all estimated by putting a finger in the air and subdividing lung cancer deaths into what they feel like the causes were.
You don't see a lot of people arguing that starvation doesn't mean much because the deaths of starving people are more directly caused by disease or injury.
People can die because they don't have access to energy or agricultural products.
I wonder what would be the word population now had we not used fire, coal oil, haf we not grew rice and cereals, had we not raised cows and sheep.
Some would consider raising cows and sheep to be bad idea too, given how inefficient it is in terms of input resources for output calories -- not to mention it has very detrimental effects on ecosystems.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/climate/un-food-waste-one-bil...
Exposure to air pollutants increases our risk of developing a range of diseases. These diseases fall into three major categories: cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, and cancers.
It makes sense to think of these estimates as ‘avoidable deaths’ – they are the number of deaths that would be avoided if air pollution was reduced to levels that would not increase the risk of developing these lethal diseases.Health effects include:
- Respiratory diseases developing in otherwise healthy people
- Cardiovascular damage at an early age affecting long-term health
- Developmental impacts on children with lifelong consequences
- Cancer and other conditions with substantial life-shortening effects
I wish we'd bite the bullet and go all in on vegetarian and vegan foods but we need to invest a ton in them to make them more palatable and easily accessible, including to poor people.
Could be that one needs way fewer cows to produce diary equivalent to beef, that would invalidate above sentence. Anybody knows this?
I've lived for maybe 6 months in cca vegan diet when backpacking in India and Nepal (apart from infrequent paneer cheese, their meat in cheap dhabas was not great to be polite - either chicken bits chock full of bones or very chewy mutton), but I wouldn't consider it the best idea for everybody alive. Also those indian spices helped mentally to feel like eating great, but I know very few (specifically) men in Europe who would find it acceptable replacement (women seems more reasonable in this).
I can't speak for everyone, but there could also be plain old biological reasons for why spicy food isn't for everyone.
Just to give an example, spicy food is spicy throughout the entire digestive tract. It's much easier to control your reaction to spiciness at some points in your digestive tract than at others...
Even in Europe its at least 10x but probably more compared to my childhood where I lived (east & west). My parents used to play as kids on the roads next to their places, those few cars per hour were slow and easy to spot and hear. Now its a car every few seconds at least.
We also found plenty more way to pollute and more types of materials to burn. Also all is now permeated with micro and nano plastics.
Africa: 1.8M
South America: 149k
North America: 179k
Australia: 4k
Europe: 434k
Asia: 6.3M
I guess to keep it positive, I'd say "Great job, Australia"!
This might be a case of a shortfall in record keeping and open reporting.
6.3e6/4.8e9 = 0.00131
4e3/26e6 = 0.00015
About 9x as bad?
Not sure about 1x%, was that 1% worse? I am sorry I might have misunderstood that.
Though my maths seems to be wrong as well!
Would be interesting to see how much of that is due to proactive regulation