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Comment by alexmccain6 | Hacker News Reader

One of the most striking aspects of air pollution is how invisible yet pervasive its effects are. Unlike more immediate environmental disasters, air pollution slowly chips away at public health, reducing life expectancy and quality of life, often without dramatic headlines. The comparison to starvation as a "frailty multiplier" is an interesting one; pollution doesn’t always kill directly but makes people more susceptible to fatal conditions.

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?

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The other striking aspect for me is how, as has often been the case, those most affected are the poorest.

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.

> Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vicinity of the docks

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

> Someone else pointed out that there's very little shipping in central London now. It's all cars and buses causing this pollution.

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...

There are still cruise ships that dock, and they have been a big issue for local kids. They use a lot of power while docked. I believe the solution is to hook them up to the grid, but that requires that they and the dock both have the facilities.

There is a dock in the Greenwich area, and another one further down the Thames estuary.

Here in NYC shore power for cruise ships has been a multi-decade effort. The Manhattan terminal still has no shore power system because it requires an entirely new electrical substation. The Brooklyn one (in proximity to a poor neighborhood) had a system installed some years ago (with an eight figure price tag), but which ships were seemingly not bothering to use. They’ve since mandated that ships actually use it, if they have the capability, and I think they have some kind of incentives for the cruise lines to retrofit their ships for it.

> 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.

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.

Lest anyone take this seriously, these assertions are confidently-misinformed, conspiracy-minded thinking.

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...

Took me quite some time to find back where I read about that.

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.

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...

> Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vacinity of the docks where cruise and container ships and moor.

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

Cruise ships certainly used to moore up in the Greenwich stretch of the river at the and a few years ago there was quite a lot of coverage of the issue around it. Cruise ships require a lot of power while docked, and unless they connect to the grid they used to create a lot of air quality issues.

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.

Thanks, I didn't know that was a thing.

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.

It's a big issue there but it's very localised to that specific area (which is itself in the bottom 25% of areas in the UK). They are like having a whole load of idling lorries sat near your house all at the same time, normally for several days at a time. And all of that is on top of the general level of pollution from being in the centre of London. I'm going from a documentary and a couple of article from a few years ago, which I should try and find.

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.

> those most affected are the poorest

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.

In many cities a lot of rich people live in the city centre. London is an example. Take a look at house prices and rents in Westminster or the City, or even adjoining areas. The only poor people there are the ones in social housing who are a minority.

Yes, but if the air pollution we're talking about is invisible then why would the rich elect for less exposure? Some might look at air quality data, but I suspect what is really going on is they seek out quiet. Noise pollution is the thing people really hate and avoiding that will likely lead to getting better air quality too.

Generally the pollution comes together with other indesirable effects. Stench, noise, etc.

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.

Exactly. The rich don't actively avoid air pollution, not really.

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.

Do you have data on how much wood burning contributes to air pollution compared to, say, burning fossil fuels? On the surface, your comment sounds like more rhetoric trying to shift the blame from the companies to the consumer, an unfortunately common problem that is getting us nowhere in correcting environmental problems. That said, if there is data displaying this discrepancy, I'll happily change my mind.

Here’s one UK datapoint from a few years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/15/wood-bur...

I think part of the IMO2020 compliance is that fines have actually been applied for ships that have broken previous similar regulations.

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.

Also, the industry had a few years of lead time to prep, which probably helped avoid a full-blown logistical panic

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