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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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).
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.
I thought that this article will address an elephant in the room but either it missed it or I missed it.
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.
> 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.
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.
> (where there's a significant risk that the owners of the factory are slipping the town councillors the odd brown envelope)
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.
Doesn't seem there is anything done in Dublin or other Irish cities though vs Europe? https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/userhome/map
I don't believe Dublin city air is all that clean given that the cars are primary mode of transportation.
That small town might get even more pollution from all the cars driving through it, though. It's counter-intuitive, but columns of smoke from chimneys might often just be water, or be too high to really affect locally (but globally it matters, of course) compared to cars driving and flinging dust where people breathe.
In 2019, ambient air pollution claimed the lives of young children at alarming rates in several countries. Here's the top 10 list of countries with the highest number of deaths per 100,000 children under 5 due to ambient air pollution:
Nigeria – 18.95
Chad – 18.10
Sierra Leone – 12.02
Mali – 10.56
Guinea – 9.90
Niger – 9.64
Cote d'Ivoire - 9.04
Central African Republic - 8.79
Cameroon - 8.69
Burkina Faso - 8.68
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.
>Not that this isn’t terrible, but those numbers look really low. Surely malnutrition and violence must be a hundred times more likely to kill them?
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.
Take Nigeria - capital is cca 6 million. That means, that every year around 1150 children die from just air pollution alone, every year.
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.
Interesting article. I always assumed that a large part of the "soot" air pollution in cities came from car tyres as well, since their compounds are one of the main sources for the dust that deposits in apartments.
Particles from tires and brakes account for a significant chunk of pollution. I'm in the middle of reading Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles which goes into those details.
Cars become worse the more you approach colder climates. Every fall and spring there are multiple weeks during which asphalt roads are dry from sunlight and warmth, which leads to studded tyres chewing through asphalt. Not only that, the sand we spread on roads to help people stay on their feet also helps in creating massive amounts of dust. It's so difficult to time the change from summer tyres to winter tyres.
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 wild how many pollutants trace back to the same root cause: burning stuff. Fossil fuels, biomass, agriculture byproducts - it’s all combustion and decomposition in different forms.
For those who are worried about indoor air pollution like me, I found out thanks to this [dynomight post](https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier/) that having an efficient air purifier is a low bar and is actually quite accessible to poor people like me !
Even cheaper is the DIY Corsi-Rosenthal box. We make a couple every few months and it does make a huge difference! Worked wonders during the wildfires a couple of years ago
I ended up purchasing a Lasko Air Flex[1]. It fits standard HVAC filters. It doubles as a white noise machine for me, it is quite loud. This review[2] indicates it works well but a bit power hungry, and it definitely gathered a visible amount of dust over a 1 year period.
Standard filters is interesting but it looks that the Ikea one has many advantages: it's smaller, discreet, less power-hungry, has textile pre-filter so that you filter will work longer, can accommodate activated charcoal filter and is not loud on 1
Air there any air filtration systems that use water (maybe by bubbling air through water or a fine mist) to remove particulates? Like a canister vacuum cleaner, I'd love to be able to see the dirt/dust/particulates/gunk that is being removed from the air.
It's a pretty common method in industry (a wet scrubber) but I don't know of any indoor-scale, self-contained units - it sounds like a recipe for mould because a misting one would basically be a humidifier too, and they are hard to maintain because bacteria like legionella can grow in the water and then you're dispersing it inside your house!
What still baffles me is the reduction in SO2 emissions due to regulations on shipping fuel.
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...)
To be honest: yes, at this point, and with an industry of this scale, it's a bit shocking to me.
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.")
Yes, e.g. compare that to agriculture where emissions are still increasing exponentially. The political power the farmers have is amazing, apart from the fact that they managed to get exempt from emissions penalties in many countries, they also continue to be able to push increased meat and dairy consumption which does not only increase pollution but has many other serious environmental and health impacts.
SO2 was the main driver behind the forest dieback. I'd estimate that the global investments in forrest property (mostly by old money) dwarfs the total cost for the switch to sulfur free fuel.
It is remarkable how fast the wheels of progress turn when old money faces the prospect of their assets being washed away.
Really wish they showed deaths per capita instead of raw deaths for all their data sources. It would be better for doing country by country comparisons
Readit News
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.
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
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters/
[1] https://lasko.com/products/lasko-air-flex-2-in-1-20-inch-box...
[2] https://youtu.be/daayXtlpg_o
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.")
Deleted Comment
It is remarkable how fast the wheels of progress turn when old money faces the prospect of their assets being washed away.
Deleted Comment