I got a reality check recently about air pollution being worse than I thought, when I was cleaning the dust/dirt off my patio railing. I noticed the dust was particularly black, and the whole time I was cleaning it, a familiar smell was in the air. I finally realized: it's brake dust!!
While I live on a street with many cars driving by all day, I thought being a few storeys up would reduce the amount of pollution from vehicles... apparently not at all!
The larger the vehicle, the more problematic. We need small, rightly sized vehicles. Commuters to office jobs don't need maxed out hardcore trucks, and allowing super old/polluting heavy duty trucks to spew garbage onto our communities is sad. We should make it easy and cheaper to switch a very dirty vehicle for a clean vehicle. Carbon taxes are nice for the long term, but we also need very rapid improvements in the dirtiest polluters: trucks, older vehicles, those driving without cat converters (common in my area), and obviously coal plants.
There are programs to buy back citizens' dirty vehicles, in Vermont they tried to reduce the old truck fleet to lower CO2 emissions. The problem is the owners were just fine with their trucks, why should they need to retire their machine before its' time?
There is a process of convincing here, mere economics hasn't been enough. We need all citizens, not just one party or the other, to help fight air pollution. I recognize the poorest will have the hardest time, which means those in power should support climate justice for lower income or frontline communities.
Genuinely curious, what’s the difference between a truck, a van, and an SUV? Demonizing trucks, to me, feels like demonizing “assault” weapons. And trucks have arguably much more positive utility than assault weapons. How can you effectively regulate vehicles with a flat bed on the back? Some people need utility vehicles, period. I suspect it’s more than simply a case of “they were perfectly happy with their trucks”.
Basically the idea is we then take the tax income raised by a societally harmful activity (like driving) and redistribute it to individuals like the ones who are scraping by so that tax is revenue neutral.
Money flows through the food system from people who eat to landowners who personally live in places like Beverley Hills and Pebble Beach. Food production in America in 2020 has nothing to do with salt-of-the-earth farmer-models they put on packaged food labels.
Agree that US farming financially is kind of messed up. Most subsidies go to big farms. Small farmers constantly go out of business. The price of land keeps going up at the same time. There's little profit, it's received up in the chain going to consumer stores.
Americans can buy food from anywhere. There's an oversupply that is difficult to deal with because the farming industrial complex constantly improves yields. We already get food from Mexico, south america, Canada, fish from the ocean all over. We stupidly subsidize ethanol, we should get rid of that. We need to keep some food production going, both for national security but also because the rural areas are already decimated with job loss and lack of opportunities for people. Every town is full of closed shops and the nearby Walmart supplanted all local things, except maybe a bar.
My family has farms in the south and midwest, I want to support farming and those farmers. The US govt pays us not to plant part of our crop. And they also have price supports on crops which basically sets the price. Of course we all benefit from cheap food. Much of the profit is gone from farming. Most young people take outside jobs because you can't make a living unless you have very large mass scale (this is not exactly a new discovery).
My dad lives in a big city in Texas and inherited his mom's farm. Someone else farms it, he doesn't have anything to do with it. 30 years ago there were some salt of the earth farmers but they all sadly died, at least in my family.
Anyone in that boat will see much greater benefit from alternatives which don't cost a significant fraction of their annual income. Investing in transit and bike infrastructure saves many thousands of dollars a year and improves health outcomes for everyone.
There’s a lot of things wrong with the electoral college in the US, but when I read comments like this I can’t say I’m entirely mad it still exists.
That’s not to say that externalities of consumption shouldn’t be accounted for. But if you’re going to squeeze people out of cars, you should probably have a solid plan to deal with the outcome.
You might want to reconsider my comment and ask how much of your reaction is due to whatever baggage you’re bringing rather than what I wrote. Note, for example, that I didn’t say anything about forcing people out of their cars but was instead talking about how expensive cars are – we built most of the country around having them but that means the second most expensive property purchases in the average American’s life is a big purchase which requires regular expenditures and is idle more than 90% of their life. If you’re going to use terms like “squeeze”, think about the politics behind the assumption that this is the natural order of things.
It seemed like you were positing public transit and bike infrastructure as an alternative to cars...particularly as a money saving and healthy alternative to those 'who are barely scraping by after the pandemic who have no leeway in their budget for an auto tax increas'
My point was that the shear inefficiency of low-use single passenger vehicles is expensive but it’s baked into the system so we tend not to notice it. Cars are a significant expense, along with the cost of insurance, maintenance, fuel, parking, taxes to pay for roads & subsidized parking, etc. but it’s so normalized that even if they’re just scraping by most people think of it as an unavoidable necessity.
The problem is that we spent most of the 20th century designing the country around cars, and especially discouraging transit as something generally for poor/brown people. Even in cities which have things like subways, urban design almost always massively prioritized suburban commuters over transit users. People make horrible financial decisions because having a big, late model vehicle is such a social status signal.
The problem is changing that puts us in a prisoner’s dilemma: on an individual level in much of the country it’s best to keep piling your money into a depreciating mostly-idle asset because you need a critical mass of riders for transit to be cost effective. Using things like higher gas taxes to pay for things like road maintenance and pollution remediation can work well but people who are used to being subsidized will complain bitterly as soon as you ask them to pay the true cost for what they use.
>That’s not to say that externalities of consumption shouldn’t be accounted for.
My point is direct economic recovery of those externalities is going to be largely regressive, and that the idea of that investing in bicycles and buses is a suitable replacement is incomplete...particularly in non-metro regions.
"Rural folk" are going to need to come to grips with their exorbitantly subsidized lifestyle choices sooner or later. Probably sooner, since their guy is sabotaging one of their most important subsidies (near-free rural mail service) as we speak.
My understanding of a common rural view is that 'city people' restrict them unnecessarily with a lot of environmental restrictions (which may be partly true). But they don't believe they are subsidized.
In Washington state they have a report from the legislature that has spending in each county compared to tax revenues. This is very sensitive because of course Seattle money goes out to the whole state. There's a second version of that report that tries to compute the economic benefit of the rural areas, separately from the actual tax revenues, I'm sure this was created to lessen the sting.
I want to keep our economy and the people in it living. But we need to have a shared reality.
An interesting manifestation of this belief is the California separatist movement "State of Jefferson". These are people who believe that the economy of far northern California would be far stronger if they were simply allowed to clearcut every forest in the state.
One county, Lake County, had the good manners to cancel a planned vote of secession in late 2015 after the rest of the state paid to put out an enormous wildfire there.
up until 1900, 98% of people worked on farms in rural areas. IMHO it's a bit pretencious to force rural folk to move to the big cities and become Urbanite Consumers. and it is reckless to think changing the way most people have lived for 100,000 years wont trigger an even worse catastrophe.
rural folk think the same way of Urbanites as you think of them. they think everyone should get out of the cities and stop being a polluting leech who is detached from the natural state of humans living in equillibrium with nature.
Nobody, absolutely nobody, lived in a fully dispersed car-based rural landscape prior to 1900. They lived in small towns and villages, like sensible people.
Flip that question the other way: what happens if we continue ignoring externalities? They’ve been subsidized for a century but it’s also hurting people – many of the least healthy lifestyles involve regular long drives (night, lack of exercise, etc.), and climate change is going to be brutal for agriculture and forestry.
Now, also look back a century. Rural life existed - not exactly the same but also with improvements like healthier communities because people bought locally rather than driving 2 hours to Walmart or Costco. Raising the price of gas would benefit all of businesses which have been out priced by companies who don’t have to pay for externalities. Sharing a ride might seem like a good trade in comparison to learning that your staple crop no longer grows in your region or that the hundred year flood/fire is now a decadal experience.
Also, remember that this isn’t a ban on cars. It’s a financial cue pushing people to drive less, combine trips, buy the vehicle with the specs they actually need rather than the heavily-marketed guzzler, etc. People like having way more horsepower than they need but nobody is really inconvenienced without it.
You act like european rural folk and concentrate into small villages surrounded by your farms. Instead of driving to walmart for an hour, you shop at your local village.
It's not a national ban, but auto manufacturers don't use asbestos in their brake pads. And since California does ban it, not many aftermarket pads use it either.
I live in the Ohio Valley. When I was growing up everyone that worked in town had the paint on the roof, hood, and trunk of their car peeling off because of the particulates that settled on them.
This does not seem to be happening now because nearly everything is shut down and what is still running is operating at less than max capacity.
I feel the term "micro particles" is too broad. I'm pretty sure there is a difference for health between car exhaust particles, tire particles, brake pad particles, industry particles, fertilizer particles, wood smoke particles, etc. It all ends up in the same PM10 or PM2.5 or whatever category but the chemical nature is quite variable.
Not as big of a difference than you think. They're all rather bad, causing insults to cells and immune reactions - carcinogenic.
Additonally, resorbed into bloodstream they cause a variety of hormonal and kidney problems.
They can be roughly grouped into hydrocarbons, other plastics, aerosolized solvents, other absorbed aerosolized chemicals, inert particles.
I've generally heard from hybrid & EV early adopters that they have found their brake pads are replaced either "once" or "never", in the life of their vehicle. For this reason.
If you're driving gently (to maximize regeneration), a hybrid or EV pretty much only uses the brake pads to hold the car at a stop. Deceleration is done entirely with regeneration, for maximum energy recovery.
Because of this, some fancier EVs/hybrids have an auto-wipe feature that briefly applies the brakes at low pressure while you are driving to clean the pads.
Very little braking is used day to day. Brakes might be used once or twice a day in my roommates Tesla. I mean they even have a one-pedal mode where you don't touch the brake except emergencies.
You don't have to use the brake pedal at all if you drive carefully. Just lift off the accelerator and the wheels drive the motor generating electricity and slowing the car.
>You don't have to use the brake pedal at all if you drive carefully.
Until you drive down a hill, another driver does something unexpected, you have to take a poorly marked turn, there's a stop sign around the bend etc...
I don't think they mean you never actually use the brakes.
That person is probably referring to the Tesla feature where when you don't use the gas pedal, the system is slightly recharging the batteries all the times (via magnets). You can turn this off if you don't like it. Then you get used to a driving style where you take your foot off the 'gas pedal' before you need to stop and the car slows down on it own (through regen braking), and so the 'UX' is you just selectively apply the gas pedal or not to go fast or slow down. If you need to stop suddenly you use the brake. It's an automatic thing after a while, you don't need to think about it. I sometimes have to get used to a 'regular gas car' that doesn't have this when I drive something else.
I have a Tesla, and I can assure you that I use the actual brakes crazy less than a normal car. I do have the AWD version which I do believe has more regenerative braking than the RWD model. Generally if it's a "oops I messed up" and you see a red light or stop sign later than usual you tap the brakes. But even on pretty steep hills I don't hit the brakes and basically never ride the brakes which was pretty common on my subaru.
If the car is not slowing down by clamping brake pads to a metal disc, then yes? I'm not sure how to answer the confusion here: confused on how regenerative braking works, or conventional braking?
I guess I wasn't sure how regeneration could occur through a process that is not frictive & therefore clean. And if there is a clean friction, why there wouldn't be one for disc breaks as well.
The answer is that an electrical motor can also be a generator. An electrical motor when a current is applied causes it to rotate. When power is drawn from a rotating motor it generates a counter-torque proportional to the power extracted. Not perfectly efficient of course and there are still resistive and inductive losses but that means less energy dissipation by friction. This synergies beautifully with an electrical power system in boosting overall efficiency.
So in a way you could say that the friction resulting from engaging the generator has byproducts of both electricity and dust, rather than just dust produced by disc brakes? And that since the energy required to stop in both cases should be equivalent, it must mean less dust when using the generator, because the electricity subtracts from it?
You're headed in the right direction, the only thing you are missing is hybrids & EV's can generate 100% of their braking force with the generator during gentle driving. So no dust at all.
They still have brake discs & pads, but mostly just for panic stops & holding in place when stopped.
I guess I meant that even ignoring breaks entirely, there must be some wear ("dust") inside of a generator resulting from the rub of physical parts, but I take it to be a very tiny amount.
Imagine a generator on a bicycle, you pedal to make a light bulb light up. There is of course inherent friction in the system, but a large fraction is actually pushing magnet fields around to produce electricity. That part actually has no friction, while it's not 100% efficient in the form of stray magnetic fields and some heating, normal metal on metal friction is a very small fraction.
Normal brakes use 100% friction, which of course causes substantial heat, and increases wear and tear on the pads, the rotor, and brake fluid. These type issues are why it's often recommended to use a lower gear down hills so you can offload the brakes with engine friction.
So not only does regenerative braking produce less dust, but it produces less heat, and the brakes/rotors/fluid are on average cooler and in a state where any needed braking causes less wear.
When I was a kid I was told not to eat food grown near roads or in the city. If you can notice the pollution by what has settled on surfaces then how bad is it in the food that's grown in a city?
Brake pads contain asbestos and other nasty stuff. It's certainly bad for you. You're not gonna noticeably hurt yourself if you eat roadside fruit a couple times, but the same can be said about many harmful things.
It's not yet banned for use in brake pads everywhere (not in the US as far as I know), and anyway more modern brake pads materials aren't significantly better for eating either.
I think a more informative comment would add some perspective on how harmful break dust actually is or isn't. Whether or not someone would use it as seasoning is a moot point.
For example, I wouldn't sprinkle dirt all over my food. But I'm perfectly happy for my food to grow in dirt. Does that mean contact with dirt = bad? No.
It depends. The older the brake the worse the dust. But even modern brake dust is not something you want to ingest if you don't have to. In general dust is the worst possible form that you can get some contaminant in, it offers the largest reactive surface per unit weight and can get into all kinds of places that it shouldn't.
As for the dirt: plants act as natural filters, they select that which is good for them using their root systems and use that to build the rest of the plant as they go along. Some plants can be used to extract certain materials from the soil, others do the opposite and will react by rejecting the contaminants. What exactly happens depends on the plant, soil conditions, humidity, amount of sunlight and lots of other factors besides. Not all dirt is good, not all plants grown in all dirt are good, not all dirt is the same.
There are an endless number of gross and harmless things which I don't want to sprinkle on my food.
It's actually a good question, and I'm disappointed to read middlebrow dismissal of it.
As long as we want to go fast, there will be some brake dust in the air. Brake pads can be made out of a variety of materials, and we want to use the ones which are least harmful to our lungs and other organs.
That takes research, not emotional appeals to disgust (from the Latin, meaning "bad to eat").
Someone actually at a classic Mini. I wouldn't advise that either. The point is that if you have the choice to eat food with or without such contamination you'd always choose the uncontaminated food because you can reason out for yourself that it is probably unhealthy. If you want to run the experiment feel free, being disgusted by it has nothing to do with it, this is about food safety, not about taste.
Historically yes. But plenty of things that are perfectly safe to consume taste terrible and plenty of stuff that will kill you won't even register. So this is not a reliable indicator.
I wouldn't even say the US has travel luxury. imo "luxury" is being able to travel via an interconnected train system and not having to drive! More like US has system of inconvenience and pollution.
While I would love HSR in the US (and there is definitely a pitch to be made for it in the Eastern US where population density is similar to Western Europe) there are negative externalities incurred with high speed rail as well. Metal-on-metal friction caused by going around bends releases particulates as well, and air currents can be disturbed by trains traveling at speeds in excess of 250km/h.
It is preferable to having to drive in back-to-back traffic though, I agree.
It can actually get worse higher up. I used to live in an apartment tower near a busy freeway, and the black dust was pervasive. I had to move because I literally lost the ability to breathe.
I too live close to a busy freeway. The dust doesn't bother me as much as the sound. The noise is constant, and though closed windows isolate a lot of the sound, for some reason, when I go to sleep, I feel like I can hear everything 3x better than when I'm awake. It took like 2.5 years, but now, I'm starting to have difficulties sleeping.
I thought I'd get used to it, but as the time passed, I got more and more sensitive to it. Strange.
> for some reason, when I go to sleep, I feel like I can hear everything 3x better than when I'm awake.
That's because you stopped making noise yourself. That masks a lot of environmental noise. Ditto of course for a chunk of your neighbors. So then your hearing adapts: it becomes more sensitive so you're more alert in case predators come and visit your cave.
That kept you safe in the stone age, today it will keep you awake at night from traffic.
Constant noise like road noise gives me anxiety but thats a new theory I’d never heard, so its not the noise thats a primary problem, its the fear of missing hearing something else important.
I have the same problem. I can sleep easily during the day. But at night it can be super hard to fall asleep. Even the slightest unexpected sound will get me.
You could try a masking sound, white noise or ocean sounds should mask traffic quite well. Not very loud, just loud enough to even out the variation. Good luck! Loss of sleep is terrible. I wrote about it recently: https://jacquesmattheij.com/dealing-with-insomnia/
I hate road noise so much. They have a large botanic garden near me. The problem is they built it close to the highway and you can hear constant road noise throughout the entire park. It completely ruins the experience of what would be a very nice park.
One benefit of electric vehicles is you break far less because typically unless it’s very cold out the car will use the regenerative engine charging feature to slow the car. You might notice this on Tesla’s with metallic rims they are rarely dirty with break dust.
I like the strategy proposed (linked in the article).
In increased production capacity: 4x electric vehicles, 16x batteries, 12x wind turbines, 10x solar modules. 2x the nuclear capacity. 25% of the energy grid converted into communal/consumer owned renewable production.
Basically full production in every technology that result in zero air pollution for the energy grid. Full production in all technologies also allow us to see which clean technology is cheaper in practice without people sitting still while arguing over which strategy they should use.
I've spent a lot of my life opposed to nuclear power - but I'm slowly feeling that even with the currently unsolved long term storage issues - that it is better than the alternatives (carrying on burning fossil fuel until some point in the future when storage is good enough.)
I'd love to be wrong and I'd love to see renewable energy and storage solved in the next 10 years (though likely take longer than that to scale up nuclear).
AFAIK modern reactor designs do a lot to solve the long-term storage issues; from what I remember France uses a series of different reactor designs, combined with reprocessing, that result in a small amount of waste that's only a problem for 60-70 years.
The kind of reactor most people think of (again, AFAIK) are breeder reactors, or otherwise derived from breeder reactors, which were about making weapons-grade material rather than power, which is part of the reason those designs have the issues everyone (largely legitimately) has with them.
No, France uses light water reactors, just like the rest of the world.
They also reprocess their spent fuel, but due to complicated sciency reasons you can only do that a few times when you're burning it in thermal reactors.
France had plans to move to a closed cycle, which would improve fuel utilization by a couple of orders of magnitude, but their breeder reactor program (required for the closed cycle) has largely stalled (see Phenix, SuperPhenix, and ASTRID which was recently cancelled before it even got off the drawing board).
And no, breeder reactors per se aren't about making weapons-grade material except in the feverish dreams of Greenpeace.
Cool, thanks for the corrections. I learned a bit about this for a single semester a decade ago, so I'm not surprised my knowledge is incomplete and warped by time.
SuperPhénix was cool on paper but I'm actually surprised that they built it and after that it took so long to stop it. It used sodium, a lot of it, which explodes violently in contact of water.
That's an issue for most people. The political pressure was huge to stop the project. The CEA wasn't even that good at manipulating sodium, they got two known major incidents in Cadarache. One quite spectacular with a huge cloud of fire.
I think nuclear power is great to research and the risk is sometimes worth it, but SuperPhénix was too risky.
The issues with sodium are manageable, as seen in other sodium-cooled reactors like the Russian BN-XXX or the US EBR-II. Sodium has other good properties which make up for the downsides, which is why most fast reactor designs have chosen sodium has the coolant.
IIRC the idea behind BN reactors is that single such reactor would "burn" waste from 2-3 VVER reactors and recycled by BN fuel would be loaded back to them.
So you would install a number of BNs in Russia and supply recycled fuel back to exported reactors. Not only you will save money on fuel (well, assuming nuclear fuel will cost more than it does today), but also will reduce amount of nuclear waste for long-term storage (today most of waste from exported reactors has to come back to Russia).
The Russians have a couple of them in production (BN-600 & Bn-800) and another being planned (BN-1200). They work fine, but with current uranium prices there's not much reason to do breeding and reprocessing.
It's good that we research these, but there is no pressing need to take them into use soon.
If it makes you feel any better, many types of reactors produce helpful medical isotopes as a side effect of operation. So when looking at lives-per-megajoule nuclear is one of the absolute best, even accounting for some of the accidents.
When you compare Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Wind, Solar, and Hydro, Nuclear comes out by far as the safest technology [1].
Coal is incredibly dangerous directly - mining and operation are generally unsafe. Hydro has had some terrible accidents like the Chinese Banqiao dam rupture in 1975 which killed tens or hundreds of thousands. Solar and wind I'm not too sure about, but nuclear power has tens of deaths total attributed to it.
The nuclear-relate deaths that occurred have been from using light-water reactors, which are essentially very-high pressure high-temperature radioactive containers. Modern designs like molten salt reactors (like LFTR) have the potential to be safer, but don't have regulatory support and are mired in the process [2].
I made a whole infographic about the safety of nuclear power, but I'm not an engineer or journalist [3]
Per IPCC, wind and solar are very nearly on par with (possibly better) than nuclear. It's coal that really drags down the average, and yes, we need to stop using that.
Hydro's mortality is largey attributable to a single, though immensely bad incident, the Chinese Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975. That itself was a consequence of poor engineering, planning, management, response, and an unanticipated weather event (parked typhoon/cold-front dumping > 1,000mm rain in 24h), with most issues being common to any high-profile technical engineering project.
Hydro otherwise is largely safe (there are a few other exceptions, again higghligghting planning, management, response, and institutional integrity, especially in developing regions or periods), problems not specific to the energy-harnessing mechanism) and the Banqiao site is presently home to > 15 millions, rather than being a multi-century technically-induced wildlife park as is the case with other technologies.
Banqiao, China (~170k mort, almost all to disease and starvation, planning/response was abysmal); Machchu2, India (5k, 1979), Johnstown, US (2.2k, 1889, birthed Red Cross and reformed liability law), Vaijont, Italy (2.5k, 1963 landslide-triggered tsunami overtopped dam). Seven topped 1,000 fatalities, of which one was an act of war. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure)
There are literally tens of thousand of dams, if not > 100k, worldwide (over 22k in China alone), with well over a century of major utilisation. Granted 100 or fewer major (2+GWe) installations.
There are fewer than 400 nuclear power stations worldwide (3911 by my count from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations...), the bulk in operation for less than 50 years. We've had three major disasters and numerous close calls, all with massive long-term consequences. Building out infrastructure to the scale of present or future (industrialised-world electric provisioning to 8-12 billion inhabitants) would see even at much better safety records* a major accident every few years. And that's only one disadvantage.
Notably, once floodwaters recede, even a catastrophic dam failure returns to livable condition rapidly: weeks to years, rather than centuries.
And, as noted, it's human, social, business, and organisational factor common to any major high-value asset technical project generally to blame.
Gah! One of their reports within the past 5+ years. It was in an analysis of risks by major energy modalities. Unfortunately IPCC's content organisation is a disaster.
Analysis unit was deaths per GWh or similar.
I'll see if I can find it though I'm not optimistic.
Our World In Data posts similar stats, premature deaths/yr at 1 TWe/yr generation:
Coal: 25
Oil: 18
Gas: 3
For the safer options, statement is inverted, as years for 1 death:
Nuclear: 14--100
Wind: 29 years
Hydropower or solar: 42 years
Solar: 53
Note w/h/s are all within the range of error for nuclear. (And why hydro isn't broken out separately I don't know.)
This is where I'm at as well. I'm not crazy about Nuclear, but when I sat down and did a hard look at a lot of alternatives, there isn't really anything that can provide power that dramatically, at least not without some sort of magic leap forward in battery technology.
Not to mention, while it needs a solution, long term storage doesn't have to be solved today. Or tomorrow, or even fifty years from now. Climate change on the other hand will not wait fifty years for us to get around to facing it.
I'd much rather my children face the narrow technical challenge of long term storage, as opposed to global migration crises, drought, and famine.
Dry cask storage will not be without issues on the 100 year time frame. However, I am relatively well convinced that this will be a problem in the billions in cost. That is a lot, but not $10s of billions or $100s of billions. A single national reprocessing facility is >$10 billion.
The simple truth is that radioisotopes decay. When you split Uranium, you dig up the nuclear dust. The more years you give it, the more it settles.
Don't get me wrong, fuel cladding is going to be popping, leaking, and breaking all over those racks of fuel in dry Helium atmosphere or whatever it is.
Also, companies who want to do US reprocessing (but will not anytime soon b/c of $$) are ready to cherry-pick the living daylights out of the fuel inventory. In another 50 years, the best fuel candidates will be vastly more economically attractive. You have the burn history of each fuel assembly, and you know which has the most good stuff and the least bad stuff. Time tends to shift that ratio in the right direction.
There are many types of nuclear power, with thorium salt reactors being one of the most effective possible components to an overall solution. These could be scaled up quickly. The problem is public opinion and the lack of nuanced understanding of the differences.
No, the problem with molten salt reactors is that except for a few test reactors in the 1960'ies, nobody has built and ran them. There is little knowledge how well they'd actually work as power production reactors running at high power for years. E.g. how do you do maintenance?
And on top of that, the Th fuel cycle requires reprocessing and breeding, again technology that looks feasible on paper but little knowledge how it would work out in practice.
I'm not saying this as a negative, I think MSR's are cool and potentially very useful technology. We should definitely research them with the goal of taking them into use for large-scale power production. But this won't be ready in 10 years.
Now, I hope I'm wrong, and maybe IMSR proves me wrong by deploying at scale sooner. Though that is the traditional once-through LEU cycle, no Th, but still a MSR design.
You know who has picked up all the research on molten salt we abandoned?
China.
The utter hysteria around Nuclear is the biggest threat to climate change and if you really want to diminish the use of fossil fuels nuclear is the most economically viable path. The majority of costs are either cultural or obtuse regulations that have layered up over time. Micro reactors, molten salt and other really innovative designs don't get traction because of irrational fears radiation spawns in people.
Similar to a lot of hysteria we are seeing around COVID-19. Even if the majority of the population gets infected, it's only a real threat to a small portion of the population - so rather than managing that specific threat we are acting like it affects everyone the same - with disastrous results that are still unfolding.
Molten salt reactors have HUGE technological issues with corrosion. You have to design a material which would contain essentially almost all of Mendeleev's Table at high temperatures and under really powerful neutron flux. And we don't even touch problem of online processing of this salt. Even for BN reactors fuel processing plant is arguably more complex than the reactor design, and for salt reactors this problem even more nightmarish.
New nuclear power in the west is currently very expensive with rising prices and and extremely slow to build (see for example hinkley point c).
I‘m not sure if battery storage, which has predictably falling prices, isn’t already cheaper than that, but you can at least already calculate when it is going to be.
A sensible strategy is to keep old nuclear plants running and invest heavily in renewables and energy storage.
I've been skeptical that we can make nuclear power safe, too, given the human elements, but global warming has me asking myself which is worse: a Chernobyl every ten years, or a 2ºC rise in global temperatures?
Chernobyl was billed as proof of just how bad nuclear disasters can be, but looking back, we didn't know how good we had it when that was all we had to be afraid of.
No energy source [that we've discovered so far] is perfect. All have downsides. Sadly, living in denial of that fact is more popular than ever, but that's a separate topic.
Here are a couple TED talks showing the downside of renewable energy - such as the enormous land usage and reliable energy storage needed to compete with nuclear or fossil.
Why are you so opposed? It seems like most of the problems have been entirely man-made through poor regulations, stupid choices, or lack of budget - all of which are surmountable. The technology itself is proven, and produces reams of clean energy. It could even be cheap, if we stopped gutting the nuclear industry and built up towards smaller-scale, commodity modular reactors.
many designs have, but few want to have discussions because of the decades of hysterical ranting about how evil radiation is. Radioactivity is neither good nor evil; it's a tool. Yup, it can be used for evil but it can also be used for good.
I'm not convinced nuclear is safe enough. Say new nuclear it is 2x safer than previous designs on average, and we spin up 4x more nuclear plants, well you can see where this goes.
Plus, such a concentrated power source is going to invite a terrorist attack by something like drones, which can't be effectively defended against. An attack that looks like this:
I think that modern designs are at least an order of magnitude safer than reactors from early generations. Chernobyl's RBMK and Fukusima's BWR/1 were both designed in 60s. Note that containment of modern reactors is designed to withstand direct airplane hit, so without a bunker-buster grade munition such attack would not result in radiation release.
If you increase production, wouldn’t that produce more air pollution?
If we scale up this mind set and suddenly produce 100x Increase in electric cars and nuclear plants, wouldn’t we see a massive spike in air pollution much more than if we simply had 0 production of these?
I’ve been very skeptical of “produce more green energy” solution because they seem to pile on more problems under the guise that it is better in the long run.
Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less? Fewer cars, fewer things.
Consuming less is definitely a big part of climate plans I've seen. Consuming less doesn't have to mean a reduced standard of living. This article mentions heat pumps for example, which consume much less energy. Other plans I've seen also include supporting dense development (=consuming less land/resources for housing), supporting public transit (=consuming less energy for transportation), and upgrading efficiency in homes (=consuming less energy for housing). I think longer term, the cuts will have to be deeper due to population growth, but there is so much low-hanging fruit.
I think in general the environmental movement has been hurt by the association with austerity. Most people don't like being told their lives have to get worse for a benefit that's difficult to see. It needs to paint a positive vision of the future that people can get excited about.
I think anyone supportive of consuming less is including less individual travel and proximity trade/consumption as a fundamental part of the decrease. Other popular issues nowadays seem to be meat consumption and human breeding, but the key importance of transportation seems to be still more generally acknowledged by everyone I know with an outspoken opinion on the matter or a corporate agenda.
Air conditioning as a luxury to rethink, OTOH, rarely if ever comes into discussion around here (I'm writing from a Mediterranean perspective, obviously AC can quickly become a necessity elsewhere).
Air conditioning will become much less of a luxury as the climate warms. Even in the past decade, summer temperatures high enough (especially indoors) to pose a health threat have become an increasingly regular occurrence in many parts of the world. Worse, some places are approaching the point where the confluence of air temperature, humidity, wind, and sun intensity will raise temperatures above the 35 degrees C wet bulb limit for human survival. In these conditions, air conditioning will not be a luxury but rather an essential life support system. Plans for climate-compatible energy use will need to take increasing needs for AC into account.
It actually costs way less energy to cool a house than it does to heat one so the net migration to the south from the US northeast has and will continue to actually lower US per capita use and as the US uses circa 24% of the worlds energy this will have an effect.
Almost all of our problems are energy-cost constrained. If power were 100x+ less costly per kWh, for example, we'd be able to pull all the uranium, lithium, or any of a dozen other metals we need straight from the ocean, without having to run polluting, damaging mines. There are significant benefits to increases in production, if reasonably possible.
Well sure, production of anything takes energy. Question is if 5% of the cars need replaced a year (20 years average age seems about right) are you better off replacing 5% of cars with electric or gas? The studies I've seen show that gas cars are so inefficient (often 15-20%) that even natural gas produced electricity is better in an electric car than a gas car.
The story gets even better if any solar, wind, or hydro is used. Sure nuclear helps as well. Seems obvious to me that we should push on all green energies.
We're already consuming less. In California for example despite the growing population our electricity demand peaked in 2006. But we still need to replace our fossil inputs. After we have abundant peak generating capacity, we can use the excess to remove carbon from the atmosphere, which needs a large energy input.
> Isn’t the best ultimate solution to consume less?
How can we do that when overall population is still growing (even if the rate of growth is slowing). I mean, even if I cut my consumption by 25%, there are so many new people that it doesn’t seem like it would matter much?
A 2019 OECD paper analyzing European satellite data estimates "that a 1 µg/m³[!] increase in PM2.5 concentration (or a 10% increase at the sample mean) causes a 0.8% reduction in real GDP that same year. Ninety-five per cent of this impact is due to reductions in output per worker, which can occur through greater absenteeism at work or reduced labour productivity."
I think they overstate the case for clean energy being cheap. It is cheap because the costs of storage are externalized. If you don't have fossil fuel producers then suddenly you have to add a lot of storage into the mix, which is not cheap.
Of course, if it's doable in practice I'm all for it, and if clean energy is really as cheap as they claim, then we'll get there pretty soon just on economics.
This is something I don't think is fully understood by most people.
Most people think "clean energy is just about building solar panels" - it's viewed as this linear process. I think the media often present it this way.
But in fact, between us and a society run by clean energy is all sorts of huge technical hurdles we haven't solved yet. Adding 10,20% renewables is simple enough - but 100% renewables without daily blackouts is incredibly hard. We need many orders of magnitude more battery storage to get there (or some other storage technology).
It's the same for electric cars. The cost of electricity to run an electric car is small, so people assume that if everyone has an electric car, running costs will be low.
But currently electric cars are subsidised by fuel taxes, and low emissions vehicles are encouraged by low vehicle taxes. When every vehicle is low emission, we still need to get the cost of maintaining the roads from somewhere. And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
It's a problem because it means most people don't appreciate how far we have to go before a clean energy society is possible. We need to increase investment into this technology by an order of magnitude to have a hope of implementing before climate change has significant effects.
Charging at night isn't great for using solar power without storage. Ideally, we'd incentivize people to use their car's battery to store excess solar power during the day and smooth out the duck curve (perhaps slowly recharging again at night)
> The majority of the cost of road construction and maintenance comes from general taxes. Fuel taxes haven't paid the majority since the 80's.
My point isn't that fuel taxes pay the full costs of the road, but that electric cars in many countries receive favourable taxation (which significantly reduces the cost of ownership) which is only possible because they are a minority of vehicles.
This actually depends largely on the country you're in. In the UK (where I live) the effective tax rate on gas is around 68%, and there's lots of tax breaks for electric cars. The effective tax rate on electricity is 5%, and the cost per MJ of electricity and gas is about the same. Effectively the government tax revenue per mile of electric cars is drastically lower than that of gasoline cars - not a sustainable situation for widespread adoption.
It looks like the tax on gas in the US is significantly lower than in European countries, so the same situation probably doesn't exist to the same degree.
> electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven. Distribution network changes are not required.
Yes, average power consumption is quite low. In fact over a year the average car (if it was electric) would probably only consume a few hundred watts.
But that's not the problem. The problem is peak demand. A usable electric car charger draws 7kW for a sustained period of time. That's a very different use case (distributed across every house in the country) than currently.
Taking this study for example: "32% of low voltage (LV) feeders (312,000 circuits) will require intervention when 40% - 70% of customers have EVs, based on 3.5 kW (16 amp) charging."
http://myelectricavenue.info/
Bear in mind that's for 3.5kW charging, whereas anyone installing a charger today is putting in 7kW+ charging.
The only way to mitigate distribution network changes is by smart charging on the car side - basically reducing charging rate or times to spread the load. Fortunately that's fairly doable, but it's not necessarily a panacea - if there's a couple of days where many people do higher than average mileage (eg a national holiday) you could find that there's simply not enough capacity locally to sustain charging all the cars on the street.
The problem is that we need to be adopting electric cars _now_ to make a dent in emissions, but there's all these infrastructure problems (I haven't even mentioned on-street charging or long distance journeys...) that will become evident when we do. We need to be fixing them today. Claiming they don't exist is naive. Remember that there's just over 1 million electric cars on US roads today, out of 273 million vehicles. The infrastructure needs to grow by 2 orders of magnitude to support that.
It's not a big deal. Average american drives what 12,000 miles per year? Or 32 miles per day. My car (m3) has a 75kwh battery and has a range of 310 miles or so. So I need (on average) 10.3% of a battery charge or 7.75 kwh. Most people are home for 12 hours a night, so 650 watts. So sure peak might be 3.5-7kw, but the average car load will be much less.. 5-10x less. Keep in mind that the average car lasts 8 years (claims consumer reports), but seems like bad economy is causing that to head higher. So even if 10% of the cars per year switch to electric that's not really all that much power. Especially with wind, solar (both home and utility scale), battery storage (both home and utility), hydro, etc ramping up. The hardest thing for most grids to handle is peak loads on hot days where a fairly large fraction of home AC are running, now that's a load that makes charging an electric car look easy. E-cars by nature tend to balance the load and make the grid easier to design and maintain. Sure tax incentives for storage, wind, and solar should continue. California's SGIP program seems particularly effective. Solar+Storage solutions get a big break, and the grid can make do with less peaker plants because they can tap into residential installed power walls all over the state to handle the peaks that used to require spinning up the least efficient/most expenisve peaker plants.
> electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven.
That does not sound right. Napkin math: A tiny Renault Zoe has a 52kWh battery. Even assuming 100% charging efficiency, charging for 8 hours over night you’re looking at 52/8=6.5kW per hour. That’s already more than twice as much as an oven, and an extremely conservative approximation.
edit: thanks for pointing out what I missed. I was somehow fixated on full recharges.
Most cars don't need to be recharged fully every night, and don't need a full recharge in 8 hours. If you get home at 8pm and leave at 7pm, that's 4.7Kw/h for 0-100. (I checked my oven and it peaks at 4.5Kw out!)
A Zoe has a 245 mile range on said battery, but assuming you drive at 25% efficiency for 20 miles to and from work, you'll use about 30% of a zoe's battery in a day, which spread out over our 11 hours from earlier gives about 1.5Kw per hour.
- I charge about twice a week, overnight, from around 50% to 100%, if I drive to work every day
I have a relatively short commute to work. So this is may be a lower bound. But charging 52kWh every single day is definitely an extreme case on the other end.
Where I'm from, EVs typically charge at 10A-32A at 220V, or 7.4kW to 22kW with level 2 chargers. That means you can't charge a Tesla from 0% to 100% over night, but then I haven't heard of anyone who actually needs to do that every day, if ever. The closest I've done personally is charge a Tesla I borrowed from around 30% to 100% at a cabin, but then I started when we arrived in the afternoon and we left just before noon.
It's weird that you'd call a 52kWh Zoe tiny btw. 52kWh is quite respectable. It's only half of the largest EV you could possibly buy now, and I'm guessing 50-70kWh will be the standard mid/entry level battery size for a long time.
30-40kWh cars might disappear. That'd kind of be a shame, because it's a useful size for many people. And having a larger battery than you need is a huge waste unless you have vehicle-to-grid to get more value out of the battery capacity you're not using. But then again, maybe the 30-40kWh market will be taken over by second hand 50-60kWh cars with reduced capacity.
> 30-40kWh cars might disappear. That'd kind of be a shame, because it's a useful size for many people. And having a larger battery than you need is a huge waste unless you have vehicle-to-grid to get more value out of the battery capacity you're not using. But then again, maybe the 30-40kWh market will be taken over by second hand 50-60kWh cars with reduced capacity.
I am sad that there are so few good subcompact/ truly low energy options in this market. There is a tiny Chinese car coming to the US, but right now it seems like it's only going to hit a few markets.
The US is the only major market really lacking in this space. Asia and Europe already have a bunch of competitors in the "city car" space with a lot more on the drawing board. Almost none of those companies believe the US is interested in "city cars", if they have a US presence at all.
The American (genital) size contest for SUVs and Trucks has sucked a lot of oxygen out of what is a much more interesting variety in EV production for Asia and the EU.
Not sure of the range of the Zeo, but if you are burning 52kwh daily you are driving a ton. That's about 217 miles a day in my model 3, and with an average speed of 50 mph that's over 4 hours of driving.
Average drives do more like 12,000 a year, not 80k miles.
those 52kwh are a few hundred kilometers of driving. wouldn't assume that to be the daily norm. say you only do 30km, you only need to charge a fraction
100% renewable capacity is where Denmark sits right now, so it can be used as an small example. In good conditions they can operate exclusively on wind.
It actually a bit above 100% to the point where the price can go into negative during optimal conditions. This has put a damper on the enthusiasm for further expanding beyond 100%.
By my estimates, with land wind parks operating on an average ~30% capacity per year and ocean wind parks at around 60%, the average during a year is about half the energy grid generated from renewable and the rest from fossil fuels.
my pet peeve with people mentioning Denmark as the poster child of renewable energy is that has one absolutely enormous advantage - access to two large and stable electric grids to account for the variations and uncertainty of renewable energy.
The continental European grid is massive and Denmark has power lines to Germany, Sweden and Norway. The Nordic grid has massive amounts of hydro power.
Not every country has such access to allow them to go all-in on renewable energy.
The real poster-child for large-scale renewable integration is the UK.
Most importantly it can utilize 82 terawatt-hours of pumped hydroelectric energy storage in Norway. So energy storage is much cheaper than for most areas in the world.
If it gets cheap enough, you can overbuild, which can solve a lot of the problem. Solar only produces peak power for a couple hours, but it produces 50% of peak for up to half the day, and wind delivers 50% or more of peak pretty much around the clock.
Add in transmission lines & a functioning energy market, and demand will timeshift where it can, and whatever arbitrage opportunity finally remains can be met with either storage or curtailment & further overbuilding, whichever is cheaper.
It's not like we need to run the whole grid from storage at night.
Wind Turbines get mostly put on existing farm land (or out at sea? or are they clearing forest to put them up?
I also don't see why farmland and solar can't live side by side. mixed livestock farming and panels higher above the ground seems doable.
I'm sure it's possible to grow crops under solar panels too provided you're not blocking all the light. Google shows there are some studies on it I don't have time to read right now.
This ignores cost of course. but I'm arguing against the idea that we don't have the space.
By calculations, perfect rooftop coverage would produce up to 8% of total energy required. In Poland. The cost would be immense.
See, even with superb photovoltaics only single story homes have the right area to power use ratio to make sense to use solar as main power source.
These cause transportation problems that probably eat all the benefit...
> but 100% renewables without daily blackouts is incredibly hard.
Well, maybe we should just get accustomed to daily blackouts? I mean yeah, it's inconvenient, but so is being choked to death by pollution and staring down a global climate catastrophe. Besides, being accustomed to blackouts would make us better prepared for other causes of blackouts, like a chaos monkey for our power dependency. And to top it all off: people will need to find something to do when their power is out, like maybe go outside and see what we've been working so hard to destroy with our giant SUVs and whatnot.
Indeed it is difficult and requires massive investment.
Storage options include pumped hydro, a proven technology for long durations, and some analysis like that done by Australia's national science agency is already finding that: "wind, solar and storage technologies are by far the cheapest form of low carbon options for Australia, and are likely to dominate the global energy mix in coming decades." https://reneweconomy.com.au/new-csiro-aemo-study-confirms-wi...
100% renewable is not really required and I think it's not so bad to use some fossil gas on occasion. In the future it may actually be renewable-generated hydrogen.
For countries with more population and less land it'll be more difficult to find room for massive wind/solar so I certainly hope the challenges with next-generation nuclear get solved soon as well..
The answer is obvious, at least with our current 'clean energy' systems and their related costs. We would _all_ just need to use MUCH less energy. This of course would force major life style changes and industry output to be drastically reduced, not something most people and business are ready to accept at this time but the point is, there is a way, right now, with what we have but the terms are unacceptable to most.
What's fascinating about 2020 is that for the first time we can radically reduce our total energy usage (as you advocated) while keeping a nearly identical current lifestyle.
How? Electrical systems (e.g. cars/heat pumps etc.) are much more efficient than fossil fuel equivalents. An example, most new gas cars get ~30 mpg today, but a Tesla model 3 gets 141 mpge. So switching from a gas-powered car to a model 3 results in a 75% reduction in energy usage (as you advocate) with the identical ‘lifestyle’. [1]
This effect is found far more generally. Quoting from a detailed report [2] on how to decarbonize America, “One key aspect of electrification makes this transformation possible, and it represents perhaps the most astonishing finding in Griffith’s modeling: Large-scale electrification would slash total US primary energy demand in half, from around 100 quads to about 45-50. This a huge deal — it means America only needs to produce about half the energy with renewables that it is currently producing with fossil fuels.”
I strongly support, dense walkable cities and public transit, but for the first time in history we’ve separated the task of reducing energy usage from convincing most Americans to give up the lifestyle they’re used to. It’s incredibly promising news for the energy transition!
It could be mitigated by alternative infrastructure: better insulation and ventilation, for example passive housing.
Diminish need for air conditioning by adding blinds or other sun shades on the appropriate sides. Use air foils on cargo ships, making them follow trade winds and sea currents (trading polution for increased transit time (increase crew cost)).
Make people commute less (works for white collar jobs, but blue collar?).
Increase veganism.
Look into having agriculture require less chemicals through use of perennials or alternative varieties and crop rotations.
I don't know enough about other industries to do more than yell "electrify all the things" and mandate factories to use renewable electricity, put solar panels on the roof etc...
Unfortunately walls are the major way houses get hot. You could use something with big thermal capacity but it's expensive and heavy. AC or evaporative cooling cannot be avoided, but can be made more efficient.
Increased transit time for ships is from month to many months. Not worth it.
Veganism faces a big problem with water use.
Agriculture is being looked into all the time, but cheap always wins. We need to feed these billions of people somehow, and crop rotation won't do.
Mandating greenwashing is what we have now. The area to cover with renewables to power just a single smelter is huge.
> The area to cover with renewables to power just a single smelter is huge.
That would be an issue only if that prevented the land from being used for other things. Wind power generation doesn't prevent farming on the land or prevent fishing on the ocean. Solar can be deployed on rooftops or parking lots. Solar developments often support grazing animals underneath the solar panels.
The offshore wind farms I have seen photos of have the individual wind turbines packed too closely together to safely navigate a fishing boat between them.
Fish are not uniformly distributed, however, so the fishing impacts of offshore wind farms can probably be reduced by not installing wind farms in fishing grounds.
I agree with what you say. I would like to point out that there are big batteries called water reservoirs that bring huge energy output when actually needed. Maybe with more creative 'batteries' we could solve problems like the ones you point.
I hope we will see big advancements soon enough although I am cautious about this happening anytime soon in the US.
Adding solar or wind seems pretty linear to me. As the % goes up past 20 you need various mitigations, but each set of mitigations is fairly small, and better tech keeps popping up.
> But in fact, between us and a society run by clean energy is all sorts of huge technical hurdles we haven't solved yet. Adding 10,20% renewables is simple enough - but 100% renewables without daily blackouts is incredibly hard. We need many orders of magnitude more battery storage to get there (or some other storage technology).
We're already at the point where it makes more economic sense to build renewable than it does to build infrastructure to support non-renewable energy (in most locations, there are exceptions). In many places, it's more affordable to replace existing, functioning non-renewable generation with clean energy (either solar, wind, or a combination of the two). This is without considering environmental costs, when you consider the externalized costs of environmental damage, the case is even more lopsided.
Maybe we won't be at 100% renewable without massive battery systems, but 70-80% is reachable without a huge investment, particularly in solar rich or wind rich locations. We're not even at 50% at the moment so we have a long way to go before we hit that last 20-30% where it's going to be most painful. Even if we accelerate adoption massively, we have a lot of time to work on that problem.
If nothing else, we can fill that gap with the least dirty non-renewables and eliminate a massive amount of emissions. Nuclear seems like a good choice, particularly some of the new, safer pelletized plants.
> But currently electric cars are subsidised by fuel taxes, and low emissions vehicles are encouraged by low vehicle taxes.
Personally, I think this is the wrong model. Since internal combustion engines cause tons of external damage, we should be taxing those vehicles based on that externalized damage rather than subsidizing vehicles. The fundamental problem with the current approach is the benefit runs out for the manufacturers who are reducing emissions the most.
> But currently electric cars are subsidized by fuel taxes
This is not remotely true. In fact it's the opposite, ICE vehicles are subsidized by externalizing the costs they inflict on society.
> And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
The average driver clocks around 10k miles/ year, a little under 30 miles/ day. That's less power use than a typical refrigerator. Much less than air conditioning a 2 story house in California. The energy grid can handle that.
> It's a problem because it means most people don't appreciate how far we have to go before a clean energy society is possible. We need to increase investment into this technology by an order of magnitude to have a hope of implementing before climate change has significant effects.
One of the bigger problems we have with getting funding for clean energy is exactly the sort of arguments you are making here. When you present clean energy like it's an all-or-nothing thing and paint a verbal picture like there is a big, insurmountable wall, people just throw their hands up and want to give up.
We do need to increase investment in this technology, but there are massive, incremental benefits which can be realized at nearly every step along the way.
>> And electric car charging at home works because only a handful of people do it. When every car on the road is plugged in every night the distribution networks to every street will need to be massively upgraded.
> The average driver clocks around 10k miles/ year, a little under 30 miles/ day. That's less power use than a typical refrigerator. Much less than air conditioning a 2 story house in California. The energy grid can handle that.
And with delayed charging and Vehicle-to-grid, it could even be beneficial for the grid.
How much is that due to a lack of investment? How fast could we build that storage if we really wanted to? A fraction of $700B a year seems like it could really change that quickly.
Many of the problems related to storage don't seem like a technology problem. They appear to be a commercialization problem. We're not waiting on some fundamentally new tech. From elevated water to liquid metal batteries to compressed air, many technologies are all being commercialized right now. It feels like we have the ability to really push that forward in a big way.
I think they overstate the case for clean energy being cheap.
I think you misunderstood what cheap means, in the context of public health and a nation scale economy. Cheap is code for "do we want to" and if you implement storage as a public utility there may be no price problem. It makes jobs, it fuels industry. Do you think building out coal and oil and nuclear power was "cheap"?
This is what I never understood about people that don’t think anthropomorphic climate change was a thing. Like ok, forget the warming of the planet, we still are making our air, water, and soil unhealthy at alarming levels.
I wonder if the fact that it causes brain damage has something to do with our collective reluctance to address this enormous human health and environmental issue.
Generations of Americans suffered a lifetime of inhaling airborne lead and we're all paying the price of it right now as our insane grandparents burn down the entire country.
After living in Vietnam for 4 years, which has massive air quality issues, I wouldn't say they want or even care to do something about it. They just live with it.
You need a certain level of prosperity to care. If you have enough to eat and that is about it you don't care, you would prefer other nice things in life first. Eventually your house isn't too crowded, you can get to enough places you want to go, you have good enough medical care, some education for the kids, and a few other nice things in life. Eventually you cross the line to where clean air to breath becomes important.
Vietnam has a lot of problems they need to solve before clean air gets to the top of their priorities. It is a long road but it will come to the top. They are making good progress on the other issues, but we are talking about decades, so no surprise they don't care yet. Give it time.
Anyone who thinks Vietnam is poor, is mistaken. They are the epitome of capitalism gone to the greedy. The richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. It is the wealthy who are often the worst offenders, not the people struggling to make ends meet.
The culture is literally to not care about these sorts of things because it is someone else's problem. You see it in the day to day living... endless numbers of people routinely just throw their plastic cups carried in plastic bags, into the sewer on the side of the street. Knowing full well, it will either just sit there or one of the govt. sponsored cleanup people will pick it up.
I spent two years actively refusing plastic and it is impossible to convince every single person you deal with that you don't need yet another plastic bag.
Covid will end up being a giant reset for this country and I'm less enthusiastic about the future than you are. It will be interesting to watch for certain.
The only way I could see that making you unpopular is if you heard people talking about global warming and you changed the subject to talk about other pollutants instead.
"Pollutant" depends on context. Plants need nitrogen and phosphorus compounds to grow, but when fertilizers run off farmland into rivers and lakes those same compounds are pollutants. The same goes for carbon dioxide. It is essential to plant life, and it is also a pollutant when dispersed into the environment in large quantities.
Build your own sensor for about 50-60 dollars. The community has a DIY guide. There used to be a guide that didn't require soldering, but the current guide still isn't very complex.
I currently live on an arterial road, about 2 blocks from a major Interstate (I-5).
I'm very concerned about air pollution. Pollution here (Seattle, Downtown / Capitol Hill area) is bad enough I can see it in the form of black dust which comes in even through closed windows. And that's just the particles big enough to see.
I placed 4 HEPA filters throughout the house, and I run them constantly on a low setting. Based on square footage, I would only need 1-2 of these filters. But I wanted extra filter capacity in each main room.
One annoyance is that my particle counter returns a particle count (per cubic meter, I think?) which doesn't have an exact conversion to the standardized AQI (Air Quality Index). I found a plausible conversion guide, surely not exact but close enough.
Here's what I learned:
- Indoor air filters make a dramatic improvement to air quality. When the outdoor particle count is ~1M, my indoor count can be well under 100K. That's 90% reduction.
– When I approximate AQI, it's common for outdoor air (https://cfpub.epa.gov/airnow/index.cfm) to be in the "Moderate" scale, and my indoor air to be at the floor (best) of "Healthy".
– My other air filters are still effective, even though they don't get the particle count down to zero. They are the RabbitAir minusa2, and two Blueair Classic 205 units.
I was also very surprised when I carried the particle counter around my neighborhood. The quiet streets often have worse air quality than the arterial! And the particle count on the arterial was just as bad as on the Interstate 5 overpass. I think the better airflow on the arterials may help get the pollution out of the area. I really expected the quite streets to have fewer pollution particles.
I have not ventured into testing for C02, other gasses, or Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). But I'm very curious and may try to measure that myself someday soon.
CO2 and VOC trend to be less problematic, though my sensor does pick up some 200 PPB VOC sometimes indoors in a relatively new building with adaptive energy saving ventilation system. Outdoors is below 40 PPB or better, near busy street some 120 PPB.
I got the particle counter used on eBay for about $100. I know it's totally unnecessary to have that industrial version, but it was cheaper (used) than I could buy their consumer-level AirVisual Pro(https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-monitors/airvisual-pro).
I live about two blocks from a four lane road (functionally - a highway). We don’t have forced air. I have considered in-room air filtration, but have heard mixed reviews on efficacy. Anyone have relevant experience with in/room filtration machines?
Running any air filter (cheap, expensive, etc) lowers the PM2.5 count in my home (adjacent to a busy 4-lane road in San Francisco) from ~40 to near zero. This is the tool I use to measure PM count: https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-monitors/airvisual-pro
It's good that pollution's immense consequences on public health get more attention, so I like the piece for that. Though a little puzzled about why the author approached, for his main source, an earth scientist and physicist, not someone with an epidemiology background. No disrespect to that source, whose work sounds important and very interesting.
(In case it will change, original title was "Air pollution is much worse than we thought")
The whole piece reads like political propaganda anti fossil fuels. (Which might be what you are looking for, but not what I expected from the title). Only about 10% of the text is about the air pollution aspect of using fossil fuels, these 10% are buried somewhere in the middle and basically come down to linking to a couple of studies. Are they even new studies? Additionally there is some mentioning of the phrase "air pollution" in sentences that give no new information whatsoever and discuss the various political and societal movements tangentially related to it...
If you are looking for legit reliable information, this piece will hurt your mind to even read. Even the writing style feels like political agitation and not information.
(It would actually make more sense if GPT-3 wrote this.)
> If you are looking for legit reliable information, this piece will hurt your mind to even read. Even the writing style feels like political agitation and not information
The article is filled with information on air pollution and its economic effects, making the point that the savings in health care and recovered productivity would more than pay for a transition to a vastly cleaner and more sustainable energy model.
If a brief historical overview, excerpts from congressional testimonies, and summaries from scientific studies are "hurting your mind", I don't think the article is the source of the pain.
Anyone who takes particulate pollution seriously is not going to like the article.
To solve particulate pollution in a practical way we don't need to build wind turbines to replace gas plants (that would be good for CO2 reasons though), we need to slap filters on diesel garbage trucks and heavy industry exhaust stacks and wet down construction sites and do other things to keep small dust (which invariably gets into people's lungs, reacts with various organic molecules and causes problems) to a minimum.
Straw manning particulate pollution as a fossil fuel problem is a great way to make particulate pollution seem like a bigger and harder to solve problem than it actually is.
Even better than diesel filters is not using diesel at all! Fossil fuels are never going to not produce pollution. California with some of the strictest tailpipe emission standards still has huge smog problems. I don't see the issue with highlighting the air quality co-benefits of fighting climate change. We need to do both!
>Even better than diesel filters is not using diesel at all
Of course that would be better but that's a hard and expensive problem and the 99% solution is easy and cheap. Seems like a pretty obvious choice to me.
>California with some of the strictest tailpipe emission standards still has huge smog problems.
A combination of bad geographic luck and diminishing returns (everyone else's emissions regulations have 90+% the same effect)
>I don't see the issue with highlighting the air quality co-benefits of fighting climate change.
If your goal is to stop coughing up a lung today then focusing on better batteries and cheaper green energy is wasted effort when you can directly solve the pollution problem more cheaply right now. Sure air quality is a nice side benefit to reducing C02 emissions but if your true goal is improved air quality then reducing CO2 emissions is a crap way to go about it because the two are only loosely correlated and the bang for your buck is so bad. If your goal is to win eyeballs to your site and get people who's understanding of the problems is on the level checkout-isle magazine to share your article then it is probably a good idea.
What do you think those filters and extras that a few car companies were caught software cheating around are meant to do?
But then at some point you reach loss of efficiency which means burning more fuel and producing more other pollution.
The big problem is prevalence of old cars or ones in disrepair.
Then of course coal and oil plants, secondary gas plants; and of course industrial pollution from manufacturing.
Nuclear power is also a far more feasible alternative to the "wind power and solar panels" pipe dream. I'm part German, and the German obsession with "green energy" and fear of nuclear power is leading to dependence on Russia and more coal plants. France, on the other hand, is thriving with nuclear.
Yes but what's so bad about advocating for less air pollution?
Why does this have to be a divisive political issue?
Honestly seems to me like you are the one being misled by whatever politics.
If you weren't you wouldn't react so harshly to an article about improving public health.
I don't like vox either because they are biased as you say, but I am not somehow going to think that breathing petrol fumes is fine.
You're assuming anything written in that article has even a passing relationship with the world of matter, rather than the delusional world of people who think Vox is something worth taking seriously.
Really? I think that claim is false. The Trump administration is actively working to make it easier to pollute the air as the article highlights. And many other political forces favor air pollution too e.g. oil and gas unions and utilities.
The fundamental point the article makes, is there is no difference between objecting to climate change and objecting to air pollution.
So based on their lobbying 'against climate change' there are lots of people (and lobbyists) who favor air pollution!
Not at all; I find Vox to be laughable rather than anger-making -I just can't figure out how anybody can take it any more seriously than something like the Drudge Report. You can be "middle of the road" and still super, monstrously wrong. Vox is very good at this!
The article itself isn't the worst thing they ever published, but it's pretty typical of the genre; vapid, misleading, basic midwit nonsense that seems like a good idea but actually is barking insanity.
While I live on a street with many cars driving by all day, I thought being a few storeys up would reduce the amount of pollution from vehicles... apparently not at all!