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None of your citations state that those sources are empirically worse (in terms of human health impact) than vehicle emissions. Also, different places have wil

• mschuster91 11y ago
  > Also, different places have wildly different sources of pollutants. It is ridiculous to generalise across the whole world based on a few factoids. Indeed, but no matter how you look at the data (and where), stuff like banning cars from roads is a placebo measure, given the slow share of cars in said pollutants. The most problematic point, very often overlooked, is that factory chimneys (and, to a lesser degree, ship chimneys) belch their smoke in higher air, which means that the pollutants in the smoke can fly for hundreds of kilometers before coming down on the earth and causing problems.
  • 7952 11y ago
    But there is an easy way to test that. Is pollution abnormally high close to a congested road? In some places that is unequivocally true, and altering the outputs of vehicles will make the air safer in those locations. That is not a placebo. Also, the entire purpose of a chimney is to spread the emissions over a larger area... > the dispersion of pollutants at higher altitudes can reduce their impact on the immediate surroundings. In the case of chemically aggressive output, a sufficiently tall chimney can allow for partial or complete self-neutralization of airborne chemicals before they reach ground level. The dispersion of pollutants over a greater area can reduce their concentrations and facilitate compliance with regulatory limits. [0] It is certainly true that stack emissions can have a significant health impact (for example coal power stations in China). But there are also places where the effect is less significant as the ambient level is considered to be safe. Vehicle emissions can cause local levels to be much higher. I agree that certain sources are popularly ignored, but that is not a reason to also ignore vehicle emissions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney
    • mschuster91 11y ago
      > Is pollution abnormally high close to a congested road? In some places that is unequivocally true, and altering the outputs of vehicles will make the air safer in those locations. The problem is: vehicles have a freaking high life time if they're not destroyed in accidents. Even if all new cars by tomorrow were electric, it'd take years for these new cars to replace the old cars (and thus solving the problem of local pollution). To make stuff worse, old cars are usually exported to Africa (http://www.zeit.de/auto/2010-01/auto-export-afrika http://www.zeit.de/auto/2010-01/auto-export-afrika) where they basically run until they cannot be patched up any more and of course, once e.g. a soot filter breaks down in Africa, no one will replace it. All this "uuh our vehicles must be cleaner" is just bla bla of the industry to sell more new (and, because of more complex technology, more expensive!) cars. The actual impact of these measures is next to zero because of a car's afterlife in Africa or wherever. Mandating proper emission filtering on all factories around a city helps immediately, mandating stricter emissions on new cars does nothing at all.