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US air quality is slipping after years of improvement
- gshdg 7y agoShock: loosening environmental laws and the enforcement thereof results in degradation of the environment. Who could have imagined?
- ipnon 7y agoI think the real shock is that enough people vote into office those who deregulate environmental protections. Democracies will be unable to factor in the ramifications of their actions unless the majority of them are highly-educated. To me, I doubt the sustainability of a technologically advanced democracy without universal college education for this reason. The electorate has enough power to drastically harm the environment and themselves without the ability to consider the self-harming consequences of their voting habits. Can anyone think of a similar situation in history?
- briga 7y agoI know plenty of highly educated people who couldn't care less about environmental protection. Something tells me that universal college education isn't the fix for climate change, although it could solve other problems.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ipnon 7y agoI know plenty of uneducated people who don't care at all about environmental protection. The point I'm trying to make is that some understanding of physics and chemistry is necessary to logically conclude that human activity drives harmful changes to the environment. For example, I understand that a glass box filled with carbon dioxide will be warmer after an hour under sunlight than the same box filled with oxygen. My parents don't. What follows is that my more liberal parent believes the environment should be protected and my more conservative parent believes it shouldn't. If they had both gone to college and taken chemistry and physics 101, like I did, then their political leanings would be irrelevant. They would understand that current rates of pollution, especially in the United States, are making the planet Earth uninhabitable* for their precious children and grandchildren! As it stands, one is a tree-hugger and the other a brow-beater, so the dialogue is at a stalemate. You can take this anecdote and apply it to the United States as a whole. We are politically split down the middle. Washington swings between right and left. Democratic presidents enact environmental protection, and Republican presidents undo it. The result is that the rate of pollution either stalls or increases. The problem is that at this rate of pollution, we're doomed to a terrible future. I just want the debate to be about the science. You can't have that debate with people who coasted through American high school.
- spacegod 7y agoIt's never about science and never will be. It's about funding and land acquisition. Always has been and always will be.
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoAlthough you didn't say anything to contradict this, I'd like to underscore that "people who coasted through high school" is a problem that transcends the divide. See the vaccine problem, where much of the problem resides in affluent left-leaning communities. What I wish the "right" would notice is that both the US military and the fossil fuel companies (that is, the highly-educated conservatives) have privately acknowledged anthropogenic climate change and are preparing for it. [edit] lol my goodness, who is downvoting me? advocates for the uneducated?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- javagram 7y agoIt’s not just about chemistry and physics though. You do have politicians who just deny climate change is a thing, but you also have people who believe that in 50 years technology will have advanced enough to allow us to innovate our way out of global warming. Arguably, the technology to stop or pause global warming (at least for decades while technology continues to develop and clean energy becomes more available) is available and cheap today, we just don’t feel impelled to use it yet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_inject...
- hedora 7y agoRome was in a similar situation toward the end, though apathy is widely cited as the root cause (and maybe lead poisoning), not lack of education.
- djstein 7y agomy thoughts exactly. water is wet.
- ars 7y agoIf you had actually read the article you would have seen it directly contradicts what you say. It says they are planning on changing the rules but nothing has actually changed yet. They do not give an explanation for why things changed.
- swebs 7y ago>Scientists say that it is too early to see the effects of changes in environmental policy of the Trump administration, which took office in January 2017.
- ceoloide 7y agoWhere can I find the data they refer to? These articles are maddening: they try hard to sound scienc-y and factual, yet they omit any reference that was used to draw their conclusions.
- dwardu 7y agoThey'll reply suggesting you do a simple Google search
- microcolonel 7y agoNote that air crosses borders, and wildfires are a primary cause of poor air quality days; the measure mentioned by the AP.
- Tsubasachan 7y agoWildfires are often manmade and exacerbated by climate change. Besides it doesn't matter what chokes you in the end dead is dead. I don't know if the US has air quality norms? If so it could force strong measures that impact the economy.
- microcolonel 7y ago> I don't know if the US has air quality norms? If so it could force strong measures that impact the economy. They have rather strong ones, a lot of people are completely ignorant of how this stuff works. The U.S. tracks air quality across the country with a rather high resolution[0][1]; here in Canada we don't seem to have anywhere near the quality of reporting[2], and the air quality seems similar. [0]: https://gispub.epa.gov/airnow/ https://gispub.epa.gov/airnow/ [1]: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=5f239fd3e72f424f98ef3d5def547eb5 https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=... [2]: https://weather.gc.ca/airquality/pages/index_e.html https://weather.gc.ca/airquality/pages/index_e.html
- Herodotus38 7y agoAs someone living in Washington state who dealt with wildfire smoke in 2017 and 2018 it's important to note the paragraph in the article that mentions that the 2017 data was largely affected by wildfires. In our state, a lot of these originate in Canada. It's an important note because the takeaway comments I see so far are directly implicating looser EPA regulations, when we don't have data to support that, yet.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- izend 7y agoI lived in Western Canada since 93 and it’s crazy how bad the last two years have been. Calgary’s August was brutal.
- Herodotus38 7y agoDo you think there's been any focus on ways to prevent these more? I imagine they are in very remote regions where there actually is very low risk of harm directly from the fires. I wonder if there is any possibility of using drones or satellite imaging to identify them early in a way that allows them to be put out before it becomes too expensive a problem to tackle. I don't know if that would actually help though because a lot of people argue it's a change in forest management and prescribed burns that allows these bigger problems to develop.
- stefan_ 7y agoCanadian smoke is safe?
- s0rce 7y agoBad the last couple years in northern California as well.
- fmajid 7y agoElections have consequences.
- avocado4 7y agohttp://maps.who.int/airpollution/ http://maps.who.int/airpollution/
- Retric 7y agoThat’s not a generic air pollution map, just particulate pollution which often gets really bad due to dry areas. Which is why the the Sahara desert is so bad without people.
- cameldrv 7y agoI wonder how much difference Gasoline Direct Injection has made. To meet fuel economy mandates it’s in most new car and light truck engines, and it produces way more particulates than engines that use normal fuel injection.