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This is one of the things where it matters more how healthy/unpolluted your environment is. I'd dare to say that a not-so-phisically-active moderate-smoker liv

• pas 5y ago
  Legally mandating remote work and adding public transit options and raising the cost of daily useless commute would go a veeeeeery long way. Because the petrol not burned by driving can be used to replace the coal plants.
  • catchclose8919 5y ago
    > Legally mandating remote work That's... extremely totalitarian :) ...but legally forcing employers to allow remote work X days a week for jobs where it makes sense + solid investment in public transit would make wonders.
    • goodpoint 5y ago
      No, it's not totalitarian at all. The same as not accepting slavery, murder or cannibalism. This is totalitarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
    • LadyCailin 5y ago
      I’m not defending totalitarianism, but capitalist democracy really does a piss poor job at controlling negative externalities, to the point that I’m not really convinced it’s a good system of governance anymore.
      • barry-cotter 5y ago
        Tax the externalities. Capitalism is fully compatible with using the price system to express preferences on externalities.
        • Retric 5y ago
          Capitalism operates fine when you tax the externalities, it’s democracy that has an issue setting up the taxes rationally rather than based on which groups have political power.
        • LadyCailin 5y ago
          Ok, so instead of “force companies to allow remote work” it’s “tax companies that don’t allow remote work a bajillion dollars a microsecond”. What’s the practical difference there?
          • pas 5y ago
            um, the tax should be on the externalities. like the pollution due to commute, road wear, the generated traffic contributing to the peak. (eg. if you start work at ~11 instead of at 9 you contribute less to the peak)
          • barry-cotter 5y ago
            There’s no intellectually defensible way to price the externalities off remote work at a bajillion dollars a microsecond. On some level you have to trust someone somewhere to do a good job. Taxes are tools to help that, not a substitute for it.
            • LadyCailin 5y ago
    • pas 5y ago
      Yes. Carbon taxes (and probably some land value tax) are the preferred solution.
  • IMTDb 5y ago
    I think you are overestimating the amount of jobs that can be done remotely. Things that can never be done remotely: agriculture, construction, manufacture, hospitality, a big part of health/elder care, a big part of education, anything that requires expensive equipment (research, ...), artists/shows/events, the list goes on. A lot of these sectors were either closed or running slow during COVID, which was not sustainable (you can't maintain the purchasing power of an entire population for decades if suddenly half of it stops working - it only works for a short while if you expect to be able to repay the debt you incurred to keep non-working people afloat). So even if every single person that can work remotely does so, still expect big cities with transportation issues. And that's without counting all the jobs that can be done remotely but are better done in office.
    • necovek 5y ago
      Not to go into each of your counter-examples, but while some of them can't be done remotely today, surely we can get there. Eg. how far away are we from having remote-controlled tractors and combine-harvesters? Sure, get them home into a garage when they need servicing. Hospitality? There are places which, especially in the first pandemic year, have gone all hands-off (eg. get a token to access a property on your check-in without talking to anyone). But rather than can we, I think the point should be should we? There's a psychological cost to working with people you've never met personally, never hanged around with... And some people will struggle to get any social activity happening in their lives without work. I've worked remotely for 15+ years, but I don't think it's for everybody, or for anybody all the time.
      • throwaway889900 5y ago
        You understand that agriculture didn't shut down because farmers couldn't sit on their tractors and pull equipment, but because nobody was buying the product they were producing, right?
        • necovek 5y ago
          I am talking of a technical possibility of remote work for farmers. I am not sure what you are talking about?
• firstplacelast 5y ago
  On a population wide evaluation, you are correct. However, some people are just more susceptible. It's complex, but if you just take a simplistic view of a single gene becoming cancerous, some people are only 1 mutation away and others are hundreds.
  • catchclose8919 5y ago
    100% correct, but...this is the type of rhetoric that some industries employ to "muddy the waters" when they want to lobby against banning certain chemicals or processes. Start with "it's complex" and "some people are just more susceptible" and you have a great platform for arguing against eg. banning lead-additived gasoline. Then add the shifting away of blame from industry and corporations to individuals, sprinkle some "focus on what you can do" (eg. the "ban plastic straws" type useless token-gesture) or "it's that little things" and you get exactly the kinds of stuff industry is currently gaslighting us with, distracting us from high-impact but profit-lowering big measures that could be implemented instead! Nuanced thinking can be weaponized against you just as well as black-and-white oversimplification...
• holoduke 5y ago
  I expected after COVID there would be much more focus on air control/monitoring. How nice would it be to have constant air measurements in neighbourhoods and inside houses. And not only CO particles, but a wide variety. Unfortunately I see hardly any focus on it anymore.
  • faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    I bought a CO2 sensor, and found that the CO2 levels rise to unhealthy levels in like half an hour in my room without opening my window. Since then I only sleep with a window slightly open, and open it periodically during the day. I also run an air purifier all the time, but I cannot yet measure it's efficacy, because a particle counter is like 2-3× more expensive than a CO2 sensor, so I haven't invested in it yet.
    • dqpb 5y ago
      If you have central heating / AC, running it in fan mode also helps a lot in reducing CO2 in a room.
      • giantg2 5y ago
        Yep, I leave the fan on all the time to circulate air in the house. The levels seem to range from 450-550ppm. I was surprised at how low that is considering this is a newer house.
        • dqpb 5y ago
          450-550 is great, especially since ambient levels outside are about 420. I live in an old house and with windows closed and no hvac fan running, rooms only take about 30 minutes to get up to 800ppm with one person in them. After an hour or two they get up to about 1050ppm. With two people, they get > 1000 pretty quickly. Looking at metrics from the sensor is pretty interesting too. You can see, to the minute, when a room went from unoccupied to occupied.
    • 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
• rplnt 5y ago
  > a polluted industrial hellhole Doesn't have to be industrial. Just any city full of cars will do.
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    Does bushfire count too? I guess so.
  • throwawayffffas 5y ago
    It's not just cars, standards matter. Have a look here. https://waqi.info/#/c/29.217/70.608/3.8z https://waqi.info/#/c/29.217/70.608/3.8z And that is just the things we regularly monitor, think of all the toxic crap several industrial process may be releasing.
  • EL_Loco 5y ago
    You're right. Each car is like one mini factory spewing out its exhaust into the air.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      But those mini factories have gotten much cleaner over the years, yet we still see a 30% increase in young adult cancers over 1970s levels. So while it's a potential contributor, it seems there could be more at play. Edit: why downvote?
      • tremon 5y ago
        How much cleaner have they gotten, and how much more miles do these factories get driven? Taking a look at https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles (the first useful result I could find), highway vehicle miles have almost tripled since the 1970s (1.1 trillion miles in 1970 vs 3.2 in 2019). Have cars gotten 70% cleaner in the same timespan?
        • giantg2 5y ago
          It's not about miles driven. It's about air quality in cities. Just looking at efficiency, we see that people get 50% more miles per gallon today than in 1978. This doesn't even include impact from emmissions equipment, electric/hybrid cars, etc. Plus, most highway miles are not in cities. Pollutants can disperse and settle out (not ideal in general, but relevant to air quality it is positive). They also have lower densities of people in the area to affect, which should affect the overall population numbers less. According to the EPA, cars (and trucks and busses) are 99% cleaner today than in the 70s. https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate-change/accomplishments-and-success-air-pollution-transportation https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...
• refurb 5y ago
  The point is - even in the absence of external factors, you may get cancer. A good part of the cause of cancer are natural processes - errors in DNA replication, oxidative stress due to infection or hell, just plain metabolism. Then add on top all the genetic errors you inherited from your parents. You could live in a bubble of pure clean air and only eat pure, clean organic food and get cancer. The answer is to do the best you can, then live your life.
  • catchclose8919 5y ago
    > even in the absence of external factors, you may get cancer That's like saying "even in the absence of lead poisoning, your child could still be retarded". > You could live in a bubble ...they point is we do live in "a bubble", it's called Earth, and we can work to make this a cleaner and less toxic bubble. I know perfectly well that cancer is a natural component of aging. And I also know that advances in anti-aging and regenerative medicine will make it possible to live longer and for this very reason cancer will be MORE of problem in the future and for future generations. Heck if modern medicine could enable my children to reach a theoretical max age of 250 years, I don't want them to only achieve let's say 50% of that achievable lifespan-increase because we've left them a "poisoned bubble" to live in. It's amazing how little people want to pay attention to the environment and justify this by arguments of "but wrong thing X could still happen in regardless of environment" (ignoring that its probability would be 20% lower in a different environment). And when we do, we focus on fuzzy global properties of the environment that are hard to predict and have uncertain effects (eg. "global average temperature") instead of all the toxic stuff that can be easily traced and measured and where reduction would have impacts (measurable if people would be able to spend the money and relax some "ethical" rules to properly measure them...).
    • refurb 5y ago
      Not sure what your rant is getting at but my point stands - eliminate all pollution (even naturally occurring arsenic?) and you’d reduce cancer rates by maybe 30%. Worthwhile? Of course? Going to get rid of cancer? No.
• pjc50 5y ago
  > not with me or loved ones dying 20 years earlier of cancer The problem with this stuff is that it's not a hard "20 years earlier", it's minor tweaks to the statistical odds, and without special training humans are just not very good at coping with lots of different low risk of death issues. We've seen this highlighted with COVID, where people have taken the death odds to mean both extremes of "this is completely irrelevant to me so I'm not going to get vaccinated or wear a mask" and "I'm not leaving the house again". Those then cross over with the moralising of risk. This article is "I did everything right, I'm a good person, so why did I get cancer?" to which I can only answer that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and that we're all mortal and vulnerable to horrible internal surprises. Plenty of the people in the "not leaving the house again" category know that, if they were to catch COVID, people would point to their pre-existing conditions as a reason why they deserve to die, and would be blamed for taking risks. People absolutely love to moralise about weight, as well. There was a story going around twitter the other day of "my dad lost several stone unexpectedly, couldn't get his doctor to do anything other than congratulate him, then died of undiagnosed cancer". Medical professionals being unable to look past the weight to realize that rapid weight loss is a bad sign.
• goodpoint 5y ago
  > I'd wish we lived in a world where we could actually address chemical, air-particulate +/- microplastics pollution seriously, and stuff like PFOAs that are still used round, without having it be totally overshadowed and drowned in noise by the "fight climate change" crowd or the "extinction rebellion" nutcases. Most of the people you called "nutcases" are protesting against exactly the pollutants you described.
  • catchclose8919 5y ago
    OK, I agree I'm not that informed about ER, probably I've only heard of some of their more misguided actions, maybe even overemphasized by their enemies. ...but their name and their most used description doesn't help either: first words you read are "climate change" and "biodiversity loss". No organization can focus on everything, and if they've chosen to focus on that, then from my pov. they're not focusing on what I care about most: engineering and sustaining environments (natural or artificial or hybrid...) that maximize HUMAN health & lifespan in economically sustainable ways.
    • tremon 5y ago
      that maximize HUMAN health & lifespan in economically sustainable ways Which HUMANs? Only the ones alive today, or also the ones living 100 years from now? And why focus only on economically sustainable, don't you think that ecologically sustainable, socially sustainable or even morally defensible merit equal consideration?
• bookaway 5y ago
  >I'd dare to say that a not-so-phisically-active moderate-smoker living in a less polluted environment has way lower cancer risk than a bio-vegan athlete buddhist monk living in a polluted industrial hellhole. I always heard of general phrasing like "increases likelihood of cancer", but this sentence gives me the impression that there have been multiple conclusive studies on the direct contributions of urban pollution to individual cases of cancer. Can someone here who looked through such studies comment, or at least point to them by any chance?
• Gatsky 5y ago
  The effect sizes of carcinogenic (or potentially carcinogenic) environmental risk factors are small compared to the very high baseline risk of getting cancer over the long lifetimes we are blessed with. Some cancers, like prostate cancer, don't have any proven environmental or lifestyle risk factors. Consider smoking - the exposure of the lungs to cigarette smoke is very high and very consistent compared to almost all other environmental exposures which are also generally less carcinogenic. The key question is - are cancers getting more common without a good explanation [1], and if so which ones? The answer is that upper gastrointestinal cancers do some to be getting more common. These are plausibly due to dietary changes and/or obesity. Personally, I think ingesting huge amounts of added sugar, particularly fructose, is the potential unifying culprit. [1] Many cancers are increasing in incidence because of better screening and detection. Breast cancer is a good example. Other cancers like leukaemia or pancreatic cancer couldn't even be reliably diagnosed 100 years ago, so obviously they are more common today.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >Some cancers, like prostate cancer, don't have any proven environmental or lifestyle risk factors. Prostate cancer is associated with contracting STD's: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15988645/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15988645/ Conclusions: This meta-analysis provides evidence of a higher rate of prostate cancer in men with a history of an exposure to gonorrhea, HPV, or any STD.
    • Gatsky 5y ago
      This evidence is preliminary and the odds ratios are small. Also, consider the very high prevalence of prostate cancer - it is implausible that STDs are a major or important cause.
      • samsa 5y ago
        According to the CDC the majority of sexually active adults in the US will get HPV at some point in their lives.
      • 5y ago
• midjji 5y ago
  It would be nice if we did, but while this would likely lower cancer slightly, I dont think it would come anywhere close to eliminating it. I think cancer is mostly a tradeoff for auto immune diseases and adaptation speed. A immune system good enough to prevent them, would also kill most all, and prevent any deviation from its template. This is particularly likely for the kinds of cancers which hit before 40. In general, I think both the op, and this post vastly underestimates how little people actions affect the probability of cancer. Sure you can lower them slightly, but I have never seen anything indicating you can drop the odds of cancer more than 10% by clean living and pristine environments. Highly specific issues like very high radiation does concretely increase the odd's, but its barely noticeable outside of old school radiology nurses, or nuclear accidents. Things like a heavy tobacco habit does increase the odds substantially and significantly above baseline, but most people who smoke daily for a few years are still far more likely to die of something else. We can also infer that microplastics is less carcinogenous than tobacco due to its prevalence and negligible increase in cancer. Not saying its safe, just worth remembering that most cancer is better through of as bad luck, and very unlikely to be the persons fault. Basically cancer isnt anything you can expect that healthy habits, healthy food, or pristine environments could have fixed. In the astonishingly rich biosphere there are exceptions to everything though, impossibly improbable things which had eons to occur. Concretely, we have yet to design a single antibiotic, geneditor or new trait, instead we find them. I care very little about the downsides for humans caused by pollution and global warming, but the loss of information which comes with damaging the biosphere is incomprehensible. In other words, I'm all for fixing both, but not at the expense of the biosphere. Fortunately, nuclear is a perfectly good alternative.
  • catchclose8919 5y ago
    > the loss of information which comes with damaging the biosphere is incomprehensible I totally agree on this. This is why it saddens me that in the current set of overlapping information wars we're living in, "biodiversity loss" was also weaponized and used like another red herring to distract people in many fights. Take pesticides and herbicides for example - it's 100% percent clear that they are a huge cause of biodiversity loss. But practically all the opponents of pesticides are also against artificial fertilizers and against GMOs that when used properly actually have a much lower impact on wildlife, and in many areas of the world they are absolutely necessary to prevent famine. (Also, why aren't we actively developing GMOs that work with less pesticides and herbicides instead of the current abominable idea of developing plants resistent to higher doses of these chemicals? It's like we have a tool but we're using it all wrong to screw ourselves with it... maybe we need to have more state-funded GMO research instead of having it all in private sector with skewed incentives.) Now, when people are made to choose between "full bio agriculture" (no pesticides at all AND no artificial fertilizers) and "classical agriculture", it's obvious the odds are stacked against full-bio, and any discussion on better limiting and regulating use of pesticides is avoided. Also, nobody even raises the issue that going full-bio would mean lower yields, ergo larger swaths of lands would need to be used for agriculture, so less land for wildlife and potentially more loss of biodiversity. And when people argue against hydro lowering biodiversity, we rarely discuss how its alternatives would also impact biodiversity probably even more. To make it clear, I'm not against focusing on biodiversity, I'm against it's current "weaponization" and use as a red-herring together with climate-change in a "mixed eco-activist save-the-planet-from-humans + CO2 is the devil" discourse that prevents any meaningful and results oriented discussion... > Fortunately, nuclear is a perfectly good alternative. Then let's solve the political and economical problems that make it unfeasible in most places. Let's build 100% non-military nuclear programs that are safe + cost-effective.
• codeflow2202 5y ago
  This. I live in Belgium coming from Italy and it's scary how many people I know gets cancer here. Like someone i know every few months gets it (and I'm not talking about just old people. A couple guys i know got it in their 20s). And it's all people relatively healthy. Compare that to Italy where nobody I know does any effort to be healthy, eats lots of red meat (we do like our pork meat but it's all local stuff), smoke, veggies just a small side dish, no sport at all and they still live longer, healthier lives. The few people i know who got cancer there, were well over their 60s (and all of them eventually survived). I'm talking about the region Umbria which is pretty pristine and barely industrialized. This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live.
  • paulcole 5y ago
    > This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live. Imagine you’re completely wrong about this — because it’s a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in. What’s another answer for why Belgians seem to get cancer more often than Italians?
    • catchclose8919 5y ago
      > a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in Why would it be "dangerous"? It should be almost completely common sense. Sure, the conclusion is not a comfortable realization for rich industrial countries that have completely poisoned themselves and really don't want to pay the bill for any sort of large scale investigation (factory by factory, soil patch by soil patch, each commonly used construction material etc.) and massive decontamination measures that would have to come after... Anyway, people will make tradeoffs, and they'll likely choose to live in places with better paid jobs... but they're damn well entitled to ask for an extra 25% on that already large enticing salary if it comes with +X% probability of terrible illness and lower life expectancy!
      • rytill 5y ago
        It is a dangerous assumption if wrong because it prescribes that you can do most unhealthy activities and they are not major factors for your health outcomes.
• bsenftner 5y ago
  This goes back to my pet theory that Humans do Not Scale: because we treat others as anonymous, the entire pork producing industry feeds waste plastics to their pork, and this is considered ordinary behavior. https://www.dailydot.com/irl/plastic-pig-feed-tiktok/ https://www.dailydot.com/irl/plastic-pig-feed-tiktok/ (not the only source, this video and issue has gone viral) This is why we can't have nice things or a nice life: everyone treats the anonymous other as disposable. That makes everyone disposable, and our society a degenerate hellhole.
• victor106 5y ago
  We do know absolutely that some environmental pollutants cause cancer(s) and other health related. Outside of the known pollutants I am curious to know how much of the world population living in normal polluted areas vs living in highly polluted areas have more cancers? Also it would be interesting to get data on the tribes living in say the Amazon. If their incidence of cancers is above or below average the rest of the human population
• jpmattia 5y ago
  You got me curious about cancer rates by country: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/global-cancer-data-by-country/ https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/global-cancer-data-by-cou... They list 50 countries, and relevant to your post: - Belgium #4 with 329.9/100K - Italy #24 with 290.6/100K Not a huge difference tbh. Regarding the comments about vitamin D, Sweden is lower than Italy. So I think the correct conclusion is: These things are complicated.
  • uwagar 5y ago
    i was looking for india and its not even on the list. cancer is quite low in india me thinks probably because of a predominantly vegetarian diet
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      It would be helpful to know where the lowest rates are, even though reporting accuracy is probably also lower. The bottom third of the list would still be informative, but the Institute does not seem to have that.
  • wbsss4412 5y ago
    A 16% reduction solely on the basis of which country you’re in seems like a pretty substantial reduction to me.
• seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Hydro capacity is limited from how much water is coming down from the mountains. With global warming, it is about to be much more limited. China trying to tap some of the last great untapped hydro reserves left in the world (in Tibet) could also have serious environmental consequences for India and Southeast Asia (not just wildlife, but people who need water to farm and live). Dams are not purely virtuous.
• frazbin 5y ago
  Came here to say this. Any lovely old chemical fabs in her little slice of Bengaluru I wonder?
• bglazer 5y ago
  Just checked with my cancer textbook and it cites a 1990 study from the Netherlands that indicates that curing all cancer would increase life spans by a little less than 4 years. Most people who get cancer are quite old. This doesn’t lessen the tragedy of young people dying from cancer but it is rare.
• JohnWhigham 5y ago
  I hope we look at plastics/PFAS/pththalates in 50 years as we look at smoking and asbestos now. But given how anemic our federal government has been for the past 30 years and is only working for the people less and less, I'm not hopeful.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  Part of me thinks that "green energy", "saving the environment", "stopping global warming" are all partly promoted by big businesses who know that they're unattainable goals, to keep us focused on some lofty ideal rather than focusing on small-scale environmental dangers. I remember visiting San Francisco, supposedly the liberal utopia of the west, and finding that I was forced to endure choking smog in order to use any public transit. Why are California's public transit stations all built near major highways, at street level, parallel with huge trucks and busses, with no ventilation? Because no one cares about you, it's all about "being green", whatever THAT means.