9 ms·

Visualizing Toxic Air

167 points by danso 4y ago

eterps 4y ago
> Making data public isn’t enough when it’s incomprehensible to the people it affects. ProPublica set out to decode a complex EPA data set to expose hot spots of industrial air pollution across the U.S. If at some point AR becomes commonplace I expect visualizing the hotspots directly would cause outrage. Not sure how best to visualize it in AR though.
- alexvoda 4y ago
  How about a Geiger counter style interface.
  - eterps 4y ago
    Yeah, or applying a red filter in really problematic areas would be terrifying IMO: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0647/0254/6158/files/TPB_Bkgrnd_Graphic1_77fed758-6a43-4071-acd0-100e63dbc267_720x.png https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0647/0254/6158/files/TPB_B...
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    You’ll know to run when the crackling in your 15th gen AirPods drowns out the righteous beats of your fave GPT-9 playlist.
- weberer 4y ago
  What is AR?
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    Augmented reality. Like Google Glasses, just significantly more advanced basically.
  - eterps 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
londons_explore 4y ago
It's time we moved towards a world of "you may not vent anything to the atmosphere". Ie. nothing may have a chimney, exhaust pipe, pressure release valve, or anything similar. All gases must be stored in a tank and reprocessed at gas recycling facilities, which can separate out and sell the gases. Even in your house, when you 'ventilate' the house, you are taking the stinky stuffy polluted indoor air and putting it into the environment. The volatile organics, farts, Nox from your cooker, CO2 from breath, and cooking smells aren't 'natural'. Instead, your house should purify its own gases with filters. Will it be expensive? Yes. But looking after the environment is expensive. But it's worth it.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Most of the stuff we pollute our inside air with is toxic for us. So we could get an easy win by stopping doing that. Filtered ventilation and heat recovery and good insulation are a powerful combination though.
- easytiger 4y ago
  That people live in such a fantasy land is concerning when energy production regulation is about to plunge the western world into full managed decline.
- sirmike_ 4y ago
  Absolutely not. Ridiculous regulations would beg to be ignored and summarily ludicrous by common folks. The climate is what it is. But its hardly to the level that your actions call for. No. Just no.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  You seem to be suggesting that our homes become airtight enclosures with filtered exhausts. Perhaps even an airlock to get in and out of the house. No outdoor barbecues, no campfires. What's next? No farting in the park? No thanks. I'm all for regulating industries, automobiles, etc. and to some extent what kinds of chemicals and materials can be used in the home but don't come telling me that I can't open a window to ventilate my house.
jefftk 4y ago
The map: https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/ https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  Thank you! I was beginning to question my reading comprehension when I couldn't find a link anywhere in the article.
- nerdyadventurer 4y ago
  Is there a similar map for the rest of the world? At least Europe?
  - jefftk 4y ago
    It's built on data American companies are required to provide, but maybe European regulators also collect this data?
danso 4y ago
> There are around 29 million 810-by-810 meter grid cells nationwide and more than 1.4 billion rows of data for a single year. Even using the largest database instance available on Amazon Web Services, it took up to a week to run queries on the data. Often, our queries took days simply to fail. It was a long, demotivating slog. > That’s when some colleagues told us about Google BigQuery, which is a Google Cloud services product that allows you to do SQL-style queries on very large data sets. Using BigQuery, code that once took a week to run finished in minutes. I use BigQuery at work for all my SQL processing, but I'm usually working with data in the 100K to 1M range that take 1 to 10 seconds to process and don't have to think of costs. Does anyone have an idea of what minutes-long queries involving billions of rows would typically cost?
- twoodfin 4y ago
  Why BigQuery for such small data sets?
  - danso 4y ago
    b/c BigQuery is our general data warehouse. We have some big datasets but also a lot of small ones that need to be joined and analyzed together.
nerdponx 4y ago
For anyone wondering what value governments provide, it's this. Yes, ProPublica is the one who did the analysis and data viz, but the federal government used some of our income taxes to collect this dataset. This is a clear case of the value that governments can provide with your tax money, and something that almost certainly would not be provided (free of charge!) by the free market.
- junofan 4y ago
  Doesn’t the article state that lots of data the government collected was just incorrect in obvious ways? 29% of facilities ProPublica contacted said the EPA’s data on them was wrong. And why didn’t the government pay for an interface and analysis that the public could easily use? I think people believe their tax money could be spent more wisely and competently.
  - hwillis 4y ago
    > 29% of facilities ProPublica contacted said the EPA’s data on them was wrong. I don't think it's necessary to point out why this is not very convincing > And why didn’t the government pay for an interface and analysis that the public could easily use? Because "the government" -specifically, the executive branch- has its upper leadership torn out and replaced with a completely new bunch of people with hugely different ideology if not an explicit political interest in dismantling the work of their forebears every 4 or 8 years. This is most obvious with the recent Trump admin, but applies in degree to every single administration. There used to be an internal, cross-disciplinary office that did API and visualization work for accountability reasons (unfortunately I forget the name). They did great work. It was dismantled and 90% of it was not replaced. The 10% that was replaced consists of (1) internal work (EIA being a good example, DOT being a bad one) that is driven entirely by the good will of employees who are fighting tooth and nail for any amount of budget to expose any amount of the work they do. And (2) external work by any number of massively wasteful contracting programs, like SBIR, where I used to work. Reagan's SBIR program mandates a certain amount of money to be spent on tiny (100k-1m) contracts which are either useless or unused, because there's no way to actually convert anything to a long-term status. Most of that money goes to defense, but make no mistake that the work there is also completely useless. The whole program should be lit on fire. > I think people believe their tax money could be spent more wisely and competently. It can, if people stop voting for republicans who intentionally destroy the only functional programs and then divert the money to completely worthless contractors in the name of "free markets".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
singularity2001 4y ago
The best Visualizing of Toxic Air I have seen so far was an electron microscope image of pollen covered in all kinds of plastic particles and immeasurable toxic chemicals. Whenever I hear the words allergic hey-fever to describe our bodies panic reaction to these "hyper reactive ninja stars" I am disgusted.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  I'd love to see that. A casual Google didn't get me anything that looked like what you're describing. Do you remember in what context you saw this?
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    Not quite what you're looking for, but evidence of the general idea - https://theecologist.org/2009/jun/19/pollution-may-affect-pollination-study-suggests https://theecologist.org/2009/jun/19/pollution-may-affect-po... Would like to see these pictures myself though, hope OP can find them.
  - hwillis 4y ago
    https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scanning-electron-micrograph-SEM-of-ambient-pollen-surface-which-particulates-are_fig3_225379108 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scanning-electron-microg... "electron microscope pollen pollution" showed a few similar papers. I did not read them, and microplastics seems a little... unexpected, but the general idea seems to be accurate. Kind of crazy.
weberer 4y ago
>RSEI uses emissions estimates industrial companies submit to the agency each year along with weather data and facility-specific information to estimate concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in half-mile-wide squares of land across the country. It sounds like the results are really dependent on whether or not these companies are lying. I would prefer to see them based on diagnosed cancer rates, but that data set probably doesn't exist.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  Yeah and it'd be noisy due to any regional differences in culture and behaviors. You'll see higher cancer rates in the South, with their love of sweet tea and fried fish, than you would in say, Colorado where there is more of a culture of fitness and health.
- hwillis 4y ago
  > I would prefer to see them based on diagnosed cancer rates, but that data set probably doesn't exist. Definitely not, especially in the US. Cancer is very highly correlated with age and body weight. Maine has one of the highest rates of cancer in the US, because the population average is the oldest in the US. Texas, despite a huge amount of air pollution, has relatively low rates of cancer because it's the second-youngest by average population age. Map of cancer rates per state: https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/AtAGlance/ https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/AtAGlance/
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Ideally you'd be able to look at baseline age and body weight data in a broader area, and then compare areas with comparable average ages & body weights that do and don't have high-carcinogen-emitting facilities nearby. You could even look specifically for less-emitting industrial areas as a control for lifestyle, access to medical care, and other forms of industrial pollution.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Popup immediately on page load. Clicked back instantly.
seltzered_ 4y ago
One of the interesting things I wish they mapped are where some of the corporate offices / residences are - Based on personal anecdote (could be wrong) for Houston I'd speculate much of it is further west in the residential areas of Katy, Sugarland, and The Woodlands, and downtown (westheimer/loop)
hcurtiss 4y ago
There are varying degrees of "toxic." Red blobs painted on a map may or may not be relevant to your health. Toxicity is an arena rife with controversy and dispute. That they (EPA IRIS, ATSDR, or the like) take a "Lowest Observed Effects Level" and then straight line it back to zero, and then apply myriad "uncertainty factors" to derive an "X in a million" chance of getting cancer -- in many ways, it's all make believe. Many toxics have non-linear toxicity thresholds (like table salt or tylenol), and there's plenty of reason to believe humans may be more resilient to toxic exposures than animal surrogates, and not less. These Pro Public efforts, or those by the Environmental Working Group, use data produced by public agencies to paint a picture of hazard out of context, and they can sometimes lead to very expensive policy prescriptions with very low return on investment in terms of human health.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  Yeah, I dunno. I'm sure that's what people were saying about the [Monroe school PCBs] behind the scenes – return on investment! It's too expensive! – but we shouldn't be comfortable with those factors being weighed in the dark with so little public accountability. If you want to tell me that the EWG has a chemical wrong, I'd buy that, but it should be the job of the people who want to make money off that chemical to persuade the public that it's fine – not to argue the public should go back to unawareness. [monroe school pcbs]: https://www.propublica.org/article/school-district-where-toxic-chemicals-lingered-for-years-offers-34-million-settlement-to-families https://www.propublica.org/article/school-district-where-tox...

167 points by danso 4y ago

> Making data public isn’t enough when it’s incomprehensible to the people it affects. ProPublica set out to decode a complex EPA data set to expose hot spots of industrial air pollution across the U.S. If at some point AR becomes commonplace I expect visualizing the hotspots directly would cause outrage. Not sure how best to visualize it in AR though.

alexvoda 4y ago
How about a Geiger counter style interface.
- eterps 4y ago
  Yeah, or applying a red filter in really problematic areas would be terrifying IMO: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0647/0254/6158/files/TPB_Bkgrnd_Graphic1_77fed758-6a43-4071-acd0-100e63dbc267_720x.png https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0647/0254/6158/files/TPB_B...
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  You’ll know to run when the crackling in your 15th gen AirPods drowns out the righteous beats of your fave GPT-9 playlist.
weberer 4y ago
What is AR?
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  Augmented reality. Like Google Glasses, just significantly more advanced basically.
- eterps 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

londons_explore 4y ago

It's time we moved towards a world of "you may not vent anything to the atmosphere". Ie. nothing may have a chimney, exhaust pipe, pressure release valve, or anything similar. All gases must be stored in a tank and reprocessed at gas recycling facilities, which can separate out and sell the gases. Even in your house, when you 'ventilate' the house, you are taking the stinky stuffy polluted indoor air and putting it into the environment. The volatile organics, farts, Nox from your cooker, CO2 from breath, and cooking smells aren't 'natural'. Instead, your house should purify its own gases with filters. Will it be expensive? Yes. But looking after the environment is expensive. But it's worth it.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Most of the stuff we pollute our inside air with is toxic for us. So we could get an easy win by stopping doing that. Filtered ventilation and heat recovery and good insulation are a powerful combination though.
easytiger 4y ago
That people live in such a fantasy land is concerning when energy production regulation is about to plunge the western world into full managed decline.
sirmike_ 4y ago
Absolutely not. Ridiculous regulations would beg to be ignored and summarily ludicrous by common folks. The climate is what it is. But its hardly to the level that your actions call for. No. Just no.
cassianoleal 4y ago
You seem to be suggesting that our homes become airtight enclosures with filtered exhausts. Perhaps even an airlock to get in and out of the house. No outdoor barbecues, no campfires. What's next? No farting in the park? No thanks. I'm all for regulating industries, automobiles, etc. and to some extent what kinds of chemicals and materials can be used in the home but don't come telling me that I can't open a window to ventilate my house.

jefftk 4y ago

The map: https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/ https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
Thank you! I was beginning to question my reading comprehension when I couldn't find a link anywhere in the article.
nerdyadventurer 4y ago
Is there a similar map for the rest of the world? At least Europe?
- jefftk 4y ago
  It's built on data American companies are required to provide, but maybe European regulators also collect this data?

danso 4y ago

> There are around 29 million 810-by-810 meter grid cells nationwide and more than 1.4 billion rows of data for a single year. Even using the largest database instance available on Amazon Web Services, it took up to a week to run queries on the data. Often, our queries took days simply to fail. It was a long, demotivating slog. > That’s when some colleagues told us about Google BigQuery, which is a Google Cloud services product that allows you to do SQL-style queries on very large data sets. Using BigQuery, code that once took a week to run finished in minutes. I use BigQuery at work for all my SQL processing, but I'm usually working with data in the 100K to 1M range that take 1 to 10 seconds to process and don't have to think of costs. Does anyone have an idea of what minutes-long queries involving billions of rows would typically cost?

twoodfin 4y ago
Why BigQuery for such small data sets?
- danso 4y ago
  b/c BigQuery is our general data warehouse. We have some big datasets but also a lot of small ones that need to be joined and analyzed together.

nerdponx 4y ago

For anyone wondering what value governments provide, it's this. Yes, ProPublica is the one who did the analysis and data viz, but the federal government used some of our income taxes to collect this dataset. This is a clear case of the value that governments can provide with your tax money, and something that almost certainly would not be provided (free of charge!) by the free market.

junofan 4y ago
Doesn’t the article state that lots of data the government collected was just incorrect in obvious ways? 29% of facilities ProPublica contacted said the EPA’s data on them was wrong. And why didn’t the government pay for an interface and analysis that the public could easily use? I think people believe their tax money could be spent more wisely and competently.
- hwillis 4y ago
  > 29% of facilities ProPublica contacted said the EPA’s data on them was wrong. I don't think it's necessary to point out why this is not very convincing > And why didn’t the government pay for an interface and analysis that the public could easily use? Because "the government" -specifically, the executive branch- has its upper leadership torn out and replaced with a completely new bunch of people with hugely different ideology if not an explicit political interest in dismantling the work of their forebears every 4 or 8 years. This is most obvious with the recent Trump admin, but applies in degree to every single administration. There used to be an internal, cross-disciplinary office that did API and visualization work for accountability reasons (unfortunately I forget the name). They did great work. It was dismantled and 90% of it was not replaced. The 10% that was replaced consists of (1) internal work (EIA being a good example, DOT being a bad one) that is driven entirely by the good will of employees who are fighting tooth and nail for any amount of budget to expose any amount of the work they do. And (2) external work by any number of massively wasteful contracting programs, like SBIR, where I used to work. Reagan's SBIR program mandates a certain amount of money to be spent on tiny (100k-1m) contracts which are either useless or unused, because there's no way to actually convert anything to a long-term status. Most of that money goes to defense, but make no mistake that the work there is also completely useless. The whole program should be lit on fire. > I think people believe their tax money could be spent more wisely and competently. It can, if people stop voting for republicans who intentionally destroy the only functional programs and then divert the money to completely worthless contractors in the name of "free markets".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

singularity2001 4y ago

The best Visualizing of Toxic Air I have seen so far was an electron microscope image of pollen covered in all kinds of plastic particles and immeasurable toxic chemicals. Whenever I hear the words allergic hey-fever to describe our bodies panic reaction to these "hyper reactive ninja stars" I am disgusted.

411111111111111 4y ago
I'd love to see that. A casual Google didn't get me anything that looked like what you're describing. Do you remember in what context you saw this?
- mandmandam 4y ago
  Not quite what you're looking for, but evidence of the general idea - https://theecologist.org/2009/jun/19/pollution-may-affect-pollination-study-suggests https://theecologist.org/2009/jun/19/pollution-may-affect-po... Would like to see these pictures myself though, hope OP can find them.
- hwillis 4y ago
  https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scanning-electron-micrograph-SEM-of-ambient-pollen-surface-which-particulates-are_fig3_225379108 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scanning-electron-microg... "electron microscope pollen pollution" showed a few similar papers. I did not read them, and microplastics seems a little... unexpected, but the general idea seems to be accurate. Kind of crazy.

weberer 4y ago

>RSEI uses emissions estimates industrial companies submit to the agency each year along with weather data and facility-specific information to estimate concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in half-mile-wide squares of land across the country. It sounds like the results are really dependent on whether or not these companies are lying. I would prefer to see them based on diagnosed cancer rates, but that data set probably doesn't exist.

Enginerrrd 4y ago
Yeah and it'd be noisy due to any regional differences in culture and behaviors. You'll see higher cancer rates in the South, with their love of sweet tea and fried fish, than you would in say, Colorado where there is more of a culture of fitness and health.
hwillis 4y ago
> I would prefer to see them based on diagnosed cancer rates, but that data set probably doesn't exist. Definitely not, especially in the US. Cancer is very highly correlated with age and body weight. Maine has one of the highest rates of cancer in the US, because the population average is the oldest in the US. Texas, despite a huge amount of air pollution, has relatively low rates of cancer because it's the second-youngest by average population age. Map of cancer rates per state: https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/AtAGlance/ https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/AtAGlance/
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Ideally you'd be able to look at baseline age and body weight data in a broader area, and then compare areas with comparable average ages & body weights that do and don't have high-carcinogen-emitting facilities nearby. You could even look specifically for less-emitting industrial areas as a control for lifestyle, access to medical care, and other forms of industrial pollution.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

Popup immediately on page load. Clicked back instantly.

seltzered_ 4y ago

One of the interesting things I wish they mapped are where some of the corporate offices / residences are - Based on personal anecdote (could be wrong) for Houston I'd speculate much of it is further west in the residential areas of Katy, Sugarland, and The Woodlands, and downtown (westheimer/loop)

hcurtiss 4y ago

There are varying degrees of "toxic." Red blobs painted on a map may or may not be relevant to your health. Toxicity is an arena rife with controversy and dispute. That they (EPA IRIS, ATSDR, or the like) take a "Lowest Observed Effects Level" and then straight line it back to zero, and then apply myriad "uncertainty factors" to derive an "X in a million" chance of getting cancer -- in many ways, it's all make believe. Many toxics have non-linear toxicity thresholds (like table salt or tylenol), and there's plenty of reason to believe humans may be more resilient to toxic exposures than animal surrogates, and not less. These Pro Public efforts, or those by the Environmental Working Group, use data produced by public agencies to paint a picture of hazard out of context, and they can sometimes lead to very expensive policy prescriptions with very low return on investment in terms of human health.

kixiQu 4y ago
Yeah, I dunno. I'm sure that's what people were saying about the [Monroe school PCBs] behind the scenes – return on investment! It's too expensive! – but we shouldn't be comfortable with those factors being weighed in the dark with so little public accountability. If you want to tell me that the EWG has a chemical wrong, I'd buy that, but it should be the job of the people who want to make money off that chemical to persuade the public that it's fine – not to argue the public should go back to unawareness. [monroe school pcbs]: https://www.propublica.org/article/school-district-where-toxic-chemicals-lingered-for-years-offers-34-million-settlement-to-families https://www.propublica.org/article/school-district-where-tox...