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Fossil fuel heating is _extremely_ polluting, and really costing the population months, up to years of their life. But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize

Fossil fuel heating is _extremely_ polluting, and really costing the population months, up to years of their life. But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.

praptak 9mo ago
To be exact: the problem here is fossil fuel and wood being burned in inefficient furnaces/stoves/fireplaces where the fuel doesn't fully burn. There are efforts by the government to replace them but they aren't super effective yet (random example: https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy). For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
It depends what you're burning and how you burn it. If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out. If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust. It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove the CO and HC by reacting it with what little excess oxygen there is in the exhaust stream to turn it into carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses. We'd have incredibly clean cities if we ran vehicles on propane instead of petrol, and in the UK there was a big push to do this about 25-30 years ago. Obviously this got a lot of pushback from the banks and car manufacturers, because it wasn't selling people enough debt. Don't adapt your existing car to run on clean fuel that's mostly burnt as production waste! Sell your dirty polluting petrol car that only gets 38MPG and buy this nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel that gets an incredible 39MPG! And all at only 14.7% APR! Profit before the environment, as always.
- ansgri 9mo ago
  Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer. Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    LPG cars are also very popular in Poland, because of fuel prices. Not sure about new cars, but if you buy a used car that hasn't somehow yet been converted to burn LPG, the conversion is pretty much the first thing you do.
- harmonics 9mo ago
  I know developed countries have a very different understanding of the word "clean", but in my city -- which is stuck in the 18th century -- the difference between winter and summer months is extreme. 500-1000 µg/m³ of PM2.5 in winter is the usual deal. 1500-2000 µg/m³ are not unheard of. Yet in summer it's often only 5-10 µg/m³, with spikes of no more than 50 µg/m³ in the evenings due to -- again -- coal burning. And we have a lot of traffic, regular traffic jams. The average age of a typical car is older than 10 years, according to government data. Most of them are used cars with 100k miles (or more) on them imported from western Europe or the US. Still, the difference in particulates in summer vs winter is literally hundreds of times.
- tpm 9mo ago
  > catastrophic converters Nice one. Anyway three-way catalytic converters also convert NOx to N2 and O2. It would be quite bad if they wouldn't. > You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out. No, you still get small amounts of the bad (acutely toxic) stuff too. This point is important - whether it's home cooking on gas, gas heating or ICEs running on unicorn farts, there will still be byproducts from imperfect burning. The only real way out is to turn off the fire.
ansgri 9mo ago
Natural gas heating is not the problem in this case, it burns very cleanly with semi-modern heaters. The pollution is from coal, wood, and especially all kinds of trash (plastic, painted cardboard, pieces of various engineering wood products).
- readthenotes1 9mo ago
  I'm the US, one presidential administration spent some effort to also squash natural gas.
eru 9mo ago
And burning wood ain't any prettier for the local air. And not all fossil fuels are equal: natural gas is burns fairly clean, coal is a nightmare. (Note: I specifically say for the local. I'm not talking about global CO2 levels here. That's a different topic.)

Fossil fuel heating is _extremely_ polluting, and really costing the population months, up to years of their life. But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.

praptak 9mo ago

To be exact: the problem here is fossil fuel and wood being burned in inefficient furnaces/stoves/fireplaces where the fuel doesn't fully burn. There are efforts by the government to replace them but they aren't super effective yet (random example: https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy). For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).

ErroneousBosh 9mo ago

It depends what you're burning and how you burn it. If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out. If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust. It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove the CO and HC by reacting it with what little excess oxygen there is in the exhaust stream to turn it into carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses. We'd have incredibly clean cities if we ran vehicles on propane instead of petrol, and in the UK there was a big push to do this about 25-30 years ago. Obviously this got a lot of pushback from the banks and car manufacturers, because it wasn't selling people enough debt. Don't adapt your existing car to run on clean fuel that's mostly burnt as production waste! Sell your dirty polluting petrol car that only gets 38MPG and buy this nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel that gets an incredible 39MPG! And all at only 14.7% APR! Profit before the environment, as always.

ansgri 9mo ago
Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer. Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  LPG cars are also very popular in Poland, because of fuel prices. Not sure about new cars, but if you buy a used car that hasn't somehow yet been converted to burn LPG, the conversion is pretty much the first thing you do.
harmonics 9mo ago
I know developed countries have a very different understanding of the word "clean", but in my city -- which is stuck in the 18th century -- the difference between winter and summer months is extreme. 500-1000 µg/m³ of PM2.5 in winter is the usual deal. 1500-2000 µg/m³ are not unheard of. Yet in summer it's often only 5-10 µg/m³, with spikes of no more than 50 µg/m³ in the evenings due to -- again -- coal burning. And we have a lot of traffic, regular traffic jams. The average age of a typical car is older than 10 years, according to government data. Most of them are used cars with 100k miles (or more) on them imported from western Europe or the US. Still, the difference in particulates in summer vs winter is literally hundreds of times.
tpm 9mo ago
> catastrophic converters Nice one. Anyway three-way catalytic converters also convert NOx to N2 and O2. It would be quite bad if they wouldn't. > You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out. No, you still get small amounts of the bad (acutely toxic) stuff too. This point is important - whether it's home cooking on gas, gas heating or ICEs running on unicorn farts, there will still be byproducts from imperfect burning. The only real way out is to turn off the fire.

ansgri 9mo ago

Natural gas heating is not the problem in this case, it burns very cleanly with semi-modern heaters. The pollution is from coal, wood, and especially all kinds of trash (plastic, painted cardboard, pieces of various engineering wood products).

readthenotes1 9mo ago
I'm the US, one presidential administration spent some effort to also squash natural gas.

eru 9mo ago

And burning wood ain't any prettier for the local air. And not all fossil fuels are equal: natural gas is burns fairly clean, coal is a nightmare. (Note: I specifically say for the local. I'm not talking about global CO2 levels here. That's a different topic.)