[HN Gopher] Pollution from fossil fuel combustion deadlier than ...
___________________________________________________________________
Pollution from fossil fuel combustion deadlier than previously
thought
Author : seesawtron
Score : 42 points
Date : 2021-03-24 21:48 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hsph.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hsph.harvard.edu)
| ipnon wrote:
| Some economic gains we will see from adoption of EVs and clean
| energy:
|
| 1. Real estate prices in high traffic metros like Los Angeles and
| Houston will increase further because the return to clear skies
| from smoggy days and fresh air will be a bonus.
|
| 2. People will suddenly start living much longer lives with more
| quality years at the tail end "for some strange reason."
|
| 3. Cancer rates will stabilize "for some strange reason."
| scrose wrote:
| As an asthma sufferer, I went from needing my rescue inhaler
| several times a day to not touching it for several months
| during the pandemic. The only thing that changed was I was
| biking and walking through empty streets compared to navigating
| through a sea of exhausts for most of my trips.
|
| Infrastructure that doesn't encourage driving everywhere, and a
| switch to EV's in cases where you 'just have to', can't come
| soon enough.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| None of those are "economical benefits. Unquestionably social
| benefits, but increased longevity hardly improves the economy.
| staplers wrote:
| Something to consider when discussing EV's is that they
| outsource energy production to industrial/rural areas.
| Sometimes to "sustainable" sources (hydro, wind, solar) but
| often to coal, nat gas, etc.
|
| I suspect the added electricity demand from everyone switching
| to EV's won't be easily supplied by renewables thus creating
| this problem elsewhere.
|
| Hopefully it's possible but the cynic in me disagrees.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Even moving the combustion byproducts from where the people
| are to where the power plants are is a small win. That the
| plants can more easily install scrubbers for some pollutants
| is a further small win. That they are more efficient (even
| with 15% charging losses) is another small win. That the use
| of renewables can grow over time without car owners having to
| upgrade is another small win.
|
| Stack up enough small wins and you can get to sizeable gains.
| stefan_ wrote:
| You can literally take the oil we use right now to power cars
| and dump it in a generator to get electricity, and not only
| would you go farther but do it with less pollution at places
| where pollution matters less.
|
| "Where will the electricity come from" is unadulterated FUD.
| munk-a wrote:
| We've always got Nuclear energy and that will scale pretty
| much to the moon - old generation reactors have all sorts of
| fatal flaws including requiring a fuel that we have trouble
| acquiring, but that problems mostly been solved.
|
| Nah - I think your gut reaction is mostly just decades of
| propaganda painting fossil fuels as a necessary evil.
|
| On the topic of pure renewables - hydro definitely can't
| scale, we can get a lot more out of it then we currently are
| but it's comparatively not clean and most locations don't
| have unlimited options for power harnessing - wind and solar
| scale up pretty ridiculously and in most parts of the world
| one or the other is going to be quite accessible and, we've
| also got geothermal and some other options that we can look
| at.
|
| Beyond that we can look into demand reduction, the dead
| simplist of these is insulation/passive cooling requirements
| on housing and taxing private transportation to encourage
| ride-sharing especially in the commercial realm.
|
| We've got some great options to look at if only the coal
| barons would STFU and go away.
| p1necone wrote:
| Stationary power generation even with fossil fuels is still
| more efficient than ICEs. This is just FUD.
| mrtksn wrote:
| EV's may not completely solve the pollution problems because,
| as I was pointed out, the particles from the asphalt and the
| tires are actually major pollutants.
|
| Apparently, the dark greasy stuff that you can see covering
| everything close to vehicle roads is not coming from the fumes
| but from the asphalt, tires and brakes.
| jeffbee wrote:
| EVs do nearly eliminate brake dust, which is a large
| component of vehicle particulate emissions.
| xnx wrote:
| I'm optimistic that self-driving cars (in addition to
| primarily being electric) will be better maintained (tire
| pressure, lubrication, etc.) and better driven (fewer hard
| stops and starts) and that will reduce tire, brake, and road
| wear.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Mostly true, but some is fluid leaks, of which there are
| fewer in a typical EV (fewer fluid systems, more constant
| pressures in them, and EVs are newer and less frequently in
| disrepair; that last point is a downside in some ways as
| almost no one will be driving a 2015 Tesla in 2070 while
| there are tens of thousands of 1960s era Mustangs still
| operating).
| zetazzed wrote:
| Our grandchildren will look at old films of people blithely
| walking around next to internal combustion vehicles and laugh in
| mild horror, much as we look back on images of parents puffing
| away on cigarettes next to a child.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| My dad smoked 2 pack a day, I hated it. He was an early riser
| and by the time I got out of bed there was a haze hanging in
| the kitchen/dining room, everyday for most of my childhood.
|
| On the bright side, I wanted nothing to do with cigarettes from
| a young age.
|
| I took the family to Europe in 2019, in terms of smokers and
| smoking it was like going back in time compared to the US.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That depends very much on which country you visit.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| This is not primarily about cars, as some would've concluded from
| the headline
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-24 23:00 UTC)