[HN Gopher] Visualizing Toxic Air
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Visualizing Toxic Air
        
       Author : danso
       Score  : 154 points
       Date   : 2022-08-22 10:43 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.propublica.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.propublica.org)
        
       | hcurtiss wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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-tox...
        
       | eterps wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | weberer wrote:
         | What is AR?
        
           | 411111111111111 wrote:
           | Augmented reality.
           | 
           | Like Google Glasses, just significantly more advanced
           | basically.
        
           | eterps wrote:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
        
         | alexvoda wrote:
         | How about a Geiger counter style interface.
        
           | eterps wrote:
           | 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_B.
           | ..
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | easytiger wrote:
         | 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_ wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | feet wrote:
           | Cow farts are already a huge producer of atmospheric methane,
           | a greenhouse gas
        
             | cassianoleal wrote:
             | There is at least some controversy around the actual impact
             | of cow's methane in global warming [0] [1].
             | 
             | I was mostly talking about humans farting in the park
             | though. In any case, I guess the solution is to install
             | catalytic converter in all human and animal exhausts, like
             | we do for cars, I guess. Right? :D
             | 
             | [0] https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/biogenic-carbon-
             | cycle-a... [1] https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/why-
             | methane-cattle-warm...
        
         | ZeroGravitas wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | tambourine_man wrote:
         | I keep thinking of a "you wouldn't piss in the pool" analogy
         | for a marketing campaign.
        
           | methyl wrote:
           | A lot of people piss in the pool, unfortunately.
        
             | tambourine_man wrote:
             | But won't admit it :)
        
         | durnygbur wrote:
         | > when you 'ventilate' the house, you are taking the stinky
         | stuffy polluted indoor air and putting it into the environment
         | 
         | This is some different level of ecological concern. People over
         | here straight out burn furniture, rubber, and plastic in their
         | heating units, burn outdoors their green garden waste during
         | autumn, remove faulty catalytic converters and adblue-bulshit
         | from their cars. With adblue removed one can literally smell
         | the brilliance of German automotive engineering. If we're into
         | tightening the regulations, we should start with controlling
         | the home heating units and measuring car exhaust gasses.
        
         | mihaic wrote:
         | This is the sort of extremist attitude that alienates the
         | general population from _all_ environmental measures.
         | 
         | Like banning plastic straws while the cups are still plastic,
         | it enrages even many with a moderate amount of goodwill.
         | 
         | I agree we need to treat this seriously and invest a lot of
         | time and effort, but if we don't address first the biggest
         | issues (factories, automobiles), why force me to recycle the
         | exhaust from my cigarette lighter?
        
           | feet wrote:
           | >Like banning plastic straws while the cups are still
           | plastic, it enrages even many with a moderate amount of
           | goodwill.
           | 
           | This is a false equivalency when compared with the top
           | comment. The equivalent statement would be "only car exhausts
           | must be captured but we don't care about the rest of the
           | gasses."
           | 
           | The commenter said _all_ gasses and exhausts must be
           | contained, and I tend to agree that this is a good goal to
           | move towards.
           | 
           | Most of the population, quite frankly, is wrong about a lot
           | of things like this. We see that from the hate for regulation
           | partially driven by propaganda from businesses.
           | 
           | As a side note, cigarette smoke is also considered exhausting
           | waste to the atmosphere.
        
             | sirmike_ wrote:
             | > The commenter said all gasses and exhausts must be
             | contained, and I tend to agree that this is a good goal to
             | move towards.
             | 
             | > Most of the population, quite frankly, is wrong about a
             | lot of things like this. We see that from the hate for
             | regulation partially driven by propaganda from businesses.
             | 
             | Yet we do not live in that world and it is in fact not a
             | goal to achieve. It's over the top and nonsensical. Like
             | the commentor stated above you its extremist views like
             | this one which will make the common folks squash any
             | movement towards "green new deals." Just watch what happens
             | when the climate nuts like Extinction Rebellion try to
             | interfere in the normal people's day.
             | 
             | They ER types get crushed because real people do not have
             | time or money for horseshit.
             | 
             | Climate change will merely be adapted too. But not in the
             | expensive fart counting way some in this thread suggest.
             | 
             | Humanity will continue to expand and use technology to
             | solve our biggest problems.
             | 
             | The world is in fact not ending. It is changing just as it
             | always has. Humanity will do the same.
        
               | feet wrote:
               | What sort of temperatures do you think humans can survive
               | in? We are living organisms after all
        
           | ZeroGravitas wrote:
           | > Like banning plastic straws while the cups are still
           | plastic.
           | 
           | I don't think there is a single person upset at the plastic
           | straw ban because they didn't ban even more single use
           | plastic.
           | 
           | I'm not even sure that's logically possible, because that's
           | not being upset at the straws being banned, it's being upset
           | at the other things not being banned.
        
             | mihaic wrote:
             | I am one of those people. I'm more willing to accept a more
             | stringent requirement if I also perceive it as fair and can
             | see an actual improvement in something.
             | 
             | A restriction is fair for instance if it draws a
             | cost/benefit line, and just bans all things on the wrong
             | side of that line. Even if I don't agree, the conversation
             | is at least around where to draw the line, and not on
             | absurdities.
             | 
             | Banning plastic straws without banning plastic cups is
             | mostly useless and inconvenient.
        
               | ZeroGravitas wrote:
               | But it wouldn't be inconvenient if they banned more
               | stuff?
               | 
               | Talk me through your thinking here, because it's not
               | obvious to me and seems like a very poor post-hoc
               | rationalization.
        
               | mihaic wrote:
               | It would be more inconvenient, but at the same time it
               | would feel more self-consistent.
               | 
               | It you'd want to limit alcohol consumption (just an
               | example), you don't want to ban tequila but allow gin for
               | instance. You can say ban anything with more than 15%
               | alcohol by volume -- that would feel harsh but more fair.
               | 
               | I'm really not rationalizing, for me and some others
               | there needs to be a perceived fairness in the
               | restrictions.
        
       | jefftk wrote:
       | The map: https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
        
         | wing-_-nuts wrote:
         | Thank you! I was beginning to question my reading comprehension
         | when I couldn't find a link anywhere in the article.
        
       | seltzered_ wrote:
       | 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)
        
       | danso wrote:
       | > _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 wrote:
         | Why BigQuery for such small data sets?
        
           | danso wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | lettergram wrote:
         | > 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.
         | 
         | Pretty sure an HOA could fairly easily collect this data (I
         | have a setup for various chemicals in my back yard). I have
         | shared said data with my HOA to change the treatment plan for
         | common areas. If an HOA did that they can sue a plant for any
         | issues and alter emissions.
         | 
         | Government (big g) is nothing but an organized group of
         | citizens agreeing to certain rules. There's no reason any
         | random organization can't gather information, sue, etc. exactly
         | the same as government.
         | 
         | We're raised to think government is necessary, but I'm apart of
         | many organizations that effectively function as self-governance
         | and collective bargaining. At the same time they don't need
         | forced taxes paying for bombs in other countries either...
         | 
         | All it takes is a minor amount of organization. A great example
         | of this is the HAM radio community, farming co-ops, churches,
         | etc.
        
           | throwthroyaboat wrote:
           | > Pretty sure an HOA could fairly easily collect this data
           | 
           | I agree, but on a large scale this would mean that every HOA
           | needs to have access to someone who can/is willing to do
           | this. If you expand this to other environmental factors (e.g.
           | noise pollution, waterway health, etc) I could see that
           | becoming a large burden on the few people in each community
           | that care enough to collect environmental data. Seems more
           | efficient to pay someone to do it full-time for a larger
           | group.
        
             | lettergram wrote:
             | Sure an HOA can easily hire someone, a building manager can
             | and often does buy a service to monitor building detectors.
             | That's kind of my point, we already have these scenarios
             | where people not government solve problems.
             | 
             | > I could see that becoming a large burden on the few
             | people in each community that care enough to collect
             | environmental data.
             | 
             | What you're saying is not enough people care. So the people
             | that do care are taking money from people who don't care to
             | get what they want. That's called stealing when the
             | government isn't doing it...
             | 
             | That's my point from above, we're taught to need
             | government. We don't. Never did.
        
               | uoaei wrote:
               | > we're taught to need government
               | 
               | That's an uncharitable way to cast GP's comment, and not
               | really true. We do understand by now that the state is
               | just a better solution than private entities relying on
               | "market forces" for certain desired outcomes.
               | 
               | Back to the original point: the problem is scalability.
               | If everyone goes through the same process, running into
               | the same roadblocks and suffering the same pitfalls,
               | independently and disconnectedly, that is by definition
               | wasted effort, ie, unproductive for the economy. If we
               | want such things to succeed, ie, _be productive and
               | contribute to the commonwealth_ , we need to share
               | knowledge, which requires some level of centralization at
               | this time (decentralized knowledge management techniques
               | are still in their infancy and IMO require architectural
               | changes in our telecommunications infrastructure to
               | properly support).
        
               | lettergram wrote:
               | > We do understand by now that the state is just a better
               | solution than private entities relying on "market forces"
               | for certain desired outcomes.
               | 
               | I'd say the opposite is true actually. I don't understand
               | how any mandated entity is better. I've formed plenty of
               | organizations, governments aren't necessary. It's
               | supposed to help mediate force. Instead people use the
               | governments monopoly on force to get what they want.
               | 
               | In terms of scale, we have planned parenthood, Churches,
               | habitat for humanity, and so many others that work at
               | scale. If pollution was an issue as described people
               | would care. HOAs would hire organizations to monitor
               | pollution and then HOAs would sue for damages. Almost
               | exactly what the EPA does btw. Except the government gets
               | the money and people in the country fund pollution
               | research like this.
        
           | tnorthcutt wrote:
           | > I have a setup for various chemicals in my back yard
           | 
           | Could you share any more information about this?
        
         | Zamicol wrote:
         | As a counterpoint, in my hometown there's a grassroots effort
         | to collect and monitor the air quality because no one,
         | including the feds, will. The data can be appreciated without
         | dogmatism.
         | 
         | My personal bias here would be to say, "lowering the cost of
         | technology, civic organization (whatever form that might take),
         | empowering the individual, and removing barriers to entry wins
         | again."
        
         | peyton wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | beowulfey wrote:
           | The companies submitted bad data, and it was not until
           | ProPublica visualized what the data were saying that it
           | became obvious.
           | 
           | If anything it shows the government is not providing enough
           | oversight on the data provided.
        
           | runnerup wrote:
           | I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated
           | industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern
           | edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO
           | state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect
           | which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount
           | of something with either sulfur or N-O bonds -- no clue what
           | though!". Completely fucking useless for an area which
           | manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic
           | chemicals.
           | 
           | The entire east side of Houston metropolitan area has only 3
           | air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals.
           | During huge major events like the ITC fire, they often show
           | no increased pollution at all. I lived next to leaks every
           | day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells -
           | one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons,
           | etc. But the 3 monitoring sites over 10 miles from me showed
           | nothing at all.
           | 
           | Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the
           | chemical plants of Houston: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps
           | /webappviewer/index.html?id... but several of its analyzers
           | are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of
           | all the other ones: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappv
           | iewer/index.html?id... Generally single/dual color dots mark
           | "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5
           | or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally
           | useful.
           | 
           | The data used by ProPublica is far worse than the data here
           | -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from
           | the chemical plants. But living next to them and working in
           | them, I know that many leaks are never reported and many
           | leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data
           | collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real
           | air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across
           | 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they
           | wanted to apply to the problem.
           | 
           | We don't actually have any data. The government is failing
           | us. They need to spend about $1 million per air monitoring
           | station and build them along the perimeters of each plant so
           | that leaks can be assigned to the offending companies, and
           | they need to be built near housing so that we know how
           | families are being affected.
           | 
           | ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke:
           | https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-
           | qualit...
        
           | nojito wrote:
           | Conversely 70% of the data is good and valuable.
        
           | aporetics wrote:
           | As I read it, the data about emissions specifically is self-
           | reported by facilities:
           | 
           | > We reached out to each of the top 200 facilities (ranked by
           | the level of nearby cancer risk) to ask them if their
           | emissions reporting was accurate -- and if not, whether they
           | would resubmit 2014-18 data to the EPA. Of the 109 companies
           | that responded to us, 71% confirmed that their reported
           | emissions were correct, and 29% noted errors, which we asked
           | them to correct.
        
           | hwillis wrote:
           | > 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".
        
             | photochemsyn wrote:
             | It's hardly _only_ the republicans blowing government funds
             | on useless programs, Obama 's team did the same with bogus
             | 'clean coal' funding funnelled into public-private
             | partnerships with coal outfits (to the tune of ~$8 billion
             | via the DOE), gave loans to the renewable energy companies
             | with the worst products on the market via insider
             | connections (Solyndra), etc. It's an across-the-board
             | problem.
             | 
             | If we really wanted to do large-scale infrastructure
             | projects that were successful, like nationwide high-speed-
             | rail, maybe we should study how China does it.
        
             | nerdponx wrote:
             | > 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.
             | 
             | And what's worse is that one political party has been
             | running a decades-long campaign to literally _make
             | government worse_ in order to get people on board with
             | dismantling big sections of it. It 's not even a conspiracy
             | theory, it's an actual part of their public campaign
             | platforms that people deliberately vote for.
        
         | Xeoncross wrote:
         | Totally, our $30,000,000,000,000 in government debt got us some
         | measurement data that is barely a passing grade (~1/3 incorrect
         | data). They kind of dropped the ball after that but a private
         | company was able to clean the data and make it neat
         | visualization that got up votes on HN.
         | 
         | My faith in the government is restored.
        
         | lkbm wrote:
         | I agree. Private enterprise has built some incredible data set.
         | Google Street View is an incredible public good, and who knows
         | what would be built on top of it if it truly were public,
         | rather than owned by Google.
         | 
         | But some things _can 't_ really be built by private enterprise.
         | The government can compel data reporting. You can pay credit
         | card companies to sell you their data, but only the government
         | should have the power tell every employer "you _must_ tell us
         | the names and salaries of all your employees ". (Credit
         | agencies essentially do this too, but that means they're big
         | enough to require government regulation.)
         | 
         | It can be onerous, though, and sometimes unnecessarily so. When
         | I was at a charter school, every here I had to compile a data
         | set on the demographics of our students to ensure we weren't
         | mistreating people based on race or something. It's a very
         | important thing for the government to be checking on, but given
         | that we already had to send all our student's demographics,
         | attendance, and discipline accounts to the state government, it
         | felt redundant.
         | 
         | I feel like the government has been moderately good at making
         | these data sets more accessible, I'd love to see more resources
         | put into that, as well as making their collection smoother.
         | Building effective, efficient systems is incredibly difficult,
         | and requires constant investment to respond to changes.
         | 
         | I harp on "infrastructure" a lot, and I'm coming to realize
         | that what I mean is less "roads, bridges, and trains" and more
         | "efficient, effective systems of all types".
        
           | nerdponx wrote:
           | Don't forget that private companies like Google very often
           | create value not by _collecting_ data as such, but by
           | crawling through 50 different US state datasets and untold
           | thousands of county /town datasets to figure out property
           | lines, ZIP code maps, address numbers, etc. There's a
           | symbiotic relationship here, much like research in the
           | natural sciences: basic research and basic data collection is
           | a public good, but there's plenty of value to be added by
           | private industry. It's a win-win _as long as_ the people at
           | large are able to recapture some of the value created by
           | private industry (rather than it being concentrated in the
           | hands of a few stakeholders).
        
       | weberer wrote:
       | >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.
        
         | hwillis wrote:
         | > 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/
        
           | nerdponx wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | Enginerrrd wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
       | Popup immediately on page load. Clicked back instantly.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | singularity2001 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | Not quite what you're looking for, but evidence of the
           | general idea -
           | https://theecologist.org/2009/jun/19/pollution-may-affect-
           | po...
           | 
           | Would like to see these pictures myself though, hope OP can
           | find them.
        
           | hwillis wrote:
           | 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.
        
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