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Air pollution greatest global threat to human health, says benchmark study (phys.org)
79 points by myshpa on Aug 29, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments


Original report: https://aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/AQ...

It's very well written and illustrated.

Big takeaways:

* Population-weighted findings. Air pollution is a bigger public health threat than (say) tobacco and alcohol not because it's worse for you individually (although it's terrible), but because the regions most affected are so densely populated

* Regulatory policy really works. "After periods of industrialization led to pollution that choked Europe and the United States decades ago, the two regions have largely been successfully creating and enforcing strong pollution laws. In the United States, legislative measures like the Clean Air Act have helped to reduce pollution by 64.9 percent since 1970, extending the average lifespan by 1.4 years" and similar improvements began in Europe 25 years ago, and even in China 10 years ago


https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/1696568927843742059

Global life expectancy reduction due to

Air pollution: 2.3 years

Tobacco smoke: 2.2 years

Malnutrition: 1.6 years


Let them breathe cake.


[flagged]


Is that really the case? The article says "Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan are in order the top four most polluted countries". While there are certainly "0.1%" people in those countries, I highly doubt they're responsible for a meaningful amount of the pollution. For one, rich people use far less polluting technologies. Cooking and heating with electricity causes far less pollution than the poor burning biomass or coal. Furthermore, their population is small by definition, so even if they somehow pollute 10x more than average, their contribution is only 1%.


A week or so ago there was news about a research article[1] about greenhouse gases and how in the USA, the top 10% of households by earnings can be linked to a much higher carbon footprint. The headlines mentioned that 40 percent of USA’s GHG emissions can be attributed to the top 10%. Granted, it seems like they aren’t emitting directly, but it is linked by how they earn their money, and how they spend and invest it.

[1]: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...


In India the biggest source of air pollution is people burning wood for cooking and the like, mainly in the poorer countryside. Previous poster is talking rubbish.


That percentage keeps getting smaller every year huh.


Because it's a power law distribution and because wealth inequality is getting even worse over time.


Because the 0.1% all live in Dhaka, Bangladesh[1].

[1] https://www.iqair.com/world-air-quality-ranking


I think it’s more a result of affluent professionals’ changing political affiliations and the need to reshuffle the line between good guys and bad guys.


Like most things, pollution follows a power law. For example most of the plastic waste that ends up in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers.


10 rivers where poor people live.


Indeed, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that.


It's probably still not there yet.


If man-made electromagnetic radiation is counted as air-pollution, then yes, its a grave threat.


My guess is the downvotes are coming because you are expressing a far outside of mainstream science opinion without any substantiation.


What? Have you looked at the science on this? Those in the RF/EMF science field opining that RF is perfectly safe, are a minority fringe. Example: ICNIRP, the private club that sets the limits most countries choose to follow, is a tiny, self-selected group, many with ties to telecoms business interests [1,2].

On the other hand, there are hundreds of independent research scientists in the RF/EMF field that agree [3] that the current limits are far outdated and based on assumptions of safety, not proof.

References:

[1] https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/posts/how-much-is-safe

[2] https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ICNIRP-re...

[3] https://emfscientist.org/


Downvotes without counter-arguments can only be taken as uninformed opinion.




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