Posted by dabinat 11 hours ago
So unlike greenhouse gases, which can last in the atmosphere for years, seems like NO2 and particulates only stay in the air for less than a day or a few days. This is an amazing little fact because we can start small and call for meaningful reform where we live without requiring a global coordination. Maybe there will be a global consensus later but it doesn't matter because we can start making improvements today within our own local context. The bonus is we will likely also lower our own carbon footprint as we reduce our other emissions. I think this is the "selfish" breakthrough we need to convince people.
When I say it doesn't matter, I don't mean like cross border contamination does not happen but rather that we can improve our own lives with our own action regardless of what others do.
The obvious actionable thing that you can do for your own life is to stop using or being around gasoline or petrol powered two stroke engines such as in a leaf blower. But we can do more. We can completely ban these two stroke engines from being sold at all and that will bring meaningful improvements in weeks, not years.
The problem is to make more impact, we will need to actually get people to give up or retrofit their existing equipment. We will need to educate people about the harms that these things cause and why the change is good. However, in today's siloed world, I don't think it will be easy at all. So perhaps the most difficult part ironically in a very connected and yet siloed world is the marketing of this idea and connecting the required change in behavior with the benefits.
As we saw with the leaf blower example, the costs are concentrated, yes but so are the benefits! The benefits are NOT at all diffuse because guess who benefits the most from not inhaling in gasoline fumes? The person operating the leaf blower!
Sure but they had to live in Luton
>At baseline, 184 (14%) of 1280 children with successful FEV1 measurement in London had a clinically low FEV1 (pre-bronchodilator FEV1 <80% of predicted value) compared with 126 (9%) of 1339 children in Luton (appendix p 8). At the end of the study, these values had dropped to 51 (9%) of 585 children in London and 41 (7%) of 606 children in Luton (appendix p 8).
So the proportion of children with low lung function dropped from 14% to 9% in London, and from 9% to 7% at the comparator site in Luton. It's not that much different, though any improvement is obviously welcome.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
So EVs are better than ICE for air quality, but fewer cars even better.
We had a lot of construction work in the neighborhood, our house covered in fine dust particles each day. My kid got asthma in the same period, keeps asking when she can stop taking the medicines, and I say "I don't know" thinking "probably never". But maybe now the construction work is over, there is hope? (And if construction starts again, we know that it is better to move, because there is hope.)
In the UK's far-right media culture, Khan's ULEZ is painted as fringe extremism, not as a common sense public health measure.
There is a big difference between believing something is true, and demonstrating it is true and measuring the effect. One is a vibe. The other can drive policy.
However most people live next to a busy street ...
(Actually, the _very_ busiest streets are probably major bus gates (where, again, there are no cars), those can have fairly ridiculous density at peak times.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/18/ulez-h...
I bet if some youtube weirdos pushed out videos against "big soap" for making us unnecessarily clean our hands after pooping... we'd have a growing following of angry "freedom from big soap" people.
At one point during Covid, I tried (not very hard at all) to float a conspiracy that the vaccine was in fact not the poison, but the antidote. That Covid was deliberately designed by governments to filter the 'independent thinkers' (who won't take the vaccine) from the sheep (those who do take the vaccine). So by not taking the vaccine, you were giving the governments what they wanted.
This was because the conspiracy that governments were killing the loyal sheep with the vaccine, therefore only leaving the 'independent thinkers' behind, made absolutely no sense at all to me.
In this case:
"While we would expect children's lungs to grow year on year, our results indicate that the London children's lung growth had accelerated during the four years to 'catch up' with the control group in Luton to reach similar levels of lung capacity," researchers say.
"I was absolutely stunned when I first saw the results," Prof Chris Griffiths, a senior author on the study, at Queen Mary University of London, told the BBC.
"The speed of catch up in lung capacity in the London group was surprising and impressive."