It is an underappreciated part of the discussion. Fighting climate change also reduces the emission of contaminants to the air that we breath. Even if climate change were not happening, we would have to reduce pollution anyway.
I visited China a few years ago, the touristic potential is limitless, it has so many great cities to visit, natural parks, rivers, and many more. But, the air is so polluted that it is difficult to enjoy any of it.
There are a million reasons to reduce pollution, and only a very bad one to not do it.
This is why it's important to not let "green" be reduced to renewables. Fortunately it's now over, but for a while wood pellet heaters were subsidized because wood is renewable. Yes, and it's also the number one pollutant in your neighborhood if anyone heats like that.
I really dislike that cartoon, because it fails to grapple with opportunity costs and tradeoffs. 'What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?' doesn't address the fact that a world which is better than it would otherwise be measured on those axes must necessarily be worse than it would otherwise be measured on other axes. Every dollar spent on on one thing is necessarily a dollar not spent on another thing. TANSTAAFL.
And of course individual people have different weights they apply to different goods. E.g. one person might prefer energy independence to green jobs, and another vice versa. While there may be a globally optimal solution per each person's preferences, I do not believe that there can be a globally optimal solution for everyone's preferences.
And also, things can interact in weird and unpredictable ways. Higher crop yields should yield lower food prices, but perhaps requiring cleaner engines increases the cost of food transportation such that food prices increase instead (n.b.: I am not arguing that is in fact the case). Knowing all this is an information problem, and figuring it all out is a planning problem, and it turns out that solving those two problems is not just practically impossible (cf. every centrally-planned administration ever): it's theoretically impossible (cf. chaos theory in mathematics).
So, 'har, har: we can just make everything better for free' is a really naïve view to take.
"We can make things better for free" isnt a naive take, its basic economics.
The cartoon is aimed directly at the people who are lying (knowingly ot unknowingly) about the 'cost' of addressing externalities.
Which, economics tell us, lead to inefficiency i.e. unnecessary waste. Reducing unnecessary waste is the exact equivalent of 'making things better for free'.
What if productivity rises faster than growth and we have plenty of people having nothing to do?
In conventional capitalism you would just concentrate jobs onto a handful of people and let the rest starve instead of improving the world in exchange for nothing.
The most important reason that I'm somewhat of a treehugger is because trees are just nice. Walking in a forest is nice, taking my dog for a walk outside in nature is nice, hearing the birds chirp is nice too.
But without everyone having to carry their butts from home to the offices and then to the supermarkets and then back home, everyday by car, just think of the damage that has done to our economy. How are the poor car manufacturers, dealers, gas stations, shopping centers, office real-estate enterprises supposed to survive whiteout all this car traffic?
Did anyone notice that the pollen season last year, after almost a year of lockdowns, was absolutely ridiculous? I do not remember anything like that. Everything was blooming and smelling well into the summer. My floor had green dust for months on it - I live near a large park in an NYC borough.
Is ‘irony’ the right word to describe current situation where we convert fossil fuels to calories in the name of Agriculture? Without fossil fuels, food production would go down drastically.
If we have to run faster to stay in the same place and burn down the world in the process because we are past carrying capacity, then I think the solution hasn’t found the right problem.
The true irony is when we take the fossil-fueled crops and turn them back to energy with efficiency that barely breaks even, depending on your assumptions.
It’s actually worse than that when we factor in supply chains..transporting fresh produce in refrigerated trucks and keeping them in air conditioned grocery shelves after throwing out 40% of all fresh produce we grow.
All the issues in America can be solved if we had efficient network of public transport for inter and intra city movement of people and goods.
Housing, car dependency, health, green spaces, pollution..the list can maybe accommodate a few more
Actually, the paper goes on to explain that they discovered that a lot of the damage is caused by other pollutants that either just happen to exist on the same regions as NO2 or are created by its reaction with the air (they suspect ozone is a large guilty).
They measured NO2 because it's the best one to measure.
The data is coming from satellites, which are apparently able to directly measure NO2 levels (a good proxy for NOx levels), and they use near infrared reflectivity to estimate crop yield (which they say previous studies have shown to be a good way to estimate it).
Thank you for posting the actual quantitative data. All the sound and fury in the world pales in comparison to the awesome and terrifying power of Microsoft Excel!
Cars are a significant source, though in China "industry" is a bigger source per [0]. I'm not sure what the ration worldwide (and I didn't find a global number in the quick search that found the links I am posting).
Crop residue burning also comes to mind as a source that would be particularly concentrated near... crops [1].
These studies sound trivial in the headlines because the headlines take out the quantitative degree of the effect, which was the hard-won part of the study. An excerpt:
>Utilizing this data, the researchers calculated that a reduction in NOx emissions of around 50% in each region would improve yields by approximately 25% for winter crops and 15% for summer crops in China. In Western Europe, yields were estimated to improve nearly 10% for both winter and summer crops.
Now it is possible to put a number on how much NOx is costing farmers.
This is the type of quantitative research that's hard to report because, in my mind, it's not particularly useful reporting. Simplifying it for layman understanding makes it seem completely trivial, as you point out. The methodological details that make the study interesting are only relevant to people who are gonna read the study anyway.
This kind of simplified thinking causes so many issues. Like people avoiding fluoride toothpaste because fluoride bad. Or people not getting important vaccines because they contain minuscule amounts of something harmful.
Or the alarm fatigue that cause people to just stop paying attention at all, like with "known to the State of California to cause cancer".
We have to know how harmful something is to know whether to bother fixing it.
You just upvoted a comment detracting from the value of the study. (Well, if it's not doing that then it's a non-sequitur. I'm not sure which interpretation is giving the most benefit of the doubt.)
People see a smokestack and think the burnt carbon goes up.
But the smokestack is a pure marketing maneuver to not leave sharp red dots on cancer charts.
Smokestacks are marketing, period. Intended to diffuse harm. And they do all kinds of shit so the smoke looks billowy and doesn't plop down on the land right away, in keeping with it's marketing-oriented nature.
On TV smokestacks always have very billowy vertical plumes, same shots of the same smokestacks. In real life, especially at night in Puchuncaví in the 90s, smoke plops, and then it's clear the coal plant is plain shitting on the land, which is why they do it at night because seeing it kills the marketing effect. Can't let people see smoke plop, like pouring down at a downward diagonal from the smokestack, then it's not a plume, more like a bomb if it's coming at you in a straight line at a high angle of attack. You gotta lob so it's invisible and spread out it if you don't want it coming right back at you, which it will if you shoot it. Color matters too, white smoke looks so harmless, that's why TV smokestacks emit white smoke, whereas nuclear power plant steam is black, it's accurate in reverse.
People don't like getting shit on in a straight line. You gotta tell people it's dust and not soot, lob don't shoot.
It used to be in eg Pittsburgh or Manchester the whole city was covered in soot and people were obsessed with sweeping, twice a day was the norm, to pretend they had servants, or were lucky (eg the wind favored them or just blessed), the two principal forms of prestige. Plus you had to sweep because soot is so gross, everything turning the color of a drunkard's shit, it's incredibly ugly, I saw it in Santiago's downtown growing up, the most polluted city of its time. Allegedly Mexico City was worse on a global scale but in the Southern Hemisphere Santiago was by far the worst. Worst in South America. You know I divine worst in the world for real. Fuck the statistics, the polluters fuck with the numbers, so fuck their numbers. In fact the government to this day by law--a shit-eating Pinochet law I may add--has to call polluters ahead of inspections. There's no inspections. They just invent numbers to look good. Smokestack as marketing again. Plus it served as chemical oppression for political purposes.
But in all three cities, Industrial Manchester, Industrial Pittsburgh, and Dystopian Santiago, a curious accusation from Mother Nature itself. While under pollution, the color of moths went from white--like dust--to black--like soot.
'pollution' is vague and politically charged. The article observes that Nitrogen Oxides reduce crop yields, whereas some "pollution" (e.g. volcanic ash) can increase crop yields.
If I ever needed to know how tribal our society has become, here it is. Pollution now has a varying definition depending on if you are left or right. Jesus.
I was wondering where the side of "what if we reduce pollution for nothing???" would move the goalposts. I have no idea what would convince these folks to reduce pollution.
The sad thing is when people don't lean towards a particular political orientation based on what they believe but choose what to believe based on their political orientation.
Yes, there has always been some tribalism. But I am old enough to recall when the fact that you were Democrat or Republican was a secondary bit of information, not the deciding factor in who your friends and family were.
I really don't see how you can use the word "some" here -- tribalism is ingrained at us. See: Racism, the Halocaust (prejudice against Jews), Nationalism, any set of kids on a playground.
He was probably only referring to the situation in the US, where the political polarization (and tribalism) has undeniably increased in the last decades.
It has a varying definition because Leftists lost touch with reality along time ago, and it has spread into every part of the party doctrine.
How can you assert common definitions when Leftists wholly embraces relativism, where you can deny objective facts and substitute your feelings as facts, and use those feelings as justification for literally anything?
Tbf everything has always been politics. How we handle issues are a social discussion..
That said, this is a definition problem… which used to be agreed upon lol. The issue is one political party is trying to use the term “pollution” to enact policy changes; so it becomes political and definitions change, etc in a fight for power.
Pollution captures a very wide range of things true, but it's a pretty common term and I don't see it as particularly political... To whom/where would you say it is?
It's also very commonly agreed which ones are the concerning ones in day to day life - the WHO (first result on Google for me when I google 'air pollution') lists exactly the ones I think of when I hear the term: "Pollutants of major public health concern include particulate matter, carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide." (Although I think it's better to use "Nitrogen oxides" or NOx instead of just saying nitrogen dioxide).
It would be terrible if we made an effort to make Earth a better place to live, for sure. Also, we need to find a way to control those volcanoes. We need more of them, so that we can increase crop yields.
Remember when we're freezing and starving in the dark that this blinkered view of civilisation is what brought us to the inevitable end that the green agenda brings forth.
We do not have the alternatives for what you want to get rid of, period.
Industrialisation has brought us to where we are, removing it for this nonsense will doom billions.
As an internet stranger, I would like to overstep my bounds and recommend some reflection on what drove you to this reaction.
If you read the article, it's an extremely thoughtful point that makes sense if you know a bit of biology & chemistry,
> In Western Europe, yields were estimated to improve nearly 10% for both winter and summer crops. Crop yields in India were calculated to increase by roughly eight percent for summer crops and six percent for winter crops. North and South America were generally shown to have the lowest levels of NOx exposures.
>
> Overall, the study highlighted that effects appeared most negative in the seasons and locations where NOx likely drives ozone formation.
https://solar-power-now.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bette...