I have a ready solution to all their problems. They should simply do what we did in Kazakhstan a couple of years ago: raise the maximum permissible exposure levels by an order of magnitude and declare all of the previously extremely polluted areas as safe. I am not sure it made the air look any different, or had any effect on my chronic bronchitis, but at least the air pollution indicators look nice: they are now permanently in the "green zone".
That's what I do with my code coverage reports. I just exclude any file that isn't covered from the report and the report turns green and all the managers are happy because it proves the code is of high quality.
Does anyone know if/how the human impact of planting trees is measured?
What I mean is, what metrics determine the "quality" of a tree plant? I assume this can vary greatly based on location and type of tree planted.
I often see impact quantified by CO2 removed from the environment, but what about the impact on people nearby?
Would it be better to plant 100 trees in the center of New Delhi, where the air is toxic and the population is sky high, or 10,000 trees in rural USA where the air may already be very clean?
On topic:
This is incredibly serious as pollution has serious effects not just on health, but on intelligence and behavior. It's a vicious cycle and India needs to break out of it. The environment minister's comments in the article are unbelievable.
“The relationship between trees and air pollution is a complicated one. Particulate matter suspended in polluted air tends to settle onto leaves, and certain gases including nitrous dioxide (NO₂) are absorbed by leaves’ stomata, filtering the air and reducing pollution levels slightly.
But trees and other vegetation also restrict airflow in their immediate vicinity, preventing pollution from being diluted by currents of cleaner air. In particular, tall trees with thick canopies planted alongside busy roads can act like a roof, trapping pockets of polluted air at ground level. To reliably improve air quality, city planners need to give careful consideration to how trees are placed.”
No Indian government will openly fine farmers (they secretly fine for not maintaining the minimum balance in the bank accounts of state owned banks) -- with majority of population coming under the name "farmers" (including Amitabh Bachchan.
More voters are farmers or are aligned with keeping farmers' costs low than are affected by the pollution or aligned with clean air standards.
It's not a local issue because the pollution emitting happens in a different state than where the concentration causes most of the problems, so it would need to be addressed at the national level.
Farmers are financially not that well off and a big share of population in India is farmers. There is already provision of prosecuting farmers in law, but no administration wants to punish the relatively poor + electorally important farmers by enforcing the laws.
In India it's important to make a distinction between farm laborers and farmers. Traditionally what people referred to as farmers in India are basically feudals, and they are by no means poor people, they are easily some of the richest people in India.
Farm laborers are a totally different set of working class people. Who only until recent decades were into as bad as a thing like bonded labor. They work on starving wages and are generally poor and from lower castes.
India for very long has given feudals unlimited loan bailouts, and freebies. They also pay no taxes. Most of my friends who come from farmer families has gone to do expensive education in countries like US. And they are often confused with farm laborers and they milk this perception to the very extreme.
Imagine being so rich you hold large banks of land, make windfall profits, pay zero taxes on them and get freebies(seeds, fertilizers, water, electricity) and then being confused as the poorest people in India.
Its the farm laborers that need help. And they are unfortunately treated very badly. Heck many people don't even recognize their existence.
I realized this in 2015 when I was looking at the sky and got the small/taste of something burning (and then I must have done some research). It has taken several years for everyone to 'get' it because winter pollution is confounded by other issues (low wind/rain, Diwali firecrackers, etc.) and people stop paying this much attention to the issue after these couple weeks of Armageddon--until the next year, when it happens again.
To this day the issue is obfuscated -- the media is talking about "Delhi pollution" which enables rival politicians to make it sound like a local governance issue when actually all of North India is under a cloud of smoke.
Some specific points that may be lost in the headline / cursory reading of the article:
1) India as a whole is overpopulated and has a pollution problem. This particular issue is limited to Delhi, however.
2) From the perspective of the magnitude and extreme levels of pollution, this is a seasonal issue whose primary contributor, by a large margin, is farmers burning off their crop stubble after their harvest ends. This has been happening every year for some time (more on this below).
3) Political ideologues have hijacked this issue to push their pet issues like automobile emissions and firecrackers. These are obviously important issues which most reasonable people will agree ought to be curbed. Sadly a lot of otherwise intelligent folks have a blind spot when it comes to these issues, so there is a temptation to let it slide when these kinds of politics are being played dishonestly, even though their motivations are different. By emphasizing one's biased issues, the root cause is ignored, which helps nobody.
On stubble burning:
There was a time when sowing paddy in the neighbouring state of Punjab began during the first week of June. Harvest season would be mid October, and sowing would resume in late November.
During the period between October and November, farmers would let the stubble decompose over time. This required a lot of water and time.
Unfortunately this took a toll on groundwater levels. Government intervention led to a reduction in water supplies to the fields during the summer (June), when there was a shortage of water across the state. This led to a delay in the sowing season (moved to July). The entire crop cycle got moved up, and so the time previously available to allow decomposition of stubble had reduced to barely a few days. Their solution to this problem was to burn all the stubble.
A nice overview of what recently (2009) changed and what's changing now (2018-19) and the related politics by Shekhar Gupta: https://youtu.be/OAnSS6rdJCA
I travel to India every other month for my job. Most agriculture happens on small farms by poor and uneducated people. Introducing new technology and agricultural practices is difficult but is certainly underway in parts of the country. There is also a lack of political will to solve the problem in the particular case of Delhi and its neighboring state of Punjab, and as the parent comment suggested, there is very much a tendency to sow disinformation by those highest up.
Introducing new technologies is difficult with the supposedly highly educated American farmers. Reality is, farmers worldwide are awfully anti-intellectual with a strong contrarian streak and rarely listen to science, even if ironically science has given them their way of life in the form of fertilizers, GMOs etc...
Source: I worked for an ag-tech company and I will never EVER have anything to do again with anything that has to do with that world.
American farmers are anti-intellectual and rarely listen to science? Citation is really needed, because that’s not what reality shows. It’s very true that farmers are risk adverse, but that’s for good reason: it takes years for “discoveries” to be vetted and people aren’t going to literally bet the farm on trendy tech until it’s proven.
American farmers are grease monkeys, they like big machines but know approx. jack squat about agronomy. If I could have a dollar for all the nitrogen farmers waste because they don't know how to manage soil properly I would be a goddamn trillionaire.
It does not help that land holdings in India can be as small as 2-3 acres per person. Water distribution is what decides the overall economy of a given region and due to political reasons it has not been easy to change agricultural policies either (although a big effort is underway).
A top political leader is claiming Pakistan or China may be responsible for releasing the toxic fumes. Notice that one of the most popular newspapers in India does nothing to refute this illogical and unscientific theory.
Great write-up! But, this issue is not limited to Delhi; the whole of north India is under severe pollution. Delhi gets highlighted the most because it's the capital of the country.
And a lot poorer overall, which certainly doesn't help.
GDP(PPP) per capita for India was 7874 in 2018.
Versus 41351, 44227 and 53023 for South Korea, Japan and Taiwan respectively.
These countries that manage their high population density pretty well are also much smaller (Japan is around 10 times smaller than India) and it is much easier to optimize/organize on a smaller scale.
Just curious: Have you visited China in recent time? The past few years it's made incredible gains, and it continues moving at a blazing speed.
I think one force that can encourage Pakistan to move forward is China. I don't know if Pakistan can have its own Samsung, but it can maybe 'modernize' with China's help. Would you agree?
Japan, Korea or other countries may also be overpopulated yes. But realize the volume spread. A few millions overpopulation is largely different from an over population of a few billions. The magnitude is incomparable.
Overpopulation is always relative. It means that the population at hand exceeds the amount that existing systems can cope with. You can argue that Indian society is badly organized and that their current population levels and densities could be sustained with better societal systems, but that doesn't quite capture how difficult it is to fix societal systems.
> South Korea and Taiwan have higher population density than India ...
This is disingenuous.
Australia has an astonishingly low population density (3.1 people / square kilometre) however it has about the same volume of arable land as France and most of that land is poorer (soil, nutrient) quality, and has a lot lower rainfall and is prone to more severe weather events ... etc.
Assessing or comparing population density based purely on people / sq km is wildly misleading. Rather, it's a matter of carrying capacity of the land, which is what I presume GP was referring to.
> We're talking about Delhi here, not all of India.
Parent was comparing country population densities.
GP was asserting whole of India is overpopulated, while also trying to assert that 'this issue only affects Delhi'.
Clearly the 'only affects Delhi' isn't pollution related -- as most large cities in India are literally breathtakingly polluted.
So I assume GP was asserting that the burnoff issue was a purely Delhi (or surrounds) related issue ... though even that seems unlikely given the water management & agricultural practices throughout the country.
India has the highest proportion of arable land in the world. Lack of land isn't India's problem. We've long had the resources to house and feed our population, which, ironically, is the reason why we have so much population in the first place.
Based on what I see on social media nowadays, mentions of “overpopulation” in the Indian context are invariably in the context of some genocidal fantasy/hate.
The population density of Delhi is 29K people per sq mile which is one of the highest in the world. Tokyo, for example, has a population density of 16k.
India's population density is not really a problem though, the problem is lack of urbanization and absolutely horrible California like land regulations that prevent building new cities and infrastructure.
Delhi's pollution is not caused by Delhi, it is caused by neighboring farming zones that burn the stubble.
South Korea, Taiwan, Japan all are coastal, whereas North India is landlocked and surrounded by mountains, which does not let that fog to escape. This makes the problem worse.
For that matter, if Mumbai wasn't a coastal city, it would have been way more polluted than Delhi.
Having said that, yeah, the politicians do not show any kind of intent to solve the problem, it is just another matter for them to blame their rivals.
>>This particular issue is limited to Delhi, however.
Not anymore. Pretty much a huge chunk of North India is in trouble now. Delhi is where the peak problem is manifesting. Our media has other pointless issues to rant on than show problems in smaller towns and cities, that doesn't mean the problem is only in Delhi.
I will recommend anyone curious to know why the stubble burning issue has become this serious only in recent times, to have a look at Shekhar Gupta's (a well respected journalist) analysis from couple days ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAnSS6rdJCA
Tldr - Stupid laws trying to tackle heavy water consumption in the dry months forced farmers to grow paddy 6-8 weeks later which then left them little time to get the fields ready for next harvest and hence burning stubble seems like a quick option (with no consequence to them).
I don’t see how we can address resource consumption and pollution more broadly without population controls. We need a two child, replacement rate rule. Otherwise we will continually play whack a mole with patching symptoms and bickering politics. And yet no one wants to own up to this reality.
Two child policies aren't necessary, as populations become more educated and wealthy they naturally have fewer children. This is already taking place. So we just need to keep spreading democracy and education, especially of women.
To add to that, outside of a few states, fertility rate is well below replacement level for most states.
The problem is that these rogue states have a) very high fertility (3.3 for Bihar iirc) and b) very high base population which greatly accelerates population
Generations ago I would have agreed. Several generations of inaction have resulted in needing a less-than-two child rate.
Before the Haber-Bosch process, humans numbered about 2 billion. That process requires fossil fuels. With some efficiency gains we can probably double that number, but along with many other triangulation points, it seems only a substantially smaller number than today's would allow sustainable human society.
We can get there by lowering the birth rate or nature can do it for us, which would likely lower it well beyond.
The problem is rapid unplanned urbanization. And that is because there is not enough money to develop new cities. Heck, let alone that there is not enough money to sustain existing ones.
So you end up huge masses of population concentrated in existing cities.
The areas around Bangalore are empty. Try visiting Kolar or Tumkur during weekdays, chances are you will be bored in 30 minutes of your visit and fall asleep. The afternoons feel empty and totally devoid of any activity. Bangalore itself was this way a few decades back, when I was growing up here.
The problem with the cities will continue for the obvious reasons. There is economic activity, schools, colleges, hospitals and better life prospects.
>Harsh Vardhan, the union minister for health and family welfare, urged people to eat carrots to protect against "night blindness" and "other pollution-related harm to health".
Not entirely. What the British did was to take a medical truth - that vitamin A deficiency leads to night blindness, which is often the first reported symptom of vitamin A deficiency - and transform it into a plausible "night vision enhancement" story. Curing or preventing a problem is real; creating a corresponding opposite super-power, not so much.
This trick fuels the modern "supplements" industry too.
(In the UK for example) You aren't allowed to advertise "This product will make you smarter" because that's a lie.
But you are allowed to advertise "Vitamin D is essential to normal cognitive function" and "This product has all the Vitamin D you need" which are both technically true - and let the audience draw the false conclusion themselves that they'd be smarter if they used the product.
The product maker has plausible deniability, and especially if consuming the product has no major harmful effect they'll be allowed to keep this up. After all there are also advertisements for fizzy drinks, booze, and plenty of other products that are hardly a good idea, so what's the problem?
Industry, crop burning and other agricultural land use for animal production has far bigger impact than fireworks for one day. The BBC are really ill informed to post this as something that is even noteworthy, fireworks do cause smoke, but the net effect on Delhi 365 days a year is nothing compared to everything else going on causing pollution.
While I'll be very happy if we stop bursting firecrackers (its not in the spirit of Diwali; I hate the noise; my dogs hate the noise), much of the pollution is because of crop burning. Because firecrackers alone can't explain why Moradabad and Meerut have the same pollution as Delhi
India as a whole is on the verge of some totally different set of changes which won't end up well on the longer run. Pollution, excessive sugar consumption, unhygienic living, sedentary lifestyles will likely destroy a lot of what my generation is living through. This could be anecdotal evidence, but I hear male fertility problems in men above age 30 very common these days.
Almost every home has people with diabetes/hypertension. And every neighborhood has thyroid camps every now and then, and you see a huge mass of women there. Dengue and other infectious disease breakouts are becoming common and you see a rise every 6 months or so. There are waiting queues running into months for open heart surgeries in affordable hospitals, which should tell you the overall direction of health situation here.
This is beyond a total political meltdown looming above the whole country.
80 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadDoes anyone know if/how the human impact of planting trees is measured?
What I mean is, what metrics determine the "quality" of a tree plant? I assume this can vary greatly based on location and type of tree planted.
I often see impact quantified by CO2 removed from the environment, but what about the impact on people nearby?
Would it be better to plant 100 trees in the center of New Delhi, where the air is toxic and the population is sky high, or 10,000 trees in rural USA where the air may already be very clean?
On topic:
This is incredibly serious as pollution has serious effects not just on health, but on intelligence and behavior. It's a vicious cycle and India needs to break out of it. The environment minister's comments in the article are unbelievable.
At best they spread pollution over a wider area thus reducing the concentration.
“The relationship between trees and air pollution is a complicated one. Particulate matter suspended in polluted air tends to settle onto leaves, and certain gases including nitrous dioxide (NO₂) are absorbed by leaves’ stomata, filtering the air and reducing pollution levels slightly.
But trees and other vegetation also restrict airflow in their immediate vicinity, preventing pollution from being diluted by currents of cleaner air. In particular, tall trees with thick canopies planted alongside busy roads can act like a roof, trapping pockets of polluted air at ground level. To reliably improve air quality, city planners need to give careful consideration to how trees are placed.”
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/do-trees-reduce-ai...
What is the obstacle to fining these farmers? (Most agricultural systems have moved past burning stubble.)
Do the farmers form a blocking bloc? Or are there other factors at play.
Why aren’t the farmers’ interests balanced by the afflicted voters?
It's not a local issue because the pollution emitting happens in a different state than where the concentration causes most of the problems, so it would need to be addressed at the national level.
Farm laborers are a totally different set of working class people. Who only until recent decades were into as bad as a thing like bonded labor. They work on starving wages and are generally poor and from lower castes.
India for very long has given feudals unlimited loan bailouts, and freebies. They also pay no taxes. Most of my friends who come from farmer families has gone to do expensive education in countries like US. And they are often confused with farm laborers and they milk this perception to the very extreme.
Imagine being so rich you hold large banks of land, make windfall profits, pay zero taxes on them and get freebies(seeds, fertilizers, water, electricity) and then being confused as the poorest people in India.
Its the farm laborers that need help. And they are unfortunately treated very badly. Heck many people don't even recognize their existence.
https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#z:6;c:77.5,28.8;d:...
Further reading on crop stubble burning: https://www.news18.com/news/immersive/crop-burning-punjab-po...
I realized this in 2015 when I was looking at the sky and got the small/taste of something burning (and then I must have done some research). It has taken several years for everyone to 'get' it because winter pollution is confounded by other issues (low wind/rain, Diwali firecrackers, etc.) and people stop paying this much attention to the issue after these couple weeks of Armageddon--until the next year, when it happens again.
To this day the issue is obfuscated -- the media is talking about "Delhi pollution" which enables rival politicians to make it sound like a local governance issue when actually all of North India is under a cloud of smoke.
1) India as a whole is overpopulated and has a pollution problem. This particular issue is limited to Delhi, however.
2) From the perspective of the magnitude and extreme levels of pollution, this is a seasonal issue whose primary contributor, by a large margin, is farmers burning off their crop stubble after their harvest ends. This has been happening every year for some time (more on this below).
3) Political ideologues have hijacked this issue to push their pet issues like automobile emissions and firecrackers. These are obviously important issues which most reasonable people will agree ought to be curbed. Sadly a lot of otherwise intelligent folks have a blind spot when it comes to these issues, so there is a temptation to let it slide when these kinds of politics are being played dishonestly, even though their motivations are different. By emphasizing one's biased issues, the root cause is ignored, which helps nobody.
On stubble burning:
There was a time when sowing paddy in the neighbouring state of Punjab began during the first week of June. Harvest season would be mid October, and sowing would resume in late November.
During the period between October and November, farmers would let the stubble decompose over time. This required a lot of water and time.
Unfortunately this took a toll on groundwater levels. Government intervention led to a reduction in water supplies to the fields during the summer (June), when there was a shortage of water across the state. This led to a delay in the sowing season (moved to July). The entire crop cycle got moved up, and so the time previously available to allow decomposition of stubble had reduced to barely a few days. Their solution to this problem was to burn all the stubble.
[Disclaimer: I live in a city (Buenos Aires), but at least I have a few flowerpots.]
Source: I worked for an ag-tech company and I will never EVER have anything to do again with anything that has to do with that world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/business/farming-technolo...
Why do you think this doesn't help?
Are there examples of countries with much larger average landholdings where land management practices are considered excellent?
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/pakistan-may-have-...
Great write-up! But, this issue is not limited to Delhi; the whole of north India is under severe pollution. Delhi gets highlighted the most because it's the capital of the country.
> 1) India as a whole is overpopulated...
I would rather say Indian society is badly organized.
I believe South Korea was poorer than India in living memory!
I think one force that can encourage Pakistan to move forward is China. I don't know if Pakistan can have its own Samsung, but it can maybe 'modernize' with China's help. Would you agree?
But that also has the risk of trivializing the problem. Improve infrastructure is hard, especially in a compromised system.
I do agree that improving governance is much, much easier said than done. And to be fair, India has had substantial progress.
I think this is just a different phrasing of "Indian society is badly organized".
Which is a different way of saying I think we mostly agree.
This is disingenuous.
Australia has an astonishingly low population density (3.1 people / square kilometre) however it has about the same volume of arable land as France and most of that land is poorer (soil, nutrient) quality, and has a lot lower rainfall and is prone to more severe weather events ... etc.
Assessing or comparing population density based purely on people / sq km is wildly misleading. Rather, it's a matter of carrying capacity of the land, which is what I presume GP was referring to.
Parent was comparing country population densities.
GP was asserting whole of India is overpopulated, while also trying to assert that 'this issue only affects Delhi'.
Clearly the 'only affects Delhi' isn't pollution related -- as most large cities in India are literally breathtakingly polluted.
So I assume GP was asserting that the burnoff issue was a purely Delhi (or surrounds) related issue ... though even that seems unlikely given the water management & agricultural practices throughout the country.
India's population density is not really a problem though, the problem is lack of urbanization and absolutely horrible California like land regulations that prevent building new cities and infrastructure.
Delhi's pollution is not caused by Delhi, it is caused by neighboring farming zones that burn the stubble.
For that matter, if Mumbai wasn't a coastal city, it would have been way more polluted than Delhi.
Having said that, yeah, the politicians do not show any kind of intent to solve the problem, it is just another matter for them to blame their rivals.
Not anymore. Pretty much a huge chunk of North India is in trouble now. Delhi is where the peak problem is manifesting. Our media has other pointless issues to rant on than show problems in smaller towns and cities, that doesn't mean the problem is only in Delhi.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=india+pollution
Tldr - Stupid laws trying to tackle heavy water consumption in the dry months forced farmers to grow paddy 6-8 weeks later which then left them little time to get the fields ready for next harvest and hence burning stubble seems like a quick option (with no consequence to them).
The problem is that these rogue states have a) very high fertility (3.3 for Bihar iirc) and b) very high base population which greatly accelerates population
Before the Haber-Bosch process, humans numbered about 2 billion. That process requires fossil fuels. With some efficiency gains we can probably double that number, but along with many other triangulation points, it seems only a substantially smaller number than today's would allow sustainable human society.
We can get there by lowering the birth rate or nature can do it for us, which would likely lower it well beyond.
Have you looked at the birth rate of India for the last 30 years, it has been consistently falling down.
Some of the Southern Indian states have birth rates below replacement rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_terri...
So you end up huge masses of population concentrated in existing cities.
The areas around Bangalore are empty. Try visiting Kolar or Tumkur during weekdays, chances are you will be bored in 30 minutes of your visit and fall asleep. The afternoons feel empty and totally devoid of any activity. Bangalore itself was this way a few decades back, when I was growing up here.
The problem with the cities will continue for the obvious reasons. There is economic activity, schools, colleges, hospitals and better life prospects.
A small part of the article, but I just wanted to point out the night vision part is a WWII disinformation campaign by the British to hide the fact that they had sophisticated RADAR: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propagand...
(In the UK for example) You aren't allowed to advertise "This product will make you smarter" because that's a lie.
But you are allowed to advertise "Vitamin D is essential to normal cognitive function" and "This product has all the Vitamin D you need" which are both technically true - and let the audience draw the false conclusion themselves that they'd be smarter if they used the product.
The product maker has plausible deniability, and especially if consuming the product has no major harmful effect they'll be allowed to keep this up. After all there are also advertisements for fizzy drinks, booze, and plenty of other products that are hardly a good idea, so what's the problem?
1. An explanation of how AQI is calculated? Some initial searching turns up very little information as to the basis of the index.
2. How the safety levels (green, orange, red, purple) are decided.
It seems somewhat opaque. Anyone know why this is?
https://cpcb.nic.in/National-Air-Quality-Index/
For US, EPA has some additional info available:
https://www3.epa.gov/airnow/aqi-technical-assistance-documen...
Almost every home has people with diabetes/hypertension. And every neighborhood has thyroid camps every now and then, and you see a huge mass of women there. Dengue and other infectious disease breakouts are becoming common and you see a rise every 6 months or so. There are waiting queues running into months for open heart surgeries in affordable hospitals, which should tell you the overall direction of health situation here.
This is beyond a total political meltdown looming above the whole country.