A lot of people - who've become inured to the air pollution they live in - have suddenly seen what clear skies and clean air looks like. Air pollution is a huge public health issue, with all sorts of deleterious effects.
Hopefully, when business restarts and the air goes back to being mucky poison in many places people will think a little more about what has been traded off for the economic benefits of cities and industrialisation.
This is a polarizing opinion, but as someone who exclusively drives electric I firmly support phasing out, and eventually banning consumer gas vehicles. A more realistic approach to do so would be to increase incentives - in the form of rebates for both new and used vehicles, as well as rebates for charging infrastructure.
Whilst I agree that phasing out combustion engines should be a priority, I have read recently that new studies have found that a lot of the hazardous materials that are inhaled are actually particles ejected from brake pads and tires. Both of these obviously are still present on electric cars too. It will be interesting to see how this research develops and what innovations come as a result but as someone who lives near a main road, I really am getting more and more concious of the long term effects that are yet to be realised
Same with combustion engines, called "engine breaking effect". More so, if one drives anticipatively instead of driving ternary (100% acceleration, 100% deceleration, or keeping the velocity).
By the way: changing the velocity gently reduces tire wear.
You can do this with manual shifting, but none of the automatics that I drove had this feature of engine breaking. Although I sometimes hack it with my current automat by flooring the pedal and releasing it right after it shiftet to lower gear.
I want to know more about why automatics can't do this, but Wikipedia only has an unsourced claim that "gliding vehicles equipped with torque converter-based automatic transmissions [causes] damage due lack of lubrication."
If you release the accelerator, does it decouple the engine from the wheels?
Gliding refers to shutting off the engine with the car moving, which isn't the same thing as engine braking (using the retarding forces of a running engine to slow the car down). Without the engine running there are various pumps that aren't running and fluid movement that isn't taking place anymore, so certain things won't be getting the proper lubrication while the parts are moving.
Automatics can engine brake -- but in response to the person above who couldn't do it -- they typically do not exhibit that behavior in the default drive gear for fuel economy. (although some torque-converter automatics with inclination sensors will automatically engine brake on downhill grades) Most torque-converter automatic transmission also have selectors for holding particular gears to allow the operator to command engine braking behavior.
As the other person mentioned, the quote you are citing means that you shouldn't spin the wheels of an automatic while the engine is not spinning. The input shaft of an automatic transmission typically drives the transmission's lubrication pump. If you spin the output shaft of a transmission of this design without spinning the input shaft, you are rotating the mechanism without lubrication.
My CVT has a "sport" button that lets you engage engine braking, but I've never seen it in an automatic (outside of low gear or "fake manual" type options)
As a person who's suffering from air pollution every day because of my extreme sensitivity, I have to see a case when I feel sick from those harzardous materials. It hasn't been the case so far, which means that it's probably far not as bad as diesel exhaust.
On the topic of living near a main road: I suggest you to move away from it as fast as possible. If I could change one thing in my past, it would be that I was living near a main road as well. It was far the worst decision of my life :(
With long enough time horizon and some limited exceptions, I’m not certain this is controversial.
The moment you add a specific date, I suspect this does become polarizing. Many would like gas cars to be gone in 10 years, others 50 years, and others whenever it becomes cost effective.
I'd switch to electric once it is cost effective for me. And that means I need to be able to find a used electric car on Craigslist for $2000 that still runs well just like my 2002 corolla. Other than that, id be forced to now spend $15000 or more on a car.
Electric vehicles do not reduce PM emissions, and produce more microplastics as heavier vehicles erode tires faster. As helpful as EVs are they're not a cure-all for air pollution.
2.) nuclear power emits greenhouse gases indirectly: (a) construction/decommission of the power plant, (b) mining and extraction of Uranium, (c) contamination of nuclear waste.
The construction and decommissioning of nuclear has an exceedingly negligible carbon footprint relative to its lifetime energy generation. The same criticisms apply to wind and solar as well, they’re also energy intensive to manufacture, transport and install.
Besides, in a world with a surplus of nuclear energy, much of the plant construction and mining could be performed using nuclear generated electricity rather than burning diesel.
Which we need to phase out too. Unless you want to run them on charcoal and bio-gas (and then you probably won't get the volume), most combustion plants need to be mothballed within 10-20 years.
Whenever somebody suggests a solution to some part of the puzzle people say this. I don't know if you are suggesting we do nothing or that we ban vehicles on roads entirely.
This is just plain wrong. Not all PM emissions of cars come from the tires and EV brake less (a significant source of particles), so even if you (wrongly...) assume they're always heavier, PM emissions will generally be lower.
This doesn't say what you think it does. It claims "not significant" reductions from non-tailpipe emissions. So less non-tailpipe emissions (but not much) and 0 tailpipe emissions vs nonzero tailpipe emissions = EV win.
Public transport and last mile delivery are actually ripe for hybridisation and electrification because they spend a lot of their time stopped.
As for long haul delivery—take the Tesla Semi and add a small diesel electric generator. Now it can go all day and still emit far less than regular trucks. This, not pure electric, is where disruption will happen.
Untrue. You're thinking of CO2, where this is debatable (for my city I ran the numbers, our diesel buses fare much worse than my EV per passenger).
A modern EV will always beat a diesel bus at total emissions per passenger, simply because it doesn't emit most of the harmful stuff.
> As for long haul delivery—take the Tesla Semi and add a small diesel electric generator. Now it can go all day and still emit far less than regular trucks.
When I said "Public transport emits far less per passenger" I was not making an assertion about specific methods of locomotion. If you can claim to have an electric car, I can claim (with greater warrant, mind you) to have electric public transport. As it stands right now, public transport is SUBSTANTIALLY more electrified than passenger vehicles. Thus your insistence that we your electric passenger vehicle up against diesel powered public transport isn't just disingenuous, it's factually inverted.
When I said "last mile delivery" I am referring to trucks in cities which cover small distances. Thus I don't understand what your point is when you reply to me with "Most trucks in cities cover only small distances."
When I said "As for long haul delivery..." I am speaking about trucks outside of cities by definition. I referenced trucks which travel short distances in the prior paragraph.
I'm sorry but I think you might have just entirely failed to read my post as it was written. Hopefully you were not having a stroke at the time of replying as I wish you to be well and uninjured.
> If you can claim to have an electric car, I can claim (with greater warrant, mind you) to have electric public transport.
Then why did you disagree with my post calling for electrified public transport (by pointing out how it emits less per passenger)?
> When I said "As for long haul delivery..." I am speaking about trucks outside of cities by definition.
I was very specific in my post about "delivery trucks in the cities". I don't see why you felt you needed to explain to me something about long haul delivery, it's not relevant.
> Hopefully you were not having a stroke at the time of replying as I wish you to be well and uninjured.
Hopefully you don't expect me to read another of your posts or reply to one ever again. Grow up.
A carbon tax means by definition that "offenders" can just pay their way out of electrification. Mandating EV in cities on the other hand will actually improve air quality.
We need to phase out cars. There is no solution in sight to make driving around >1000kg for an hour a day sustainable for everybody. At least 9/10 cars need to go. That still leaves plenty to serve special needs.
This hyperbole got me thinking, what is the industry size really as share of the world economy?
Germany is often cited as the most heavily automotive leaning economy. WP says the industry employs around 800k people. Germany's total workforce is cited at 44 million.
In reality, the world will continue chugging along on gas for some time until the entire economic equation flips. We're still not ready for that, and I don't think it's going to happen in the next decade.
But for the cost of batteries, electric has already won. As soon as we can 10x the manufacturing volume of lithium ion cells, price per cell will plummet and private transport will shift to electric rapidly.
Edit: and to add, I don't want to attack you personally but the kind of "market will take care of it" thinking you shown here is exactly the problem. The market will just exhaust our lithium reserves in a few decades if let on its own. I'd even argue that the market should be excluded outright from limited resources at this point.
> There isn't enough lithium on earth to sustain a full switch to eletric.
No serious person claims that. The bogus article you linked to doesn't even claim that. Lithium is as common as copper in the earth's crust; the USGS estimates 13.5 million metric tons of it. We are presently limited only by the scale of current lithium mining operations.
"Rest assured, Earth has the lithium. The next dozen years will drain less than 1 percent of the reserves in the ground, BNEF says. But battery makers are going to need more mines to support their production, and they’ll have to build them much more quickly than anyone thought."
Well I hope you're right, but even bloomberg doesn't deny that if all private transportation was to be converted to electric, the resources we have would not be enough. Developing recycling processes efficient enough and in time is nothing more than a bet at this point.
And we are not even accounting all the pollution caused by the production of batteries.
From Forbes[0]:
"The drawbacks of the mining industry itself have weighed heavily against the rise of batteries. Mining rare earth and heavy metals emit large amounts of emissions whilst also having a noticeable impact on the environment. Around half of lithium mining comes from brine extraction while the rest is hard rock mining, which has even more damaging consequence to the environment."
Finally to charge these battieries, we will still be using dirty energy sources for the foreseeable future, since renewables are nowhere near to be enough to stop using coal/gas/biomass.
I stand convinced that the only way we have is to rethink entirely our habits of transportation.
Most of the world doesn't live in rural areas anymore. By the time we finish this transition it will be such a small number it won't matter if they still use gas/petrol.
It's quite common for people's places of business to be distant from the place they live. For industrial farms, forests, and mining operations, there is no need to the workers to live right next to it. They can live in the nearby city and commute or the company can provide a shuttle bus.
You've got to be kidding. Your solution to "people drive to much" involves having people who currently live where they work instead commute long distances to where they work, every single day.
The thing I'm most excited about is electric _buses_ I think that will have a huge effect on cleaning up pollution in cities. Especially in other countries.
I lived in Mexico City for a few years and the pollution there is over the top bad. I'm talking almost as bad as Chinese cities. They have all these ancient horribly polluting busses that spew out huge amounts of pollution. If you replace all of those with electric buses things would dramatically improve.
I'm most excited about these too, but for another reason: noise. Looking for a place to live, and there are many nice suburban streets which I pretty much have to avoid because I am such a light sleeper. A late night or early morning bus route would drive me insane.
Where I'm at they've replaced nearly all of our diesel buses with natural gas. They certainly look a lot cleaner driving down the road and I'm guessing they are cheaper to operate as well. Something like that might be a good intermittent step for a lot of these places while the cost on electric buses comes down.
This is a more polarizing opinion, but as someone who doesn't own a car I firmly support removing private cars from many cities altogether. Make anyone who wants to come in or out park outside the city and take public transport/bikes within the city. There are so many benefits including:
- Greatly reduced air and noise polution
- Much more pedestrian friendly, walkable streets
- Put the enormous amount of land reserved for parking in these expensive areas to better use
- Fewer pedestrian deaths
If you look at experiments like Barcelona, these types of changes usually result in resounding success.
Me and my sister were raised without much trouble despite not having a car. The trick is living a city that is not built for cars with humans as an afterthought.
I think this is absolutely dependent on the transport network you have available in your residence area.
I have lived in cities where I _needed_ a car to do anything or wait for hourly buses + walking several miles.
I've been living in a city where I just use public transport (with a baby + wife) and I have only rented a car twice in 3 years, once to do a house move and another time to visit friends in a remote countryside location.
Demand more from local governments or move to a location that provides adequate transport as a service.
Its almost easier to get around large urban cities on foot then with a car. My strategy anytime I am in a large city is drop the car even if its not near my final destination.
It might sound silly, but one of the main reasons I live in Vancouver is because I don't need a car. I enjoy walking or cycling everywhere. I'm healthier and happier. I don't ever sit in traffic, circle for parking, run out of money on the meter, get a ticket, pay $3000/year for insurance, have to take the car to the mechanic, or get pissed of at the moron who dinged my car with his door. I haven't had a car in 4 years now, and I'm loving it.
Cities could be built for people first, a concept familiar in Europe but mostly alien in North America.
Both your comment and the one you're replying to are perfect examples of people advocating for the banning of things that they don't want to do, which I always find unconvincing.
It's easy to advocate to ban a thing if you don't do the thing! You see all the negatives of other people doing it without receiving any of the positives of doing it yourself.
You find it easy to ban because you would not be personally affected.
Personally, as someone who doesn't own a pet, it would be easy for me to firmly support the banning of all pets from many cities on the basis that they poo in public and attack people. That would be easy to support not because it's the right thing to do (which it might be!), but because I don't own a pet.
I own car. It's a "hot hatch" so I pay a premium and consume more fuel for better performance. I drive right into towns. It's very convenient. But I strongly advocate banning cars from town centres and reducing the number of cars on the road in general. This should be done by making taxes proportional to actual road use (that is hours on the road and size and weight of vehicle, with discounts for people with greater needs, like disabled people).
I see the benefits. I get it. But I'm prepared to sacrifice it all because it's completely unsustainable. But I'm not going to do it alone. We all have to do it.
I can get behind movements like this. But, if it takes longer on public transit to get from a to b, even if it's an unusual, unpopular, or unprofitable route then I'll fight tooth and nail. I spent many years riding transit 6 days a week 90-120 minutes each way, sometimes 4 ways for work and school on terrible routes, on dirty, foul smelling, cramped transit filled with the forsaken and forgotten souls of my city. These 90-120m transit rides take a mere 5-15 minutes by car. Cycling and walking are even less practical in my area. In buying a vehicle I've spent more money, but saved something like 700 hours a year. I've also been able to enjoy my areas attractions, and amenities more. If you're going to get my support on a ballot initiative then you'll need to preserve those time savings and save me money.
Fast, cheap mass transit is possible, but the large auto makers won't let it happen unless it's over their rotting corpses.
Touting the benefits won't sway the opinions of people whose livelihood depends on them not understanding the wastefulness of car culture. We're talking about fast, safe, clean, cheap, sustainable, and rugged mass transit on a scale and timeline that our entire world has never come close to accomplishing. Entire cities would have to be remapped. We're talking tens of millions of skilled to highly skilled trades jobs backed by battalions of desk jockeys greasing the cogs at what would inevitably cost in the trillions.
So, while I respect your opinion, it's not one based in reality. There's a lot of political and economic baggage to unwind before such massive projects that threaten so many massive balance sheets could ever gain major political support. National recreational drug legalization, regulation, and commercialisation is far more likely.
Many have already pointed out numerous ways in which you might not actually be more environmentally friendly, so I'll refrain from that. Even if you assume your "exclusively" electric car doesn't pollute more, it still pollutes one way or another. Furthermore, perhaps you buck the trend, but every Tesla owning "person" I know also does an insane amount of travel both in the name of business and pleasure, releasing a ton or more of CO2 for each transatlantic trip. Rich smug people who drive Teslas probably pollute far more than some dude in the countryside with a gas guzzling pickup, at least he only drives it around in his small town and doesn't fly anywhere almost ever.
Its probably best we all try to get off our holier than thou horses and acknowledge that we all are slaves to our wants and want a comfortable lives. Perhaps then we might be able to have a productive conversation on how to truly save this planet (as if the planet needs saving rather than ourselves).
They drive a lot. What they drive is always a new whatever the latest fad is. Sometimes it is a large suv, sometimes a prius, sometimesaa BMW now it is a Tesla. I decline to speculate what will be next, but there will be a next
Seems as though over the lifespan of the car, a Tesla is better for the environment. However, the point of the comment was that people who drive Teslas are offsetting their environmentally friendly car with a larger house, more air travel, and other things that wealthy people who can afford Teslas tend to do.
I hope you are right, and yet I have a feeling that pollution from cars may grow. Why? The coronovirus pandemic may make more people use cars over trains or buses (and planes) - a perfectly natural reaction to avoid densely-packed enclosed spaces. Of course if more people are allowed to work from home, perhaps there will be fewer cars on the roads.
The point OP seems to make is rather one of awareness of the problem than one of a solution for it.
It will be hard to ignore these problems from now on. Millions of people have seen how the world not only could but can look like. I doubt there would be enough blue pills to revert this situation.
Ahh, people with HVACs, how I envy them. None available for an apartment, unfortunately. There are several things you want covered, and nothing short of a full HVAC covers them:
- heating/cooling
- ventilation (bring air from outside to lower CO2 and VOCs
- ideally, heat recovering system for ventilation
- air purifier for P10, P2.5, pollen and so on
- if I could pay extra for a professional humidifier that doesn't need refiling, I definitely would. Not a must, but a VERY nice to have.
You can find aircons with "hepa" filters (I wouldn't trust them to cross the street though). You do NOT find aircons with ventilation. Yeah, they all say they do ventilation, but that just means they work as a fan, they do not bring air from the outside. You can find air purifiers, even very good ones, but they purify the air already inside - open a window and it's full reset. Plenty of good air humidifiers, if you have the patience to refill them every two days.
I sometimes fantasize what it would be like to cobble a system together. Most of what's missing is a heat recovery ventilation, but that's awkward as fuck to add in an apartment.
You can skip step 3. The negative pressure on the inlet side of the fan is plenty enough to hold the filter to the side of the fan. The common square box fans sold in North America work perfectly with a 20x20 furnace filter.
I taped a window shut to install a portable A/C, but it feels wrong to run it at night when the outside air is colder than inside. It can cool relatively efficiently in that case, so it doesn't need to run for long, but ventilation would make it free.
I bought a Winix air filter from CostCo for my apartment. I am amazed at how much 'material' is captured on the permanent pre-filter every two weeks. The pre-filter needs to be rinsed every two weeks.
Bought a Philips AC2887/10 air purifier (uses a HEPA filter) two months ago for my appartment, and it has noticeably improved my quality of life at home; I definitely can recommend it.
We were getting a new system and the installers recommended against using 3M filters because ‘they can harm the system’ etc. They recommended an extremely porous ‘filter’ with little to no pressure drop.
Turns out, if you use a filter that actually works, you have to be more diligent about changing it, or else the pressure drop gets high enough to put pressure on the HVAC. There are new filters that monitor the integrated pressure drop to track when the filter needs to be changed.
Given the current COVID-19 crisis, this statement really staid out
"But chronic exposure to polluted air can result in the overproduction of proinflammatory cytokines and chronic inflammation that leads to nerve cell death."
As many readers are probably aware, overstimulation of cytokines seems to cause the dreaded second phase of deterioration in covid-19 patients.
A bit tangental, but one of the effects of the COVID situation has been to show me how dirty the air was previously. I live in a pretty clean place to begin with, but the sky has never been so blue. It's usually crossed with jet contrails, but it also usually has a bit of a haze that I hadn't really noticed until it was gone.
On a similar note, I find my stress levels are significantly different when walking in city blocks where cars are banned vs walking on sidewalks alongside any kind of traffic. Double the stress, if you have kids with you.
Genuinely curious - is it really more clean though? Or is it just more visibly clear to humans (obviously, that is due to a reduction in pollution, but just how much?)
I'm just basing this thought off of waterways in Italy and such. When all the pictures of "unpolluted waterways" were going around... it's not that there was a drastic reduction in pollution. It's just that the silt hadn't been disturbed by boats/other man made things.
Very huge issue in diving - some famous cave divers have claimed that's typically the cause of their most near-death situations.
It is, you can probably check the plots from your local air pollution measurements.
(Of course, in isolation that means nothing since the values are influenced heavily by weather, eg wind direction, but in aggregate and in comparison to the past you can interpret it.)
It is also especially obvious in satellite images (for those pollutants that can easily measured by satellite). Eg. the NO2 concentrations have gone down significantly in many areas of the world.
the Dolphins in venice was really a matter oft cleanliness, and possibly less boat traffic. The canals aren't so deep that you would not see dolphins swimming through on normal days.
The sky here normally has 5+ jet contrails. I live approximately between Atlanta and Charlotte. I can’t think of a single time since moving here that the sky has truly been clear.
I agree with all of the above except the diet. Fruit and Veg is great but make sure you cook the veg well because the small amount of nutrients lost in cooking doesn't balance the massively increased strain on your digestive system for eating raw veggies.
Also on the low carb thing, there is nothing inherently bad about carbs. Eating too many carbs in one sitting will make you sluggish (digestion) but not eating enough carbs will reduce your cognitive capacity due to less available glucose for the brain. You can't get the same energy from fats unless you enter ketosis which requires a close to zero carb diet and very high fat. There is no point going half way with a low carb diet (unless you are trying to loose weight) go normal carb or full keto. If carbs make you sluggish then I suggest carbs that are easier to digest such as rye crackers, oats, small amounts of wholemeal bread or small servings of brown rice.
One long term solution is to have more self sustaining communities. Local food, local business and electric vehicles run from local renewable energy (wind/solar, still connected to the grid for efficiency).
That's great and all but only weird eco people like me and the commenter above you would actually want to live there. There are massive tradeoffs. First there are all the usual tradeoffs of not living in a city but there is also less variety of food due to reduced imports. It would take longer to get specialist goods and services and travel time to say a medical specialist would be longer. The other issue is that it's hard to have a cohesive community if you have the wrong ratio of different existing cultures. If you have half one culture and half another you get a fractured community. You need either a massively mixed diverse community or a monoculture. I'd opt for the former with an emphasis on maintaining diversity instead of sliding into a grey goo world culture. But even then I don't know because I don't study those kind of social issues.
The cultural problems, education and attitude problems are much harder to fix than the technical challenges. The draw of shiny stuff and tribalism is too much. That's where I don't think anyone has a solution. I just hope the next generation can figure that one out.
Shipping need not have a significant environmental impact. Electric trains to electric trucks works. Boats need minimal fuel and can supplement with wind and solar power.
Just being aware of the situation also helps, even if one does not have a plan. Knowing that an apartment is not exactly what your mind and body needs helps you into searching activities outside the apartment for example.
I don't think we really need anymore evidence PM2.5 is bad?
I don't think you should need this article to change your mind on anything?
I think we are by far at the stage were we need influencers to be paid to start pushing it.
Clean air in the house, which will then move to clean air outside, since the rich also have to walk outdoors. (And by rich I mean Westerners visiting developing countries, for example)
Yet moderate smokers of 40+ years have no higher risk than non smokers... Strange (just ask my 96yo grandmother who smoked for 42yrs and is still sharp as a pin mentally)
There are a lot of other bad things that the people in Mexico city are exposed to. Why blame Alzheimer's on air pollution???
Oh, wait... thought Herpes got in the brain and caused it...
Scientists don't have a clue what really causes it (yet they have many clues). Probably 1,000 different things which affect 1,000 different people , well differently.
These links are great to understand and discover. Smart policy makers would start integrating these hidden costs and adding them as taxes to products/processes that contribute to PM2.5. To make it politically viable, do it the Canadian way and give the tax payments right back to the tax payers. It’s essentially a free way to help society make better decisions.
I really don’t know how to trust such research anymore. Delhi and nearby areas have serious air pollution Issue (Actually large part of the north India belt going upto Pakistan has a problem with dusty air, especially in winters), but Alzheimer’s is not a serious issue here.
I think it depends more on the time that people are exposed to pollution for. I don't know for how long this Issue has been existing, but I don't think that any significant increases are going to happen for the first 30 years of such an Issue.
See this is the slight, unnecessary, condescending attitude in west. Life expectancy in India is fine in people who can afford ok food and place to live. There’s a lot of poverty and poor people seemingly have lower life expectancy, which lowers the avg. And yeah pollution would have an effect, but it’s definitely not like people die early so we don’t have data on Alzheimer’s. My grandparents lived past 80, and only one of them took some diabetes medicine. Otherwise they weren’t dependant on drugs till their last years.
Without any causal model, a lot of this medical research is just staring too hard at scatter plots of correlated variables. I heard the other day that herpes is correlated with Alzheimer's. Is herpes correlated with air-pollution? Probably. Do we know what the real cause of Alzheimer's is? No way.
Yeah, I go about telling people the importance of knowing that “Correlation is not causation”.
Most people just don’t care to understand it, “But the scientists said xyz, who are you to question them?”. “Erm, someone who likes stats and common sense”
I wonder whether people who have lived most of their life in, say, Glasgow would show lower incidence of Alzheimer’s, if it’s linked to PM2.5.
I use AirVisual and randomly added a few cities in addition to my current location. Among those I have Glasgow, which is reliably showing very green readings of US AQI (often 10 or less).
I wonder if this is conflating industrialization's pollution with the actual diagnosis of Alzheimer's. The rural psychologist shortage is well known. We saw similar crank claims for autism but it wasn't rising, just being better diagnosised.
It's almost as if neurodegenerative diseases are poorly understood and can have many causes, because we're not even sure that what we're calling "Alzheimers" is a single disease.
Certainly many in their 50's would of been exposed more to lead from car emissions until the shift to reduce that took place. Which is an aspect when looking at peoples health as it is not just the environment they live in now, but also the past.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 3031 ms ] threadHopefully, when business restarts and the air goes back to being mucky poison in many places people will think a little more about what has been traded off for the economic benefits of cities and industrialisation.
If you release the accelerator, does it decouple the engine from the wheels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliding_(vehicle)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_braking
As the other person mentioned, the quote you are citing means that you shouldn't spin the wheels of an automatic while the engine is not spinning. The input shaft of an automatic transmission typically drives the transmission's lubrication pump. If you spin the output shaft of a transmission of this design without spinning the input shaft, you are rotating the mechanism without lubrication.
On the topic of living near a main road: I suggest you to move away from it as fast as possible. If I could change one thing in my past, it would be that I was living near a main road as well. It was far the worst decision of my life :(
The moment you add a specific date, I suspect this does become polarizing. Many would like gas cars to be gone in 10 years, others 50 years, and others whenever it becomes cost effective.
2.) nuclear power emits greenhouse gases indirectly: (a) construction/decommission of the power plant, (b) mining and extraction of Uranium, (c) contamination of nuclear waste.
Besides, in a world with a surplus of nuclear energy, much of the plant construction and mining could be performed using nuclear generated electricity rather than burning diesel.
Whenever somebody suggests a solution to some part of the puzzle people say this. I don't know if you are suggesting we do nothing or that we ban vehicles on roads entirely.
Public transport and last mile delivery are actually ripe for hybridisation and electrification because they spend a lot of their time stopped.
As for long haul delivery—take the Tesla Semi and add a small diesel electric generator. Now it can go all day and still emit far less than regular trucks. This, not pure electric, is where disruption will happen.
Untrue. You're thinking of CO2, where this is debatable (for my city I ran the numbers, our diesel buses fare much worse than my EV per passenger).
A modern EV will always beat a diesel bus at total emissions per passenger, simply because it doesn't emit most of the harmful stuff.
> As for long haul delivery—take the Tesla Semi and add a small diesel electric generator. Now it can go all day and still emit far less than regular trucks.
Most trucks in cities cover only small distances.
When I said "last mile delivery" I am referring to trucks in cities which cover small distances. Thus I don't understand what your point is when you reply to me with "Most trucks in cities cover only small distances."
When I said "As for long haul delivery..." I am speaking about trucks outside of cities by definition. I referenced trucks which travel short distances in the prior paragraph.
I'm sorry but I think you might have just entirely failed to read my post as it was written. Hopefully you were not having a stroke at the time of replying as I wish you to be well and uninjured.
Then why did you disagree with my post calling for electrified public transport (by pointing out how it emits less per passenger)?
> When I said "As for long haul delivery..." I am speaking about trucks outside of cities by definition.
I was very specific in my post about "delivery trucks in the cities". I don't see why you felt you needed to explain to me something about long haul delivery, it's not relevant.
> Hopefully you were not having a stroke at the time of replying as I wish you to be well and uninjured.
Hopefully you don't expect me to read another of your posts or reply to one ever again. Grow up.
Germany is often cited as the most heavily automotive leaning economy. WP says the industry employs around 800k people. Germany's total workforce is cited at 44 million.
Some of that workforce would be categorized as being in the industries of manufacturing, engineering services, chemical products, electronics, etc.
In Michigan, for example, there are many hundreds of non-automotive companies who rely on nearby automakers for virtually 100% of their contracts.
In reality, the world will continue chugging along on gas for some time until the entire economic equation flips. We're still not ready for that, and I don't think it's going to happen in the next decade.
Oil is still what the market chooses.
(Obviously that isn’t trivial.)
This article from 2015 sums it up pretty well: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-There-Enough...
Edit: and to add, I don't want to attack you personally but the kind of "market will take care of it" thinking you shown here is exactly the problem. The market will just exhaust our lithium reserves in a few decades if let on its own. I'd even argue that the market should be excluded outright from limited resources at this point.
No serious person claims that. The bogus article you linked to doesn't even claim that. Lithium is as common as copper in the earth's crust; the USGS estimates 13.5 million metric tons of it. We are presently limited only by the scale of current lithium mining operations.
"Rest assured, Earth has the lithium. The next dozen years will drain less than 1 percent of the reserves in the ground, BNEF says. But battery makers are going to need more mines to support their production, and they’ll have to build them much more quickly than anyone thought."
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-lithium-battery-futu...
By the time we get anywhere close to dwindling natural resources, it's likely that opportunities for lithium recycling will ramp up.
And we are not even accounting all the pollution caused by the production of batteries.
From Forbes[0]:
"The drawbacks of the mining industry itself have weighed heavily against the rise of batteries. Mining rare earth and heavy metals emit large amounts of emissions whilst also having a noticeable impact on the environment. Around half of lithium mining comes from brine extraction while the rest is hard rock mining, which has even more damaging consequence to the environment."
Finally to charge these battieries, we will still be using dirty energy sources for the foreseeable future, since renewables are nowhere near to be enough to stop using coal/gas/biomass.
I stand convinced that the only way we have is to rethink entirely our habits of transportation.
[0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/10/electr...
I lived in Mexico City for a few years and the pollution there is over the top bad. I'm talking almost as bad as Chinese cities. They have all these ancient horribly polluting busses that spew out huge amounts of pollution. If you replace all of those with electric buses things would dramatically improve.
- Greatly reduced air and noise polution
- Much more pedestrian friendly, walkable streets
- Put the enormous amount of land reserved for parking in these expensive areas to better use
- Fewer pedestrian deaths
If you look at experiments like Barcelona, these types of changes usually result in resounding success.
I have lived in cities where I _needed_ a car to do anything or wait for hourly buses + walking several miles.
I've been living in a city where I just use public transport (with a baby + wife) and I have only rented a car twice in 3 years, once to do a house move and another time to visit friends in a remote countryside location.
Demand more from local governments or move to a location that provides adequate transport as a service.
Cities could be built for people first, a concept familiar in Europe but mostly alien in North America.
It's easy to advocate to ban a thing if you don't do the thing! You see all the negatives of other people doing it without receiving any of the positives of doing it yourself.
You find it easy to ban because you would not be personally affected.
Personally, as someone who doesn't own a pet, it would be easy for me to firmly support the banning of all pets from many cities on the basis that they poo in public and attack people. That would be easy to support not because it's the right thing to do (which it might be!), but because I don't own a pet.
Much less true in some European cities though. I don't have a car and I can't say it's taken effort to not have.
I see the benefits. I get it. But I'm prepared to sacrifice it all because it's completely unsustainable. But I'm not going to do it alone. We all have to do it.
Fast, cheap mass transit is possible, but the large auto makers won't let it happen unless it's over their rotting corpses.
Touting the benefits won't sway the opinions of people whose livelihood depends on them not understanding the wastefulness of car culture. We're talking about fast, safe, clean, cheap, sustainable, and rugged mass transit on a scale and timeline that our entire world has never come close to accomplishing. Entire cities would have to be remapped. We're talking tens of millions of skilled to highly skilled trades jobs backed by battalions of desk jockeys greasing the cogs at what would inevitably cost in the trillions.
So, while I respect your opinion, it's not one based in reality. There's a lot of political and economic baggage to unwind before such massive projects that threaten so many massive balance sheets could ever gain major political support. National recreational drug legalization, regulation, and commercialisation is far more likely.
Its probably best we all try to get off our holier than thou horses and acknowledge that we all are slaves to our wants and want a comfortable lives. Perhaps then we might be able to have a productive conversation on how to truly save this planet (as if the planet needs saving rather than ourselves).
It will be hard to ignore these problems from now on. Millions of people have seen how the world not only could but can look like. I doubt there would be enough blue pills to revert this situation.
- heating/cooling
- ventilation (bring air from outside to lower CO2 and VOCs
- ideally, heat recovering system for ventilation
- air purifier for P10, P2.5, pollen and so on
- if I could pay extra for a professional humidifier that doesn't need refiling, I definitely would. Not a must, but a VERY nice to have.
You can find aircons with "hepa" filters (I wouldn't trust them to cross the street though). You do NOT find aircons with ventilation. Yeah, they all say they do ventilation, but that just means they work as a fan, they do not bring air from the outside. You can find air purifiers, even very good ones, but they purify the air already inside - open a window and it's full reset. Plenty of good air humidifiers, if you have the patience to refill them every two days.
I sometimes fantasize what it would be like to cobble a system together. Most of what's missing is a heat recovery ventilation, but that's awkward as fuck to add in an apartment.
1. get a box fan
2. get a furnace HEPA filter
3. tape the filter over the fan
4. turn it on!
But, to be honest, I prefer opening the windows more often.
We were getting a new system and the installers recommended against using 3M filters because ‘they can harm the system’ etc. They recommended an extremely porous ‘filter’ with little to no pressure drop.
Turns out, if you use a filter that actually works, you have to be more diligent about changing it, or else the pressure drop gets high enough to put pressure on the HVAC. There are new filters that monitor the integrated pressure drop to track when the filter needs to be changed.
"But chronic exposure to polluted air can result in the overproduction of proinflammatory cytokines and chronic inflammation that leads to nerve cell death."
As many readers are probably aware, overstimulation of cytokines seems to cause the dreaded second phase of deterioration in covid-19 patients.
On a similar note, I find my stress levels are significantly different when walking in city blocks where cars are banned vs walking on sidewalks alongside any kind of traffic. Double the stress, if you have kids with you.
I'm just basing this thought off of waterways in Italy and such. When all the pictures of "unpolluted waterways" were going around... it's not that there was a drastic reduction in pollution. It's just that the silt hadn't been disturbed by boats/other man made things.
Very huge issue in diving - some famous cave divers have claimed that's typically the cause of their most near-death situations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silt_out
(Of course, in isolation that means nothing since the values are influenced heavily by weather, eg wind direction, but in aggregate and in comparison to the past you can interpret it.)
It is also especially obvious in satellite images (for those pollutants that can easily measured by satellite). Eg. the NO2 concentrations have gone down significantly in many areas of the world.
eg.
https://www.space.com/nasa-satellite-air-pollution-us-northe...
but you can easily look for more.
- Eat a nutrient-rich, low-carb diet loaded with veggies.
- Use high-quality air purifier(s) at home.
- Drink the best-filtered water I can
- Constantly try to connect with friends and family and maintain a good group of friends. (I use a personal CRM to help me do this)
- Exercise often
- Get into nature as often as possible
Also on the low carb thing, there is nothing inherently bad about carbs. Eating too many carbs in one sitting will make you sluggish (digestion) but not eating enough carbs will reduce your cognitive capacity due to less available glucose for the brain. You can't get the same energy from fats unless you enter ketosis which requires a close to zero carb diet and very high fat. There is no point going half way with a low carb diet (unless you are trying to loose weight) go normal carb or full keto. If carbs make you sluggish then I suggest carbs that are easier to digest such as rye crackers, oats, small amounts of wholemeal bread or small servings of brown rice.
That's great and all but only weird eco people like me and the commenter above you would actually want to live there. There are massive tradeoffs. First there are all the usual tradeoffs of not living in a city but there is also less variety of food due to reduced imports. It would take longer to get specialist goods and services and travel time to say a medical specialist would be longer. The other issue is that it's hard to have a cohesive community if you have the wrong ratio of different existing cultures. If you have half one culture and half another you get a fractured community. You need either a massively mixed diverse community or a monoculture. I'd opt for the former with an emphasis on maintaining diversity instead of sliding into a grey goo world culture. But even then I don't know because I don't study those kind of social issues.
The cultural problems, education and attitude problems are much harder to fix than the technical challenges. The draw of shiny stuff and tribalism is too much. That's where I don't think anyone has a solution. I just hope the next generation can figure that one out.
I don't think you should need this article to change your mind on anything?
I think we are by far at the stage were we need influencers to be paid to start pushing it.
Clean air in the house, which will then move to clean air outside, since the rich also have to walk outdoors. (And by rich I mean Westerners visiting developing countries, for example)
There are a lot of other bad things that the people in Mexico city are exposed to. Why blame Alzheimer's on air pollution???
Oh, wait... thought Herpes got in the brain and caused it...
Scientists don't have a clue what really causes it (yet they have many clues). Probably 1,000 different things which affect 1,000 different people , well differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediation_(statistics)
Without any causal model, a lot of this medical research is just staring too hard at scatter plots of correlated variables. I heard the other day that herpes is correlated with Alzheimer's. Is herpes correlated with air-pollution? Probably. Do we know what the real cause of Alzheimer's is? No way.
Most people just don’t care to understand it, “But the scientists said xyz, who are you to question them?”. “Erm, someone who likes stats and common sense”
I use AirVisual and randomly added a few cities in addition to my current location. Among those I have Glasgow, which is reliably showing very green readings of US AQI (often 10 or less).
The Randomness of Correlation and its Hacking by Bigdataists https://youtu.be/D6CxfBMUf1o?t=208
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094317