In another HN thread there was a discussion of police shaking down minority owned nightclub owners for protection. But, if you look at the police (self-reported) crime statistics they will say the Midwest is very safe.
This article is another brick in the wall that shows that statistics are coerced to tell a story that is convenient for the powers that be. And, the powers that be are well aware of how that "news" shapes public opinion and voting, so the powers that be own the newspapers.
It's all dirty air when you are breathing in "news."
This has been a huge story here in Detroit for at least 6 months now. Stellantis has a plant that is leaking toxic fumes into the air. Every time they say they've fixed it you can just drive down there to any neighborhood nearby and smell it immediately.
That seems unrelated to this post, this one is about things we can't control being removed from the record, mainly wildfires from Canada and other US states.
The concept appears to be that industrial pollution is being blamed on events such as wildfires, and thus remains unaddressed by regulators and not recorded in statistics.
> That seems unrelated to this post, this one is about things we can't control being removed from the record, mainly wildfires from Canada and other US states.
The way your comment is phrased makes it seem like you think Canada is a US state, might want to fix that.
The article implies pretty strongly that there is an ozone problem that's independent of the smoke problem, so the proposed ozone controls are still necessary, and that erasing two days of bad air quality by attributing it to wildfire smoke is an over-broad exemption that disguises a real local source of additional air quality issues, but it doesn't offer supporting evidence, or come right out and say that.
Supporting evidence is offered that the actual air quality was actually bad, and that this had adverse health impacts, but as far as I can tell, that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the extent to which this justifies imposing additional air quality regulations locally.
Sure, Wayne County is working the refs on the air-quality rating system, but it's not obvious to me whether they're justifiably avoiding responsibility for issues that are not their fault, or using those issues as cover for negligent inaction. The article doesn't offer much support to disentangle these positions, notwithstanding their evident editorial position.
Reposting from a discussion on chemical plants, but I think this offers an insight into why residents often complain about the pollution, when it often doesn't show up in the official data. I'm not convinced that this is primarily caused by removing two days due to "wildfires".
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Sadly, the environmental monitoring is woefully inadequate, even next to the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex (Freeport, TX ... though its a bit better of an example to use or include Deer Park / Houston Ship Channel as well because it's part of America's 3rd/4th largest city). Below the dashed line is a copy/paste of a comment I made two months ago on a post of ProPublica's dispersion model and public health impact modeling of self-reported emission events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549653
I am very much looking forward to more and more satellites like this one and ESA's SENTINEL-5P and SCIAMACHY. But AFAIK they'll never be able to tell the difference between, say, ethyl acrylate vs. butyl acrylate (both incredibly toxic) or ethyl mercaptan vs. methyl mercaptan (both noxious/cause headaches at unbelievably low concentrations; ethyl mercaptan has an odor threshold of 0.35 parts per trillion).
So if one plant makes one chemical, and another plant next door makes a similar chemical, these satellites might let the public know that one of the plants is leaking, but both still would have deniability - "it's the other guy across the street". And you'd still not actually know which chemical you've been exposed to.
For that, you'd need monitoring stations with comprehensive sensor combinations at the property boundaries of each chemical plant.
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I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.
The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila. This massive area has only THREE air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they often show no increased pollution at all. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But all 3 monitoring sites (over 10 miles from me) showed nothing at all.
Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.
The data used by ProPublica is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical pla...
When I was kid, I lived next to a pulp mill, there was an air quality station for dioxins on a bluff over the mill. It looked to me even in elementary school that they placed it such that it placed inside of the turbulent vortex as the ocean air would mix with the mill, not measuring the true pollution output of the mill. And there was only one for the whole mill.
A drone collection system could sample air at any point vertically, it would be pretty easy to build a system to sample and model pollution that could capture a 4d volume and create a predictive model of emissions.
If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now.
EPA and TCEQ do have airplanes with analytic equipment equipped to fly through emergency disaster areas and take measurements. But I still don't think they do a good job of measuring the air that residents are breathing 5-20 feet above ground level.
> If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now.
Environmental fines are usually extremely low (if caught by government) and often non-existent (when caught and reported by the polluting company). The regulatory systems genuinely work hard to try to allow industrial polluters to identify, report, and fix their own problems. Otherwise it would create a culture of hiding problems. The regulatory agencies use the safe, open communication with industrial polluters to disseminate "best practices" on how to reduce emissions.
I'm not arguing the current system is best, but just that there are a few potential problems with making things more adversarial which should be at least thoroughly considered and discussed.
Fines are only "large" when there's clearly willful, known violation of environmental regulations. Such as if there has been obvious, active, long-term covering-up and managerial actions taken to hide the problems. Or if there are repeated orders to fix a problem and the company continues without remedying the issue. And even then, they aren't very large.
> If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now.
I'd support that. For me, the model I came up with is to get $150 million donated by some philanthropist and put together a best practice, full scale pilot demo in the Houston, Lake Jackson, or Baton Rouge area. Each monitoring station would cost about $1 million upfront and probably $100,000-200,000 per year to run. You'd need 50-100 of these to monitor the boundaries of each plant and the boundaries of each nearby neighborhood.
I think if this was shown to identify which individual business units were leaking, it would result in much lower emissions. A 5-year trial should be enough to help gather federal tax dollars from a sympathetic administration to build a public version of this, or build the support to require and facilities with a "Reportable Quantity" of environmentally hazardous materials onsite to have effective emissions monitoring of both air and water at the boundaries of the facility.
Not arguing, but at 1M per station, that sounds like a self contained automated lab with various kinds of spectrometers. What could one do with 10k per station? 1k?
You cant do anything at all with $10k per station. Literally nothing. Minimum $250k
“Total VOC” is useless, because without identifying the specific chemical sub-family (e.g. differentiation between ethyl acrylate vs butyl acrylate) you wont be able to tell which company is responsible for the leak or what the leak is.
> self-contained automated lab
Is roughly correct and is the level generally needed. It may be possible to do a bit cheaper, but probably not less than $250,000. Go too cheap and everything will be clogged and broken all the time and you wont get any actionable data for the money you spent.
A spectrometer or chromatograph is just one piece of the overall system, what you’ll want to search or build is a “gas analyzer” for the specific compounds. Take a look here for what those look like: https://www.emerson.com/en-us/automation/measurement-instrum...
They all also need pretty constant skilled maintenance from expensive technicians.
It may be possible to design and manufacture cheaper continuous gas samplers and analyzers but I wouldn’t do that just for this project, that would be its own startup and would need to compete on its own in the industrial market, which is heavily reliant on incumbent relationships and customers are often willing to spend a lot more so they get reliability and are generally unwilling to bet even one hour of potential production time. Because each hour of production can be millions of dollars of revenue, it justifies spending an extra $100k to prevent that downtime.
There’s not actually a lot of cost pressure on these gas analyzers at the moment. But if every plant was required to install 10 of them by law, then maybe buyers would care when they need to buy them for several plants at the same time.
See here a public bid where a particularly low-cost standalone CEMS unit (will still need a good deal of engineering and construction above this cost) for a single basic chemical species (SO2) costs $15,000.
In an area like Deer Park, TX, you might need 8-35 of these per monitoring station (highest variety of chemicals will be near 3rd party tank farms like ITC, along major chemical pipeline networks, at chemical railyard terminals, and ocean shipping terminals). Engineering costs to get a building put in place, telecommunications, power delivery, and SCADA control integration would be expected to run at least another $100,000 not counting any in-house project management hours.
They'll need regular expensive maintenance and some installed redundancy.
To give you a sense of the scale, here are just energy pipelines (natural gas, crude oil, etc). These maps lack thousands of chemical pipelines.
This one facility here is about 380 ft x 350 ft. There is a single pipeline going to this tiny facility which carries around 7 million pounds of chlorine per day. But that pipeline is just serving a tiny 3 acres of the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex in Freeport, TX which spans well over 13,000 acres. Just extracting the chlorine from salt water for this complex requires enough electricity to power 400,000 homes.
Regulations can be undermined at so many levels. One local example over here is noise pollution night flying around airports. It all looks good from the high level. But then you go into the details of how the disturbance measurements and calculations are implemented and you find that I could litterally be firing a canon outside your bedroom window every minute and it would still come out officially as if your sleep was never disturbed.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 54.9 ms ] threadThis article is another brick in the wall that shows that statistics are coerced to tell a story that is convenient for the powers that be. And, the powers that be are well aware of how that "news" shapes public opinion and voting, so the powers that be own the newspapers.
It's all dirty air when you are breathing in "news."
Here is a story from the summertime (I recall hearing about this on local evening news broadcast) https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/stellantis-to-address-o...
Long story short they have never actually sat down and planned a legitimate solution - or implemented a fix.
Supporting evidence is offered that the actual air quality was actually bad, and that this had adverse health impacts, but as far as I can tell, that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the extent to which this justifies imposing additional air quality regulations locally.
Sure, Wayne County is working the refs on the air-quality rating system, but it's not obvious to me whether they're justifiably avoiding responsibility for issues that are not their fault, or using those issues as cover for negligent inaction. The article doesn't offer much support to disentangle these positions, notwithstanding their evident editorial position.
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Sadly, the environmental monitoring is woefully inadequate, even next to the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex (Freeport, TX ... though its a bit better of an example to use or include Deer Park / Houston Ship Channel as well because it's part of America's 3rd/4th largest city). Below the dashed line is a copy/paste of a comment I made two months ago on a post of ProPublica's dispersion model and public health impact modeling of self-reported emission events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549653
I am very much looking forward to more and more satellites like this one and ESA's SENTINEL-5P and SCIAMACHY. But AFAIK they'll never be able to tell the difference between, say, ethyl acrylate vs. butyl acrylate (both incredibly toxic) or ethyl mercaptan vs. methyl mercaptan (both noxious/cause headaches at unbelievably low concentrations; ethyl mercaptan has an odor threshold of 0.35 parts per trillion).
So if one plant makes one chemical, and another plant next door makes a similar chemical, these satellites might let the public know that one of the plants is leaking, but both still would have deniability - "it's the other guy across the street". And you'd still not actually know which chemical you've been exposed to.
For that, you'd need monitoring stations with comprehensive sensor combinations at the property boundaries of each chemical plant.
------------------------
I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.
The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila. This massive area has only THREE air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they often show no increased pollution at all. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But all 3 monitoring sites (over 10 miles from me) showed nothing at all.
Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.
The data used by ProPublica is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical pla...
A drone collection system could sample air at any point vertically, it would be pretty easy to build a system to sample and model pollution that could capture a 4d volume and create a predictive model of emissions.
If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now.
> If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now.
Environmental fines are usually extremely low (if caught by government) and often non-existent (when caught and reported by the polluting company). The regulatory systems genuinely work hard to try to allow industrial polluters to identify, report, and fix their own problems. Otherwise it would create a culture of hiding problems. The regulatory agencies use the safe, open communication with industrial polluters to disseminate "best practices" on how to reduce emissions.
I'm not arguing the current system is best, but just that there are a few potential problems with making things more adversarial which should be at least thoroughly considered and discussed.
Fines are only "large" when there's clearly willful, known violation of environmental regulations. Such as if there has been obvious, active, long-term covering-up and managerial actions taken to hide the problems. Or if there are repeated orders to fix a problem and the company continues without remedying the issue. And even then, they aren't very large.
> If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now.
I'd support that. For me, the model I came up with is to get $150 million donated by some philanthropist and put together a best practice, full scale pilot demo in the Houston, Lake Jackson, or Baton Rouge area. Each monitoring station would cost about $1 million upfront and probably $100,000-200,000 per year to run. You'd need 50-100 of these to monitor the boundaries of each plant and the boundaries of each nearby neighborhood.
I think if this was shown to identify which individual business units were leaking, it would result in much lower emissions. A 5-year trial should be enough to help gather federal tax dollars from a sympathetic administration to build a public version of this, or build the support to require and facilities with a "Reportable Quantity" of environmentally hazardous materials onsite to have effective emissions monitoring of both air and water at the boundaries of the facility.
This looks pretty bad ass, https://ichrom.com/mid-4500-mass-spectrometer/
On the low end, there are MEMs VOC sensors like https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/environmental-senso...
It would be trivial to build a solar powered, voc sensor node that talked lora. Easily less than 30$ BOM in qty 10.
“Total VOC” is useless, because without identifying the specific chemical sub-family (e.g. differentiation between ethyl acrylate vs butyl acrylate) you wont be able to tell which company is responsible for the leak or what the leak is.
> self-contained automated lab
Is roughly correct and is the level generally needed. It may be possible to do a bit cheaper, but probably not less than $250,000. Go too cheap and everything will be clogged and broken all the time and you wont get any actionable data for the money you spent.
A spectrometer or chromatograph is just one piece of the overall system, what you’ll want to search or build is a “gas analyzer” for the specific compounds. Take a look here for what those look like: https://www.emerson.com/en-us/automation/measurement-instrum...
They all also need pretty constant skilled maintenance from expensive technicians.
It may be possible to design and manufacture cheaper continuous gas samplers and analyzers but I wouldn’t do that just for this project, that would be its own startup and would need to compete on its own in the industrial market, which is heavily reliant on incumbent relationships and customers are often willing to spend a lot more so they get reliability and are generally unwilling to bet even one hour of potential production time. Because each hour of production can be millions of dollars of revenue, it justifies spending an extra $100k to prevent that downtime.
There’s not actually a lot of cost pressure on these gas analyzers at the moment. But if every plant was required to install 10 of them by law, then maybe buyers would care when they need to buy them for several plants at the same time.
See here a public bid where a particularly low-cost standalone CEMS unit (will still need a good deal of engineering and construction above this cost) for a single basic chemical species (SO2) costs $15,000.
In an area like Deer Park, TX, you might need 8-35 of these per monitoring station (highest variety of chemicals will be near 3rd party tank farms like ITC, along major chemical pipeline networks, at chemical railyard terminals, and ocean shipping terminals). Engineering costs to get a building put in place, telecommunications, power delivery, and SCADA control integration would be expected to run at least another $100,000 not counting any in-house project management hours.
They'll need regular expensive maintenance and some installed redundancy.
To give you a sense of the scale, here are just energy pipelines (natural gas, crude oil, etc). These maps lack thousands of chemical pipelines.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/energy-web-atlas-wo...
https://pvnpms.phmsa.dot.gov/PublicViewer/
Here are some maps of very basic commodity chemical pipelines, but cost $2,000 each to purchase. https://www.petrochemwire.com/maps-and-data/
This one facility here is about 380 ft x 350 ft. There is a single pipeline going to this tiny facility which carries around 7 million pounds of chlorine per day. But that pipeline is just serving a tiny 3 acres of the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex in Freeport, TX which spans well over 13,000 acres. Just extracting the chlorine from salt water for this complex requires enough electricity to power 400,000 homes.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Freeport,+TX+77541/@28.961...