Delhi: 442. Lahore: 334. Beijing: 16. These are the levels of PM 2.5, one of the principle measures for air pollution, on November 19. How China cleaned up its air pollution – and what that meant for the climate: https://theconversation.com/how-china-cleaned-up-its-air-pol...
And yet they have the most coal plants, and the most coal plants under construction. This comparison includes India.
This is PM2.5 map of Beijing today: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/08/20/0200Z/particulates/...
This is London: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/08/20/0200Z/particulates/...
This is East USA: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/08/20/0200Z/particulates/...
They are not even close.
For the kicks, here is Delhi today: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2026/08/20/0200Z/particulates/...
Also lower than Beijing. (There's a hotspot to the west of Delhi due to wildfires.)
And if the trend of China cleaning up their electricity supply continues (they just slipped under 50% coal) then even existing EVs will get cleaner every year with less pollution created at distant powerplants.
Cherry-picking to try to portray the opposite of the generally accepted truth is much more problematic.
They add coal power because it's super fast to build, but it's not a permanent solution.
https://chinadata.live/data/coal-consumption-china-vs-world/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_reserves
We can look at more concrete promises by leadership of China:
"In a video statement to the UN in New York, President Xi Jinping said that China would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions across the economy by 7-10% by 2035, while "striving to do better"."
Too little, too late.
"Most scenarios to limit warming to 1.5C - or even well below 2C - would require China to make much greater cuts than that by 2035"
It's convenient to say they will reduce reliance on coal if they forecast their coal reserves might run out in meantime:) But people here are persistent at praising PRC for their green achievements
Well yeah, but not in Beijing
Indoor pollution ---> Use these for cooking (induction, electric resistance) stove, heatpump waterheater and furnace for HVAC
Would also be nice to do: stop using coal, gas power plants. These are usually farther out from cities and probably not the most urgent. (except when Elon Musk or new DCs decide to use gas turbines in cities).
Researchers say they have cracked how air pollution leads to cancer, in a discovery that completely transforms our understanding of how tumours arise: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62797777 (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788706)
Surprise! Electric cars are already making California healthier (2023): https://electrek.co/2023/02/10/surprise-electric-cars-are-al...
Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
Tiny air pollutants may cause changes in brain structure that resemble those of Alzheimer’s disease: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/well/mind/air-pollution-b...
It is important to use metrics and language that people can understand. Cigarette smoking is very well known, because public health initiatives make sure the harm is labeled. Air Pollution and Cigarette Equivalence: https://berkeleyearth.wpengine.com/air-pollution-and-cigaret...
Delhi’s air pollution equivalent to smoking 50 cigarettes per day but experts say it can be fixed: https://epic.uchicago.in/delhis-air-pollution-equivalent-to-...
Almost all countries failing to meet mark for PM2.5, tiny particles expelled by vehicles and industry that can cause health problems: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/19/air-poll...
Bees struggle to find flowers because of air pollution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37434381
Cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people since their invention. 1 in 34 deaths are caused by cars and automobility with 1,670,000 deaths per year. Car harm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465354
Gas stoves pollute homes with benzene, which is linked to cancer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364524
Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249971
Per day, which for some reason the headline didn’t include. Two packs a day is a pretty terrible baseline. At least it’s not addictive.
depending on where you live, its really hard to motivate to take part in generating less polition due to the involved costs and living costs already being too high
However what you don't talk about is how much progress as been possible thanks to cars. Like researchers/scientists driving to work.
The switch to EV is happening: but things like packing as many people as possible in cities and preventing them from having a car and giving them authorization to go to the country-side once a year ain't happening any time soon.
We should be celebrating the switch to EVs and to safer cars instead of hating on individual transportation.
1) Plug-in solar and batteries are plug-n-play. This is the first step to teach everyone energy literacy and numeracy.
2) Vertical panels immediately add 3 - 4 hours. Vertical panels have zero real estate cost and no need to build costly and slow transmission infrastructure. Every building in a city can produce energy.
3) EVs to store excess energy during the day and supply power back to the grid later.
1.8 billion vehicles connect 4 billion buildings. Buildings can produce clean energy and EVs can store energy. The lowest hanging fruit is to make sure all new buildings are built to produce, and all new vehicles are EVs. New buildings can be built with vertical panels and rooftop. The easiest thing to do is change building code, thats it. Then, we can deal with the built environment.
Centralized production and storage will always be more efficient
I would like to note that batteries at end of life are chemical waste and have to be disposed properly.
"End of life electric vehicle batteries in China to 2060 and related resource management implications"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-026-03555-3
"The EOL batteries contain a wide range of toxic and hazardous materials that can leach into the soil and water, threatening human health and the environment. For example, lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF₆), a component in power batteries, hydrolyzes on contact with water to produce highly toxic hydrofluoric acid (HF). Additionally, cobalt, nickel, and organic solvents in the batteries can contaminate water and soil, leading to long-term ecological damage"
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30072026/china-ev-battery...
As far as countries like the US is concerned we need to mirror our policies with lead acid batteries. Recycling chains need to be setup and monetary penalties for not recycling a battery when buying a new battery. Ideally I think this should be for lithium batteries from BEV & Home Storage, all the way down to disposable vapes.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...
Redwood recycles end-of-life batteries to recover lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper — creating one of the largest domestic sources of these critical materials: https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
Even just a day's worth of energy is decades worth of global lithium ion battery output. For just one country. People rarely appreciate the scale demanded to make grid storage feasible.
Just kidding, I’ve seen it more and more as well, and feel the same as you about it.
Behaving like that ought to get you shunned and persistence ought to get you marginalized the same way that overt racism or whatever would.
You get what you incentivize. And right now there's no incentive not to vomit dishonesty upon the public discourse so we've got a lot of idiots doing that.
"Don't worry, they will tell you."
It really is weird how many people are enthusiastic about stemming climate change but don't support one of the few non-intermittent sources for carbon free energy.
That is a defensible question, that can be argued/countered, but it's not the question posed.
A nuclear deployment takes 3 - 5 decades, costs continue to skyrocket, actually needs nuclear scientists to design and run.
Which one do you think is a better choice? If you were an investor, would you put your money on a nuclear plant and wait 3 - 5 decades for returns?
For example Germany was still building new coal power plants in 2005-2007.
https://energytransition.org/2016/10/germanys-last-new-coal-...
https://us.boell.org/en/2014/06/06/german-coal-conundrum
Currently, in 2026, Germany is retiring coal power plants and replacing them with gas power plants.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-government-appro...
Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2026 - https://www.lazard.com/media/kcfconhf/lazards-lcoeplus_vf.pd... [pdf]
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
China Keeps Beating Renewable Targets And Missing Nuclear Ones - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/25/china-renewable-targets... - July 25th, 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
"Operating coal power capacity in China has increased 44% since the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015."
"1,270 GW operating coal power capacity"
"533 GW coal power capacity"
https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...
" Many of China's renewables-rich regions are also major coal-producing areas. While renewable development creates opportunities for economic diversification and industrial transformation, it can also provide a new rationale for expanding coal-based industries. The coal-to-chemicals sector illustrates this risk.
According to new GEM research, all coal-to-olefins projects currently under construction in China’s northwestern and northern regions include planned associated green hydrogen facilities, as regulators increasingly require renewable integration as a condition for project approval. However, in many cases, the renewable component represents only a small fraction of overall energy use."
https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/chinas-wind-and-sol...
China currently builds cheapest possible energy system based on renewables backed by coal power instead of expensive energy system based on nuclear energy.
Ember Energy: China - https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ - Last Updated: May 28th, 2026
> China is rebuilding its industrial economy on a clean foundation as rapid renewable energy expansions begin to offload fossil fuels
> Hydropower remains China’s largest single source of clean electricity, contributing 13% in 2025. The share of wind and solar combined reached 22%, above the global and Asia average of 17%. Solar recorded another year of exponential growth, with 336 TWh of power generation, a 40% increase compared to 2024.
> The biggest shift in China’s electricity generation in 2025 was an absolute decline in coal generation. Coal output decreased by 71 TWh, the first such drop since 2015. Fossil fuels provided 58% of China’s electricity in 2025, down from about 62% in 2024.
> China could reach peak fossil fuel consumption by 2030, thanks to exponential renewables growth and electrification. In 2025, China’s fossil generation declined by 56 TWh (-0.9%), the first year without an increase since 2015. This represents a structural shift, and if current trends hold, China’s fossil fuel demand could begin falling soon, creating conditions for global fossil fuel demand to decline as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station
China’s energy storage market doubles in size for second consecutive year as price inflection point emerges - https://www.energy-storage.news/chinas-energy-storage-market... - August 18th, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
Ember Energy: From scale to system: navigating the next phase of China’s battery storage - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-syste... - July 16th, 2026
China Battery Storage Use Surges After Policy Shift, Ember Energy Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/china-bat... | https://archive.today/QBXxV - July 15th, 2026
I bought a couple reasonably priced HEPA purifiers and I change the filters on schedule. Replacement HEPA filters are very cheap.
Also watch out for things that we do indoors that can generate bad air quality. I had a friend who bought a VOC meter and noticed very high readings in his kid's room. He traced the source to his chemical and paint cabinet nearby, which he never considered because he couldn't smell anything. Throwing out a lot of the old containers dropped the measurements to the unmeasurable range.
The more effective the filter the more it restricts airflow. If a filter is only 99% effective instead of 99.99% but allows double the airflow, it provides nearly double the CADR. To benefit from HEPA you need a clean side and dirty side, like in a clean-room setup.
What matters is the gradual removal of particles from the air.
The HEPA purifiers I have move enough air that everything gets scrubbed. It works.
My house has a separate central air system with a non-HEPA air filter with a decent MERV rating for the bulk filtering. The HEPA air purifiers do the scrubbing of finer particles.
Don’t overthink this. This looks like knowing just enough to be dangerous but missing the big picture.
You have an air purifier in your kid's room. If this is a fairly large apartment or a house, and you have central air running, how much purer is the air in that room? If your central air system is modern and continuously circulates air throughout the house at a low fan speed, you're effectively trying to purify your whole house with that low-output room-sized HEPA filter. Have you done measurements to see if it does anything?
There are ton of variables here. One is where the return air intake is. My house only has a single return air vent in the hallway on a 10' ceiling (the furnace is directly above that in the attic). I think this is not-uncommon in the western US.
I have a room-sized purifier in each room on the floor, and they accumulate considerable dust. What I don't know is how much of that would have been successfully pulled out into the hallway, if I didn't have the vacuum of the purifier.
This is impossible for me to A/B test meaningfully given all the environmental variables - wind (house isn't airtight, wind pushes into leaks harder), wind direction (wind from the desert brings sand and other small particles), humidity, etc.
If anyone has reading material on properly controlled experiments in this regard it'd be really interesting to see. I honestly don't know if they're more effective than disabling them and allowing the central HVAC a chance to pick it up sans airflow-tug-of-war. My hunch is it's not worse, though I have no expertise here.
Long-winded post but I'll close with an anecdote: when we had those wildfires in the Bay Area back during covid, they were absolutely more effective at getting the soot and smell out of all of our rooms than the status quo.
edit: One thing to be aware of if someone is evaluating these, all of the claimed numbers from manufacturers are based on you running the air purifier on the absolute highest speed it offers. Almost no one actually does this in on these consumer grade freestanding ones, especially in bedrooms, because they're quite loud.
I used to work in the cleanest room in the state, that wasn’t a lab, back when I lived in Adelaide, and top-inlet button-outlet in a raised floor data centre is how the air handling units in the main data hall worked, so you can simulate that to a certain extent.
> The more effective the filter the more it restricts airflow.
This isn’t the whole story. Surface area and flow rate are factors.
A residential home is aiming to improve air quality, rather than grow flawless silicon ingots etc.
If you get to recycle the air through the filter several times, MERV-13 offers much better performance tradeoffs for a residential air purifier because you can recycle the air through it much faster at acceptable noise levels. My home air purifier recycles the volume of my home every 15 minutes or so, vs HEPA filters which produce totally clean air, but since it just mixes with the dirty air that doesn’t matter as much as the rate at which it cleans air.
This level of filter goes in the central air system.
The HEPA purifiers are for scrubbing the finer particles.
But a HEPA filter is better than no filter. Even if would be more effective with another.
(Also depends on size of hepa filter and room to clean. Large enough filter and small enough space and Hepa can clean all the air)
If you put a standard sized air purifier with a HEPA filter in it into a room it will absolutely lower the dirty air of the room. Because over time you're lowering the particle count.
If I turn my air purifier on in my room even with the door open the air quality sensors improve their readings quite dramatically.
In locations with central air handlers, the filter in that handler already serves this purpose. That’s how my house is set up: Central handler has a high throughout MERV filter. Several rooms have additional HEPA purifiers.
The parent comment also has a fallacious argument in assuming that the CADR is too low if a HEPA filter is present, but even the cheap HEPA purifiers I bought have sufficient CADR to cycle the room over and over.
If you’re in a location with no central air handler (only mini splits or no air conditioning at all) and you have a giant space to cover and you have a constant exchange of air from the outside to overwhelm your filtration (must leave windows open, for example) then what the commenter above would apply. You would be better with a higher throughput, lower rated filter.
For everyone else, it’s kind of a misplaced “well actually” take that has just enough information to feel truthy but misses the bigger facts.
Air purifiers are designed to run 24/7 and all they do is catch particles. Eventually all the particles will be caught. The one I got also detects if there is a lot of particles and will spin faster accordingly.
Air filters don't work like sieves. The smallest particles are easier to block than the mid-sized particles. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_filter_(respirator)
Clean Air Delivery Rate is often specified for specific pollutants. One is smoke, which is mostly small particles.
According to hepacart [1] 99% HEPA filters do not even exist, since HEPA seems to be clearly defined:
> HEPA filter definition, which requires a filtration efficiency of 99.97% for particles as small as 0.3 microns. "HEPA-type" filters may capture larger particles but are not effective against the finer particulates that true HEPA filters excel at removing.
[1] https://www.hepacart.com/blog/dont-be-fooled-by-hepa-filter-...
If you pair if with an Apollo AIR-1 you can have home assistant ramp up and down the fans with a PC fan controller based on live readings of PM2.5 in your home. I did this with the help of Claude code.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6826527
https://makerworld.com/en/models/2470181-nukit-tempest-euro-...
Though, looking it up it seems that prices for the Winix Zero (including one set of filters) have doubled since I last bought one.
However they look somewhat commercial and I'm not sure the funding/incentives so definitely corroborate with other sources.
Having said that, there are reviews of some DIY models reviewing CADR[1], and it's bizarre to complain about testing decibles since Arctic P14 fans, the most commonly recommended fans, are a thouroughly tested product. Running them at around 25% based on lower PM2.5 readings is almost inaudible from experience.
> Those 2-in-1 filters do exist but cost more. And many are scams because they don't have enough volume of activated carbon.
Any filter with a little bit of carbon added is going to be useless after a few days, or maybe even hours.
The only VOC filters that work have multiple pounds of carbon, with the good filters having upwards of 10-20 pounds. It also has to be replaced regularly.
You can safely put a washer and dryer on the upper floor of a house if you add a proper floor drain, but you’re unlikely to see anyone add a floor drain in new construction because buyers aren’t looking for it. Now multiply that by everything a buyer isn’t looking for and you’re talking real money.
European here, we've always been placing washer/dryer stacks in our bathrooms without needing floor drains. We have machines with a system called Aquastop [1] that stop the water flow if the machine detects a leak inside the system.
Therefore the washing machine is usually in the bathroom, and the shower drain serves both purposes.
They have improved over time, but you need to have a drain for the washing machine anyway so the cost is quite low vs the rather extreme damage a leak can cause.
The real activated carbon filters have 10s of pounds of carbon. The little black foam thing that comes with those 2-in-1 carbon filters is useless.
I drive the car, you buy the purifier.
You don’t think the parent commenter is also using transportation?
The pollution from transport also occurs with trains, buses, and any other vehicle that has wheels, brakes, or moves fast enough to stir up the air and kick particulates into the air.
People do what they can and control what’s within their reach.
And yes other means of transport also does pollute, but amount is is critical here. You need much less public transport than you need individual cars.
I perfectly understand that there is no quick solution (only quick patch with air purifier) so thats why we should not normalise this and remember to complain (after buying air purifier)
Am I bitter about that? Yes. There is nothing wrong with wanting the best for you. There is something dearly wrong with using what's best for you to make life worse for others.
buying a new house will have $40k in reltor fees alone, $2k for movers, plus the, you know, hundreds of thousands for the new house. and what if I like my current house, it's in a busy hip area?
or should I launch a multi-year lobbying campaign in the city and/or state and/or national level to have roads moved?
DHH is also a fan (pun not intended?): https://world.hey.com/dhh/air-purifiers-are-a-simple-answer-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanatorium
I guess the modern descendants are the health retreat, the rural airbnb, and the day spa that offers oxygen therapy.
Funny part is that locals here are absolutely scared of any sign of draft or direct aircon. All while it's what actually saves their health lol.
I have always been and am still baffled by this. My whole family loses their minds if there is even a slight draft or AC, whether in the house or car. When my brother visits he incessantly closes car vents and windows. Parents constantly nag to put on warm clothes and avoid drafts etc., and when we inevitably get sick a few times a year mostly from school transmitted cold viruses they gloat about it.
Maybe it's a cultural thing from times without good heat/insulation where drafts meant an actual freezing house, which, yes that would actually have an impact on health.
I’ve got a sensor that can detect no2 and it noticeably spikes when using gas. Switched to induction after that.
Do you have a source for that? Because as far as I can see, asthma isn't _that_ less common in countries where gas stoves are barely used, such as germany. Still has like 60-70% of the asthma cases the US has. There's also a ton of other pollutants the US hasn't yet forbidden, but the EU has, which could also explain a lot of the difference in rates.
Don't get me wrong, it's certainly a good idea to get rid of gas stoves. I just think it's a bit much to declare them the primary cause of asthma.
'Replacing gas stove can help asthmatics as much as some drugs, US experts find'
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/24/replacin...
That makes sense but the unverified claim is that gas stoves are the main contributors to asthma.
It's better now with more EVs and low pollution vehicles and the street should be pedestrianised from October.
Does the area immediately above where the gas stove was have an exhaust fan that vents to atmosphere?
I would have assumed a properly specced exhaust fan would capture and remove combustion products from a gas stove?
On the other hand, when water turns into steam at standard atmospheric pressure, it expands in volume by about 1,700 times.
Whereas the gas in your stove is already a vapour, mostly methane, turning in to mostly water vapour and carbon dioxide. So the expansion ratio isn’t going to be anywhere near as high as that.
I’d say you’re still right.
Still, I wonder to what extent an exhaust fan does help.
If the exhaust fan can vent x cubic feet per minute and the room is y cubic feet in volume then it takes z minutes to full ventilate the room, etc etc.
I suspect a sufficient ventilation would require something more like a lab fume hood that can pull a negative pressure on the area around the stove.
And from what I have seen, a good number of exhaust fans are straight up fake and just ventilate back in to the room rather than ducted outside.
It's massively easier to just not create the no2 by replacing gas with induction, and to vent the smoke outside rather than trying to trap it in a filter. I think the introduction of cheap consumer air quality sensors like from IKEA will start to make this problem a lot more visible to people.
Culinary Cargo Cult.
You’d sure notice if the air in your kitchen was swooshing around at 671 miles per hour.
Nope.
> It helps that the insides of my lungs are being squeezed outwards by the same force.
So you agree your first statement is incorrect. I’m glad we sorted that out.
Generations of men have been taught that when walking with a woman on a pavement, they should always take the side closer to the road allowing her to keep further away from the traffic.
But Dr Iarla Kilbane-Dawe claimed that Londoners should avoid walking too near the kerb because on busy streets, air pollution can be up to a third higher than on the inside of the pavement.
Surprise surprise.
Which will tend to be less desirable areas, by definition.
One approach, of course, would be to also make existing houses less expensive/desirable. Notably, wealthy people tend to have the resources to fight efforts to do that.
Despite what many in the UK think about it "being full", this is mostly an illusion from how cramped are the parts in which the houses are allowed to go; the country as a whole is mostly undeveloped.
(There are of course other considerations, with "why did you build on a flood plain?" being one of the failure modes in the UK).
Building on farmland has national security concerns (as countries are slowly realizing), as the country ends up dependent on foreign food imports after awhile. Can't grow food effectively when there is a subdivision there instead eh?
In most high demand areas (which are the ones everyone is complaining about, generally), all the decent land (or even just 'normal' land) is already developed.
Bonus - next time around, even the flood plain land might be 'too expensive' to develop on, and folks will only be able to afford houses at the dump, or in a swamp, or the like. Yay.
I've seen that mentality in other parts of the world. The thing is that agricultural land is often protected because it is good agricultural land. It is literally the reason why the cities were built where they were built, since that land provided for the cities. Unfortunately, good agricultural land also tends to be easy to build on and we have a tendency to ignore features that may make it a poor decision to build on. (Such as the flood plains you mentioned.)
If a bunch of good people acting in good faith produce a result an evil mastermind would want does it matter if they are good? On many levels obviously yes, on some practical levels the system and the incentives still need to change.
Vehicles are capped at emissions of 3mg/mile of particulates and 30mg/mile of VOC's. Something like 1-2mg of tire material actually becomes airborne PM10 particles every mile (and only about 10% of that for PM2.5 particles).
So, EV's really do a great job reducing emissions from 35mg/mile to <2mg/mile (PM10) or even <0.1mg/mile for PM2.5. A 95%-99.8% reduction in air pollution near highways would seem absolutely fantastic for me and my children!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11636205/#:~:text=W...
> EV's have 100% reduction of NOx/tailpipe VOCs, 100% reduction in soot/tailpipe particulates, 70% reduction in brake pad dust (due to regenerative braking), in exchange for 25% increase in tire wear.
Needless to say, the brake pads have never been touched and when I saw the left front one at around 110,000 to 120,000 to patch that tire, it looked like it was just installed. The regen braking almost completely eliminated the brake pad or rotor as a wear item.
If the weight on each wheel is greater I’d have assumed the tyre would need to be harder, for the same performance.
I would have assumed that would counter the otherwise additional wear, but I keep hearing EV tyre pollution is higher and yet everyone who owns one has always said they aren’t changing tyres an more than they did on their combustion cars.
And the warranty requires proof of periodic rotation. If the tires are wearing evenly, as is the likely case for a new vehicle, then rotation costs significantly more than the pro-rated rebate.
Or an entire truckload of batteries catches fire.
StasheD is an engineer and firefighter, quite eye opening.
https://archive.ph/VadwU : Tanker Truck Fire Collapses Bay Area Overpass
https://archive.ph/4INYw : I-95 Overpass Collapses in Philadelphia After a Tanker Fire
Lithium ion battery fires less so.
Surly you don’t mean to imply that a sufficiently large lithium ion battery fire couldn’t burn down a bridge?
They are driving liquid fuel tankers that can do that around regularly.
Also consider that as battery tech improves new chemistries lower the risk of fire even more. E.g. sodium batteries are very stable right now and solid state will improve that further. There's no way you can make petrol less flammable.
You're going to have to face facts, battery powered vehicles are safer than petrol powered one.
And safer, less-flammable kinds of battery are in development. Less-flammable kinds of gasoline are not.
Or is it comparing with the entire gasoline vehicle fleet?
Lithium batteries are pretty safe in practice.
Safe enough to not be allowed in checked baggage on commercial passenger aircraft.
Safe enough to kill e-bike riders, safe enough to kill people at home charging their e-bike / e-scooter / electric car.
Perfectly safe.
No trade offs, just safety.
And yet, people travel with one or often more than one battery devices as a matter of utterly unremarkable routine.
My mistake.
I'm not buying it and you shouldn't be selling it.
There is evidence of a lot of ugly diseases caused by this, without even mentioning the constant 40+ dB background noise.
Plus the idea of having everything within a 15 minute walk including access to public transport.
And pollution from bus or tram is much easier to control. Looking at you petrolheads who like to "Rolling coal"
In London now many if not most buses are electric.
Once you build anything of significance, a highway gets built to it anyway.
Living in the country gave me bad hay fever/asthma in the city much less asthma.
Not exactly the same thing.
the only plants that survive these days are the ones that spam a ton of pollen, so it gets selected for aggressively.
1. London when the ULEZ was brought in was already a lot less polluted than historically.Are there gains from that? London was not that bad by global standards.
2. This was followed by the benefits of COVID lockdowns (not a phrase often used!) as pollution dropped much further.
3. Is this effect even across London? Suburbs vs centre, different types of housing etc.? I grew up a the edge of London and the difference in pollution was visible (i.e. you did not need instruments to see signs of it).
4. There was also a reduction in sales of diesel cars which had been heavily encouraged (because of lower CO₂ emissions) in previous decades.
5. As the articles notes, there have been a lot of other changes at roughly the same time. It only mentions one, but there have been significant lifestyle changes, so a lot of potential confounding variables.
2. Definitely kickstarted it, but we're looking at taking that impact and continuing it for some 5 years after covid ended now.
3. You can look at the ULEZ map and it really covers everything but the outer tube line suburbs [1].
5. The control group in Luton, presumably, has the same lifestyle changes - it's not that far away (about 30 miles), so it is as close as you can get to a one to one comparison, not accounting for the fact that Luton is likely to be more deprived than London (especially in the council estates, which have horrible reputations).
[1] - https://tfl.gov.uk/ruc-cdn/static/cms/images/ulezdetailedmap...
2. does the study separate impact during lockdown from after?
3. my question is whether it had the same impact everywhere. I would guess very much not.
5. the impact of those changes might not be the same from a much better baseline, nor are lifestyle changes the same in a big city and a small town.
It's incredible this is even in debate. It's one of those intuitive things well known since the reduction of coal burning and smog during the industrial revolution in London?
They made it into a culture war topic.
We're going to see the same when EV-only mandates, true zero emissions zones, start appearing across the next decade.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/01/fake-tweets...
Show you how people are out of touch with reality. Even something commonsensical like what you mentioned is often countered with - "Show me the data"
'"I was absolutely stunned when I first saw the results," Prof Chris Griffiths, a senior author on the study, at Queen Mary University of London, told the BBC."'
HN needs a 's/^scientists stunned by/Scientists notice/i' filter for Titles.
Except that they do undo the damage.
“ After 15 years, your chances of getting lung cancer are almost the same as someone who has never smoked.”
https://www.verywellhealth.com/risk-of-lung-cancer-in-former...
This study looks more broadly, notably also at onset of smoking:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/27...
And this is the TL;DR:
“ Thus, those who quit smoking at ages 15 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, and 55 to 64 years avoided an estimated 100%, 89%, 78%, and 56% of the excess cancer mortality risk associated with continued smoking, respectively”
Also, quitting smoking definitely eases a number of symptoms, especially if you're not at the point of chronic emphysema. The reduction of inflammation triggers alone after a bit of time is fairly significant. Less coughing, less mucus buildup, etc.
'"I was absolutely stunned when I first saw the results," Prof Chris Griffiths, a senior author on the study, at Queen Mary University of London, told the BBC.'
https://old.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/1v73w9s/hydr...
Visiting London used to mean blowing your nose to black snot for a week afterwards, these days living in London it's pretty good.
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75q9d2pqyeo https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/12/emergenc...
Whenever my best mate goes on about having access to "cultural experiences" that I don't have for living in the sticks I remind him it comes at the cost of massive tube bogeys. :P
Rising natural gas prices due to the Ukraine war also made even more people install fireplaces (as if that was cheaper).
https://clara.southlondonscientific.com/
He also runs this repo:
The study is supposed to measure how clearing up pollution in London improved children's lung function. The decrease in London was meaningful — NO2 fell about 22%. But particulates fell faster in Luton and NO2 in London is still roughly double Luton's. The gap is larger than the decrease.
By 2022 both cohorts get the same results on blow tests. But how does this happen if we believe that the study's dose-response model is true?
Put another way, if the change in London NO2 is so crucial, how come it doesn't matter that the absolute value is still double Luton's?
>At baseline, 184 (14%) of 1280 children with successful FEV1 measurement in London had a clinically low FEV1 (pre-bronchodilator FEV1 <80% of predicted value) compared with 126 (9%) of 1339 children in Luton (appendix p 8). At the end of the study, these values had dropped to 51 (9%) of 585 children in London and 41 (7%) of 606 children in Luton (appendix p 8).
So the proportion of children with low lung function dropped from 14% to 9% in London, and from 9% to 7% at the comparator site in Luton. It's not that much different, though any improvement is obviously welcome.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
I will never forget watching this documentary about a Canadian man, Doug Rogers, who went to Japan in 1964 to train martial arts at a dojo. This YouTube video[1], watch it from 1:00 to 1:10. The air pollution is simply stunning. It shows you just how terrible the air pollution was in Tokyo in 1964. Today, it is night and day. The same is true for most large cities in highly industrialised nations.
even New York is so much more better than Bangalore or my small village in the middle of coffee farms
Sure but they had to live in Luton
I assume you mean that the increased air-exchange (purified or not) helps CO2 that originates inside the house to leave promptly? (Equalizing it with the outdoors.)
Literally "keeping CO2 out" is a much trickier and more-expensive proposition.
Note that because this purifier is mounted at the window, it filters incoming air from outside, not the indoor VOCs that are already in the residence. The indoor VOCs will simply have to get exhausted from elsewhere due to the air pressure.
What I am suggesting is that my need for activated carbon is slightly less because I am rapidly pushing the VOCs out in the resulting exhaust.
So unlike greenhouse gases, which can last in the atmosphere for years, seems like NO2 and particulates only stay in the air for less than a day or a few days. This is an amazing little fact because we can start small and call for meaningful reform where we live without requiring a global coordination. Maybe there will be a global consensus later but it doesn't matter because we can start making improvements today within our own local context. The bonus is we will likely also lower our own carbon footprint as we reduce our other emissions. I think this is the "selfish" breakthrough we need to convince people.
When I say it doesn't matter, I don't mean like cross border contamination does not happen but rather that we can improve our own lives with our own action regardless of what others do.
The obvious actionable thing that you can do for your own life is to stop using or being around gasoline or petrol powered two stroke engines such as in a leaf blower. But we can do more. We can completely ban these two stroke engines from being sold at all and that will bring meaningful improvements in weeks, not years.
The problem is to make more impact, we will need to actually get people to give up or retrofit their existing equipment. We will need to educate people about the harms that these things cause and why the change is good. However, in today's siloed world, I don't think it will be easy at all. So perhaps the most difficult part ironically in a very connected and yet siloed world is the marketing of this idea and connecting the required change in behavior with the benefits.
As we saw with the leaf blower example, the costs are concentrated, yes but so are the benefits! The benefits are NOT at all diffuse because guess who benefits the most from not inhaling in gasoline fumes? The person operating the leaf blower!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/04/scourge-of-londo...
We had a lot of construction work in the neighborhood, our house covered in fine dust particles each day. My kid got asthma in the same period, keeps asking when she can stop taking the medicines, and I say "I don't know" thinking "probably never". But maybe now the construction work is over, there is hope? (And if construction starts again, we know that it is better to move, because there is hope.)
In the UK's far-right media culture, Khan's ULEZ is painted as fringe extremism, not as a common sense public health measure.
There is a big difference between believing something is true, and demonstrating it is true and measuring the effect. One is a vibe. The other can drive policy.
History holds enough examples of intellectuals who out of absolute lack of any human compassion subjected fellow human beings to anti-humane conditions, hoping to find and push the limits of their bodies and psyches in order to maximize profits, ahem, sorry, optimize spending.
And those who you hope to be able to set "policies" on further cramming of people into the machine are either exactly those who profit off that, or eat crumbs from that table.
Yet there are always heart/right hemisphere dead morons who need precise numbers and conclusions written in blood instead of simply relying on common sense.
It's annoying though that EV's need that extra Darth Vader on wheels sound to warn pedestrians, I'd prefer them to be as quiet as possible.
But I'll take it if diesels and two-strokes will die in a fire
We don't all live in the city.
I can’t think of a single house in my sisters village without parking. The village hall also has a carpark with two 7kW chargers.
Yeah that seems to be the general problem here. Electric car champions and city dwellers living in a bubble.
Of the three Villages I know well (my sisters, the one I lived in until moving to a larger 8000 person town, and the one with the primary school) I can’t think of any
Likewise the tiny hamlets I drove through on the way to school didn’t have people parking on the road, there’s simply no room. You occasionally get delivery vehicles stop and it causes chaos.
Different to cities in that there isn't remotely the public transport infrastructure to support getting rid of cars, or the private facility to support electric overnight charging for the longer distance car-commuting etc that isn't generally needed if you live in cities.
Things are improving with technological advance but - again - not everybody can afford those advances and the latest models.
It's a completely different lifestyle living in those sorts of places in some respects.
Even including your towns the vast majority of houses have off street parking, at least according the the rac
You have a very niche issue.
1) storing car on public land at home and office
2) driving excessively long mileage each day
3) having a small capacity car
This is a tiny number of people.
That's still leaves millions (?) of households with on street parking.
Most commuters outside cities get on quite ok with normal cars - because they have to - and a third of them is hardly "niche".
You’re combining. My mother doesn’t have off street parking as she lives in a town. She’s one of the 30%
If she had a typical ev she’d have to charge it once a month.
You’re talking the 30% without off street parking and have high mileage (same needing more than one charge a week).
You can probably get away with that in most cases with on-street parking with a mix of commercial chargers and work if you're lucky.
That "probably" is the point. Your average normal car user (especially in financially challenged times) fighting for a car space on their street is not motivated to take on that higher risk at higher cost in a less competitive market to keep the equivalent of HN demographics happy.
Europe has quite a few cities where traffic is increasingly discouraged from going to the inner cities. Cities like Paris and London are much transformed from what they used to be and it shows in the health statistics.
It's not just the particulates but also nitrous oxides (nox) produced by combustion engines. Nox is correlated with lots of health issues. Take it away and you see lower rates of chronic lung issues, cancer, development issues with kids, etc.
But yes, tires are also an issue. But a fairly minor one to anything coming out of a combustion engine.
Mass transit indeed is nice in big cities. Removes the need for taking the car.
No shit Sherlock.
During the 90s "Fat is evil" craze, all yogurt was replaced with "Fat free" yogurt that had 100 extra calories worth of sugar.
The yogurt aisle in the US is still primarily made up of this garbage product category which exists based on utter falsehoods pushed by the sugar industry. 30 years later and we are still constrained by what ignorant fad chasers in the 90s did.
I guess they mean total non-exhaust particulates.
Regen braking means significantly less brake dust, especially at city speeds and with blended braking.
> Although…rail might solve those?
Trains still have brakes. Some can regen brake but because they usually don’t have batteries they need the rail or overhead gantry to support inputs.
But on a passenger-mile basis, I expect an electric train produces essentially no particulates compared to a car, even a light rail on tyres. I do not however have numbers.
It's much less wear and tear than friction brakes.
https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/subway-air-pollution-dispro...
But I expect it's much better in open-air rail systems.
For all that I did not care for them originally this is probably something full-height platform screen doors help with, assuming the trains themselves are also filtered that would keep the pollutants clear of drivers and users, although it does not exactly resolve the question of managing their presence in the tunnels themselves (and track / tunnel maintenance personnel should probably already be wearing respirators if not full breathing apparatus), and I could see things get pretty dire in case of breakdowns.
In some areas of London the ULEZ has been so successful that the measured NOx is now coming mostly from gas boilers used for heating, probably mostly old large commerical units.
So shifting from gas boilers to heat pumps and from gas ovens and stoves to electric/indusction is also beneficial.
So yeah.
That said not clear to me about PM2.5 is I've never seen anything legit seeming that tries to characterize the harm based on the type/source. Though it seems agreed diesel is especially bad.
However most people live next to a busy street ...
(Actually, the _very_ busiest streets are probably major bus gates (where, again, there are no cars), those can have fairly ridiculous density at peak times.
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/health-impacts-of-...
I bet if some youtube weirdos pushed out videos against "big soap" for making us unnecessarily clean our hands after pooping... we'd have a growing following of angry "freedom from big soap" people.
At one point during Covid, I tried (not very hard at all) to float a conspiracy that the vaccine was in fact not the poison, but the antidote. That Covid was deliberately designed by governments to filter the 'independent thinkers' (who won't take the vaccine) from the sheep (those who do take the vaccine). So by not taking the vaccine, you were giving the governments what they wanted.
This was because the conspiracy that governments were killing the loyal sheep with the vaccine, therefore only leaving the 'independent thinkers' behind, made absolutely no sense at all to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/29/respiratory-cl...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/18/ulez-h...
So EVs are better than ICE for air quality, but fewer cars even better.
Particles caused by tyre and brake wear are going to be much larger than, say, diesel particulates.
That size differences is going to affect how easily they can be absorbed into your lungs.
A new Routemaster double decker weighs 12.6 tonne and carries up to 80 passengers. A typical car weighs 1.6 tonne and carries up to 4 passengers, they both have two axles. If we guess at half the rated passenger count then we have:
Bus damages the road (12.6/1.6)^4 = 3845 times as much as a single car.
I'm sure my calculation is imprecise but surely not that far out. What have I missed or misunderstood?
Which also means roads for heavy transport is 20k times more expensive!
I recommend getting one of these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQGfO4hNb60 and just slapping a MERV 12 to 16 filter on it, you can get a whole roll off aliexpress for cheap and replace them monthly if you wanted to and it would be cheaper than 1 hepa filter replacement. They can also filter vastly more air, while you can keep hepa for 6 to 12 months MERV will filter a lot more air.
In this case:
"While we would expect children's lungs to grow year on year, our results indicate that the London children's lung growth had accelerated during the four years to 'catch up' with the control group in Luton to reach similar levels of lung capacity," researchers say.
"I was absolutely stunned when I first saw the results," Prof Chris Griffiths, a senior author on the study, at Queen Mary University of London, told the BBC.
"The speed of catch up in lung capacity in the London group was surprising and impressive."
[0]: https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/...
"High diesel-family averages were approximately 1–3 g NOx/km. Most gasoline-family averages clustered around approximately 0.02–0.15 g/km."
[1]: https://publications.tno.nl/publication/34635198/KxBBl3/TNO-...
"TNO tested in-use vehicles directly at the tailpipe. Three diesels with DPFs emitted: 3.9–5.3 million particles/cm³ at warm low idle. The same report measured warm Euro 5 direct-injection gasoline cars without gasoline particulate filters at: 50,000–60,000 particles/cm³ at low idle."
[2]: https://d-nb.info/137495313X/34
"In 2017, the highest diesel was approximately 12 g black carbon/kg fuel, versus roughly 0.4 g/kg for the highest gasoline car. In 2023, the highest diesel was roughly 8 g/kg, versus approximately 0.7 g/kg gasoline."
[3]: https://trueinitiative.org/insights/true-brussels-emissions-...
"approximately 5% of measured Euro 5b/Euro 6 diesel vehicles exceeded one million particles/cm³, and this small group produced more than 90% of the particle emissions from the tested diesel group"
"Levels in the raw 2S scooter exhaust were as high as 300,000 μg m−3 or 146 p.p.m.(v) from idling. The EU annual mean limit for the protection of human health is 5 μg m−3 (ref. 13), while the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends that workers wear special breathing equipment when exposed to benzene at levels exceeding 1 p.p.m. for 15 min. Waiting in traffic behind a 2S scooter, for example, at junctions and while the scooter is idling, may therefore be highly deleterious to health." [0]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms4749
But cities are full of shitty mopeds and old Vespas, for no benefit but cultural cosplay reasons.
It's ridiculous that we voluntarily emit fossil fuel and oil fumes in our densest urban areas.
There is a big difference between believing something is true, and demonstrating it is true and measuring the effect. One is a vibe. The other can drive policy.
Hormesis and natural selection have been driving factor of evolution for a long time.
Larry Niven played with this in one of his stories; a time traveller from the far (and highly polluted) future has to use mechanical breathing assistance, because the levels of CO2 in the air in the past weren't high enough to prompt the breathing response properly (human breathing is controlled largely by blood CO2 levels).
Anyway, by your own line of thinking, wouldn't sensitive lungs be an advantage? The incentive to find cleaner air is also breaking away from the pack. Since humans are social creatures, that's more likely to look like new leadership for followers who have their own reasons to break away.
Every civilization in history has started out that way. It takes more than mere brute force to beat the competition. Survival is just as much about picking your battles and working smarter.