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The World's 10 Dirtiest Cities
neever writes "You may already know about the pollution plight of Linfen, China. But how about the heavy metals Pittsburghers breathe in on a daily basis? Or the incomparable smog Milanesi put up with? PopSci has culled an eye-opening selection of some of the world's most problematic cities. From the painfully high cancer rates in Sumgayit, Azerbaijan to the acid rain destroying La Oroya, Peru, writer Jason Daley walks readers through the lowest of the low; and explains why, despite it all, there's still hope for these places."
I don't know which cities are listed as the Popsci servers seem to be down, but a couple of weeks ago flying out of Los Angeles, the pollution seemed pretty bad as can be seen in this picture of the afternoon sun over the San Gabriel Mountains.
From some of my other travels throughout the world, I am guessing that L.A. is not even close to how dirty some cities can get particularly in Russia. If the air is worse than it is in L.A., then it should really, really make you worry.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
And it has only been 2 1/2 minutes since the time of the articles posting.
Air pollution is a liberal myth that is propagated simply to prevent the glorious libertarian utopia that results from the pure beauty of unrestricted capitalism.
While reading the title of this article, my interest peaked just before I realized that by "dirtiest", it was actually talking about dirt.
Property is theft.
It may not be a city, but New Jersey deserves at least an honorable mention.
Take him to Detroit!
/. seems to be turning into digg with all these 'worlds #' topics...
Portland, Oregon.
Highest percapita strip club concentration, and legalized live sex shows. And while not all the ladies shave, pretty much all of them are down.
You should really check on Asuncion, Paraguay, or San Lorenzo, Paraguay. I lived there most of my life and it's really dirty there.
Ay! I've just signed myself up for four years of university in Pittsburgh. Anyone know a good method of limiting heavy metal exposure in such an environment.... Wait... Why would I want that?.. I'll be IRON MAN!
i live in canada :) .....
its clean here
except sudbury ew
Server is already /.ed?
Anyway, I live in one of the minor million-plus cities of Japan near Tokyo, and I just want to note that you can have a high-tech, high-quality lifestyle without destroying your environment. Whenever I hear a story like this, I think about running into quail the morning, almost literally. They are sometimes foraging within a few feet of the gate, and they figure people are basically harmless to about 3 meters. There's a little river two stations up, and it's heavily populated with half-meter carp. I walked about half a kilometer along it the other day, and there were almost always fish visible, and sometimes scores of fish. It's a matter of priorities, I think--but I was annoyed a couple of years ago when they cut down a pretty large bamboo grove and built a bunch of houses there...
Not sure of all of the reasons, but I feel like good mass transit is a big chunk of it. Heavy recycling probably helps, though they recently increased the garbage collection taxes quite a bit.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Guess they weren't used to actually being popular...
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
Having ionized server in the atmosphere should increase the level of air pollution substantially.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually they only get second place on this list (Cubatao, Brazil).
From the lyrics of their 1993 song Biotech is Godzilla:
Like Cubatao"World's most polluted town"
Air-melts your face
Deformed children all around
siener's youtube channel
What was up with just about every single image caption saying how "The World Bank is going to step in and help with the cleanup."
What does the World Bank have to do with pollution controls? Or a better question, should the World Bank have anything to do with pollution controls?
is the dirtiest.
Eclipse PDE and Me
Just give me the damn list. I don't want to click through every goddamn picture so I can watch your stupid ads. If you think I'm being insensitive, then why do the people who present the info put a different name and picture on separate web pages so you can see a new ad every time you click on a link.
And the other thing, since most of the slashdotters are in North America unless they live in or near a hazardous city, they don't give a rat's ass. There are plenty of dirty communities here and they are disproportionately affect minorities.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Does anybody else think it's funny that Pittsburgh is the only city not responsible for its pollution? The article claims that industry has long left the area, meaning the air pollution has to come from neighboring Ohio industries.
dom
And this is why we must reduce CO2 emissions, like, RIGHT NOW, before it destroys the planet. Man-made CO2 pollution is the worst evil threat the planet has ever faced and the only way to deal with it is to Kyoto so that polluters can buy credits and send money (somewhere) in order to continue to pollute. The fact that the two largest emerging world economies on the planet are exempt/opted-out from Kyoto is irrelevant. Quick, before the bubble bursts and we all die!
That's the low inversion layer and no matter how little smog there is in LA, it will always look worse.
I lived in metro LA for almost two decades and the situation was improving over that whole period.
Tokyo, Kobe and Beijing to name three cities I either lived in or visited since have far, far worse problems. Beijing is the most polluted city I've ever had the misfortune of visiting.
Your greatest heavy metal risk is an object around 100 - 250 grains moving at roughly Mach 1.1.
To avoid exposure, Kevlar is reccomended. To avoid repeat exposure, first puchase a return mechanism, minimum size 9mm, but preferentially .45" in diameter. Second, obtain permission from the Allegheny County Sheriff to posesss such mechanism in any place desired. Third, have such mechanism available.
Seriously - Pitt is in the middle of Oakland, and right next to "Da Hood" (The Hill District). Lived there, been there, avoid it at almost any costs now.
I thought my RSS news notification program had mixed DIGG's article with /. for a second there, first I see "9 largest Science projects" then "!0 Worlds dirtiest cities", what next "11 Ways to code and still have a life"..
Root word of Carp is Crap. That tells it all.
The dirtiest city of them all is Gloucester, MA.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
It would be nice to find a list of all major cities ranked by their pollution level. I would be curious to see NYC vs London vs Paris vs Tokyo vs Beijing.
The ranking makes pathetically little sense. Wonder where they get the data. Pittsburgh is even on the list?
The first time I visited Beijing, I was frankly shocked that life can exist in this environment. I'm in Beijing again right now, and have just gotten used to the idea that you need to budget some time each morning to hack up gunk from your lungs. I'm less than 1 kilometer from the forbidden city at the moment, but can't see it. I know it's there, because a rainstorm earlier this week cleared the air enough to see that far.
Great city once you get past the air though...
Check out Guangzhou, China. I've been there several times and never seen a clear day there. Though I hear Xian is worse.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
It seems that this article is inaccurate, according to some comments there, about Pittsburgh and Cubatao:
I really don't get Pittsburgh being on this list. So much amazing work has been done to clean up the city since the end of the steel era. Its a beautiful, clean, and green place to live and work.
________________________________________________
'm sorry, but information about Brazil is wrong.
It's been more than 15 years that Cubatao Valley is not the most poluted place in Brazil. In the early 80's there was plenty of health problems due to a failure in planing the valley occupation rules.
Since the 80's plenty of new regulations and incentives made possible to the city to receive the ONU prize for Environment Recuperation Symbol City. Today, although poluted is very far from being one of the most poluted places in Brazil.
Another misinformation is about Tiete river and Cubatao river, although close to each other (about 50 miles) Tiete river flows into the continent, while Cubatao river flows into the sea.
1 out of 1 people found this comment helpful
I haven't been able to find an international index of air quality (I don't have my statistic search engines bookmarked at work, sorry), but AirNow has a list of individual international indices.
I'm not even sure there is an single international index, due to the different standards and technological possibilities. Okay, if we're just talking fine particulates, ozone, CO2, NOX, and SOX (no, not Sarbanes-Oxley) in major western cities, then you could find something. But I wouldn't place any money on the monitoring in Mumbai being as good as the monitoring in Munich.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
Recent fires in California have turned the Sun that subtle orange color, and left the air with a noticeable stench of smoke. On a local Bay Area network TV station, they interviewed a woman who had just flown back from China. She said that these conditions were ALMOST as bad. Almost??? That blew my mind. Imagine living with smoke worse than this ALL YEAR LONG.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The article title is very misleading. The selection criteria are semi-arbitrary for this "top 10" list. Milan and Pittsburg make it in the list because they are the worst in Western Europe and the worst in the US, but there is no indication that either city ranks in the top 10 globally.
A more accurate title for this article would be something along the lines of "10 cities of interest with pollution problems". But that's not nearly as catchy.
No Euro symbol support? WTF?
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
On the other hand, the parent is spot on.
You mean if I don't feed the nano on trash island I don't have a use anymore?
I would guess that it is at least worse than Milan
I lived just outside of Manila in Quezon City for a couple of years and every night, the inside of my nose would be coated in black pollution. Forget about wearing white clothes. They turn gray when you mix the horrendous amount of pollution with the large amount of sweating you will be doing in the heat.
we won't even put out more than 10% of all CO2 emitted on the planet, if that.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Caracas?
Marrakech?
Nowadays..... Naples?
The boundary you saw between the smog and clean air above is from an inversion layer
One of the last times I flew into LAX, I recall my surprise as the plane hit a bump as we descended from the clear air into the brown air. It took me a moment to recall the temperature inversion and that the change in density probably caused the bump. Even in LA the air can't get so nasty it has lumps in it. Corrosive and toxic, yes, but lumps, no.Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
inhabitat.com -- Google Earth has an overlay that shows pollution concentration around the world. You can see all the nasty stuff you're breathing in every day.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Articles like this are just bait for clicks. Information content is minimal at best, but extra clicks are needed even to start the list. Why do people approve this kind of junk on aggregator sites?
He said what I was saying, but took the time to say it properly :-)
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
these will all be chinese/tibetan cities. Sadly, China has no real pollution controls on anything. They have a trillion US$, but do not want to purchase any of our's or EU's controls for their coal plants. Likewise, from the pix, their mining techniques are far worse than has been deployed. Their tailings are leaving a lot of waste to run into their streams. The sad thing is that they can see what other nations did, and have the ability to buy better equipment and processes, but insist instead that they be given the tech.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...shouldn't this rather be tagged !newsfornerds? Yeah, it's interesting, but probably not something that should be on Slashdot.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
That's not the 10 dirtiest. San Salvador makes Pittsburgh look like Zurich.
1. In Norilsk the soil around the city is so polluted that it's economically feasible to mine it for nickel.
2. There is an alternative list with more information and better research from the Blacksmith Institute: The World's Worst Polluted Places. (However, it contains Europe's biggest de facto nature reserve as one of the most polluted places in the world (Chernobyl exclusion zone))
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I live less than an hour from Pittsburgh. A few years ago I worked there. 40 years ago it was a dirty city. 70 years ago they had to light the street lamps during the day. But things are much different now, especially when it comes to air pollution. All of the heavy manufacturing left long ago. The only reasons the city still has air quality alerts during the summer are because the EPA significantly lowered the allowable pollution thresholds a few years ago and they put the air quality sensors in brain-dead locations such as the one at the asphalt factory. Ya think the ozone will be high a few yards from an asphalt factory? Duh. It throws off the numbers for the whole city. The article mentioned that much of the current pollution is blowing in from Ohio (and West Virginia). Don't you think the sources of the current pollution would be more polluted than the down-stream recipient?
The Pittsburgh area does have pollution problems, but it is mostly in the form of contaminated soil around the old manufacturing sites. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of sites in the Northeast US where the old textile mills contaminated the soil to the same or much worse levels.
If Pittsburgh is one of the 10 dirtiest cities then the world is in really great shape. However, since I know a number of the other cities listed are 100x worse than Pittsburgh, I think the author just didn't do his homework.
A deer was saved recently from a hopeless attempt to swim across Lake Ontario to the US. There's a rumor that it was trying to escape from Hamilton, Ontario.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
How is that blog spam? The OP was quite clear in the content, it was relevant to the main topic, it added to the conversation, other users thought he had something useful to say as mods scored him up, they thought Frosty Piss was being a troll so they modded him down and you can choose to go to the link which he clearly indicated was from his trip before you click on anything. You can choose to go there or not and it does not take up any screen space other than the original text in the post. Its also not blog spam because i looked at his site including the raw html and cannot find any advertising so clicks do not apparently generate any revenue. And the pictures are nice so why the hating?
5 easy ways to shop for a great dress on Mondays
how to go through PMS easier
why you should keep all your receipts
Let me propose an action plan to stop C02 emissions:
I was vacationing in Buenos Aires Argentina this spring when there were annual fires lit by farmers to clear their land. I guess that normally, they don't do it all at once, but this time they did. The soot from those fires covered most of Buenos Aires (good air?) and much of Uruguay for about a week. http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/47996 Visibility was so low they closed both airports on opposite ends of the city of 12 million people. Breathing was tough and my eyes watered. For most people, staying indoors solved the problem, but our apartment didn't have any weather stripping, so the air inside was just a bad as outside. Everything we owned was covered in a light soot and smelled of smoke. I have personal photos of the fires from the air - flying back into BsAs from Iguazu Falls at the Brazilian border. Unbelievable. There were multiple traffic accidents and extracity bus service was highly impacted. Besides flying, buses seem to be the major way to get around Argentina's huge spaces. Lots of overnight buses between cities with 22 hour trips quite normal.
Don't get me wrong, I live in the area of highest pollution near Atlanta due to the regional airflow blowing it over my house. http://www.examiner.com/a-1455955~Red_smog_alert_issued_for_Atlanta_area.html Code Orange/Red days happen almost every day in the summer here. I never have issues breathing at home.
I might get an offtopic mod for this but it would be worth it...if there's a time limit on how often AC mode can be used, then finally my prayers have been answered. AC is for posting information where you can't risk your identity being found (i.e. leaking sensitive information), not trolling, flaming and generally assing around! AC mode is important to have but its use must be limited to a reasonable level. In fact, I don't see why anyone who doesn't have an account should be able to post AC, to be honest. It takes less than 2 minutes to get an account, anyone who wanted to post something quickly, could. I'd also suggest that users have a separate "AC karma level" that controls how often they get to post AC.
However, I think there should be a place where we can discuss the workings of Slashdot. Right now, if you do, you get modded offtopic (and perhaps rightly so) so discussions like the one we're having cost karma. Maybe a separate section similar to the polls section would work.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Dzerzhinsk FTW!
:(
Dioxin and phenol levels 7 orders of magnitude above the safe limit, an annual death rate exceeding the birth rate by 260% (life expectancies: M=42, F=47) and generally more soviet era chem-weapons-chem than you can shake a mutant-whatever at.
The wiki doesn't really do it justice...I saw the BBC doco once, and it was appalling. There's a `pond' so choked with chemicals that it appears to have a consistency closer to foam rubber than water, and a huge pit in the ground with hundreds of barrels of toxic waste spilling out the top of it. It's hard to believe that people actually live there. Truly tragic.
C02 is a clear, odorless, non-toxic gas. It doesn't leave a residue. It won't kill you so much as it doesn't displace your requisite amount of oxygen from your lungs.
C02 is plant and algae food. Infact NASA has recently reported increased vegetation. The biosphere is thriving as a result of slightly higher C02.
If you look at the rise of C02 it is 20% higher. But what they don't tell you is it is a trace component in the atmosphere. 360 parts per MILLION. How can a 0.002% for the past 200 years increase of carbon dioxide atmospheric component create run-away global warming?
When you look at the absorption profile of CO2 compared to other gasses in the atmosphere, you realize that .00002 * absorption profile of C02 = squat. Water vapor absorbs so much more energy. And yes water vapor has been increasing in the troposphere.
Secondly, solar radiance is a factor, since the theory goes that C02 holds in the sun. What if we had a period of increased solar radiance followed by a period of decreased solar radiance?
No one is for pollution, but to call C02 a pollutant is just wrong. It is a bi-product of industry and respiration. Don't allow yourself to be put into the camp of the brainwashing people who think a clean non-toxic gas is a pollutant.
If you're a AGW believer that is fine. I respect your concern for the environment. But realize that we are at a pivotal time. We are seeing decreased solar output now, and record low temperatures now, and some charts are now showing an 11-year cooling trend. We need 10 more years - just ten to connect the solar radiance with warming on earth. The time for the passage of these CO2 protocols is not now. If we do not establish a solar-radiance correlation, then I would be all for them. But we need more time to test this theory.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
And I had already promised the wife and kids that we could go to Norilsk this year. Damn!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Which requires money to pay the lawyers, which the companies will have more of and the regular folks in said society not much of at all. Plus the companies' ability to buy off elected officials, including judges, goes way up as they have proportionally more money and fewer laws and regulations to govern them. So they get to affect and/or decide what laws do get enacted (by purchased elected official proxy), and subvert the laws that exist more efficiently. Yes, companies bribe officials now, but those horribly invasive government regulations make it more difficult than it would be in a libertarian utopia. Bottom line: your argument is pure unadulterated bullshit. Sorry no other way to put it. Reality hurts some times. Get a clue and get over it.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I wanted to see the list, so I clicked through the article link to a blog, which clicked through to a blog, and so on, and so on, until the last blog clicked through to here.
And this reply was already posted.
(logs off)
Where's Bakersfield, CA on that list?
I'm bookmarking that article and whipping it out everytime some blowhard complains about treehuggers. Hey, guess what, the treehuggers are the reason why there's only one US city on that list.
All cities are dirty if you ask me. It's just what happens when you cram a bunch of people tightly together. It's disgusting on a variety of different levels.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
"If you impose a carbon tax , however, forcing companies that emit a lot of CO2 to pay for it, then that will make electricity generation from coal more expensive, and thus hopefully cause electric utility companies to build nuclear power plants, wind turbines, and solar panels, instead."
Please explain why you think the companies won't simply pass the cost on like they always do?
That is inevitably the problem with taxing producers, they simply raise their cost and the consumers get screwed. Do you really want to rely on your hope, and the possibility that eventually people will get pissed enough to force the energy producers into building more power plants/wind turbines/solar panels?
Taxing them isn't the answer, at least not for changing behavior.
"Err... yes. "Pay to pollute" => pollution costs money => you can make a bigger profit by passing along the costs, in the form of increased cost to the consumer => Profit! Economics 101, hello?"
Welcome to reality, my version above actually happens. Your version seems to be a drug induced fantasy, culminating in the humorous (because you're ignorant of economics) jibe "Economics 101, hello?".
Companies, when forced between spending money on lowering costs through reducing pollution, or simply charging customers more, are going to choose lowering costs through reducing pollution? REALLY?
Lay off the crack, buddy.
Right there in the PopSci intro page to its slideshow, they say
Then the slideshow presents "the World's 10 worst cities" (the title of the article), but only one is in China.
Let's say that China's 16 polluted cities are the least polluted of the 20 worst (there's no reason to believe that, but it's the minimum assumption). That means that #6-10 are Chinese. But somehow only one of them makes it to the list.
These cities are all polluted. How many are on the list of "the World's Most Secretly Polluted Cities", like ones in China, Russia and elsewhere that outsiders just aren't allowed to check out? How many African cities are polluted, but no one bothers to check? How many American cities are polluted, but the EPA is ordered to lie about them or ignore them?
I mean, if the reports can't even tell the truth about "20 - 16 = 4, not 9", how do we expect to learn the truth about something less obvious?
--
make install -not war
And what do people complain about in these shit places? The environment? No! They complain about lack of money, about laws and other worthless shit.
Back few months ago, Bombay,India wanted to mandate *some* regulations that would require those shitty rickshaws to stop using kerosine mix crap for fuel. Never passed because of lobbying from the rickshaw drivers. I guess they don't give a shit if they die at 30 from lung cancer, but they do care if they have to pay *anything* to make their own environment cleaner.
This situation is the the everywhere. Kind of makes you think how shortsighted we think.
Once Cubatao Valley was one of the most polluted place in the world. But it's been more than 15 years that Cubatao Valley is not the most polluted place in Brazil. In the early 80's there was plenty of health problems due to a failure in planing the valley occupation rules, which leads to so high levels of pollution that misformation fetus was pretty common at the area.
Since the 80's plenty of new regulations and incentives made possible to the city to receive the ONU prize for Environment Recuperation Symbol City in 1992. Today, although poluted, Cubatao is very far from being one of the most poluted places in Brazil.
More information can be found at Wikipedia, in Portuguese, or in English (Google Translated)
Another misinformation is about Tiete river and Cubatao river, although close to each other (about 50 miles) Tiete river flows into the continent, while Cubatao river flows into the sea.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
I ordered some cheap radiation detectors on eBay from Magnitogorsk. (In a word: don't. After dealing with "Annakozub" I started getting a ton of Cyrillic spam immediately out of the blue on an account I don't normally share, that included my name and home address!)
Anyway, I looked up Magnitogorsk and it was supposed to be Stalin's own Pittsburgh.
Magnitogorsk has recently been included in the top 25 Worst Polluted Cities by a survey carried out by the Blacksmith Institute. Pollutants include lead, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals and other air pollutants. According to the local hospital, only 1% of all children living in the city are in good health. The Blacksmith Institute says that, according to a local newspaper report, "only 28% of infants born in 1992 were healthy, and only 27% had healthy mothers."
A report about Urinary Nickel Excretion.
And another on the environment
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"1. Tax CO2, like coal
2. coal more expensive than nuclear
3. pass expense on to consumers"
Fixed your post to make it accurate. Argue with history if you don't like it.
Nothing you said in any way addresses my point, it only further enlightens us to the fact that you're incapable of discussing this intelligently.
In other words, all those clever assumptions you make don't occur in reality, all the "get it?? not yet?" and "Still don't get it?"
are douchy, childish, and dead wrong. Don't like it? Well don't complain to me, go talk to the rest of the world. They're the ones that have shown you're wrong for the entirety of human history.
As others have pointed out, this story is full of sh%t. Pittsburgh is clean. Pittsburgh is very clean. There has been no heavy industry in the Pittsburgh area for 30 years. Pittsburgh is dominated by robotics, medicine and software companies.
This story is nonsense.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
I'm surprised to see no Indian cities in the list.
1. Delhi -- notorious for its extremely high particulate matter in the air from the millions of vehicles it has on its roads; mostly ill-maintained if at all. Add to it the after-market stuff that goes into the gas-tanks of those vehicles. A majority of the vehicles will not pass smog in the Western world.
Did I say anything about the Yamuna river?
2. Calcutta -- with filth all around. A city that chose to stay behind from the development going on in the rest of the major cities of India.
3. Poor Orissa, Chattisgarh and Bihar states that form the mainstay of India's mining, smelting, dumping, and whatever other environmentally unsafe practices you have.
The entire article was fluff. Those might have been 10 examples of polluted cities, but they were certainly not the top 10. Not that the US and the EU don't have their share of polluted cities, but I am pretty sure not a single one of them even comes close to hitting the top 100 list. Travel a little in "developing" Asia and you will quickly realize that as a westerner, you have never even begun to contemplate how bad pollution can get.
I am not saying that west should be complacent about the environment, just realize that you have it REALLY good compared to some other places in the world. There are places in the world that would make you thankful to suck on the tailpipes of cars stuck in an LA traffic jam.
I'm sure it probably isn't, but it reminds me a lot of Sakaigawa in Machida. Thinking about it, all the little rivers look like that.
Even further off-topic, it would be nice to talk to a fellow slashdotter. If you want to get a beer in Akihabara some time, send me an email.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
It's very strange that eastern Ukraine (Donbass, Dnepropetrovsk) is absent here.
"Well, for the gallery: you're completely right - companies always raise their prices to offset the higher costs caused by pollution permits... and then? Oh, right -- consumers will buy less!"
Unless they can't, you know, food (which depends on oil costs by way of transportation) for instance. GOd I bet you feel dumb knowing you're wrong.
So, I'm right, you should have just stopped there.
"Alternatively, companies can keep their prices the same (to stay competitive against their rivals)"
You're a fucking idiot. If the cost increases for them, it doesn't also increase for their rivals? How fucking stupid are you?
Stop discussing economics, you're like a 5 year old discussing nuclear physics.