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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.
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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.
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!
It has not been slashdotted. They just had to shut the web server down due to increasing HTTP pollution.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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
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!"
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.
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 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?
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"?
Well, its an even trade.
When it rains in Pittsburgh, the effluvia travels down the Ohio and gives those of us downstream unsafe levels of human waste in our water, so we give you back our carbon.
Its the circle of life, Ohio valley style.
You're welcome!
signed:
Cincinnati
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
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"
Pittsburgh doesn't belong on this list _at all_. Yes, there's tons of shit in the ground, and the air sucks by US standards, but c'mon. Anyone who has traveled to _any_ third world city knows there's no comparison in terms of livability. Pittsburgh is paradise by those standards. Even compared to most european cities, where everyone is buzzing around on catalyst-free scooters and 2-stroke engines, Pittsburgh air is tasty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The US is not dirty in any sense of the way I understand 'dirty'
I live in a Manila high rise condo (Philippines), nice part of town, but I travel almost daily across the city. My usual journey leaves me thinking that most of those pictures look about as clean as the queens bathroom in comparison.
This country has some world class areas, stunning in fact, yet you take a peek over the fence line and you'll see shanties 5 stories high filling up absolutely every bit of space left vacant for more than a few minutes. (Outside of Manila is a different story, not clean, but not disgustingly dirty either, provincial cities are generally far better than Manila)
The Philippines, definitely not as bad as parts of China, but really, the US is far from dirty. It shouldn't even be in the list.
Stick in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and a few others in the region and you'll have yourself a list of dirty, in every possible way :-)
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.
"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.
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.