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WHO: Air Pollution 'Killed 7 Million People' In 2012
dryriver sends word of new figures from the World Health Organization that estimate around 7 million people died in 2012 as a result of their exposure to air pollution. "In particular, the new data reveal a stronger link between both indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure and cardiovascular diseases, such as strokes and ischaemic heart disease, as well as between air pollution and cancer. This is in addition to air pollution’s role in the development of respiratory diseases, including acute respiratory infections and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases." The Organization says the bulk of the deaths occurred in South-East Asia and the Western Pacific Regions (PDF), with indoor air pollution causing more deaths than outdoor pollution in those areas, largely due to the use of coal, wood, and biomass stoves for cooking.
"Smug" is the filthy cloud you see around a Toyota Prius.
No sig today...
OH PLEASE insulate me from this madness.
Yes insulation... we need more of it.
Lots more of it.
Dense living + acoustic insulation lets you sleep in quiet while your neighbors party
yet be able to walk to most markets. Dense living can save on many energy fronts
and not impact the environment by a sprawl out on farm land.
Hot or cold thermal thermal insulation is undersold for locations that need heating and cooling.
Windows are so bad thermally that it makes sense to replace most with insulated
wall and with a small camera invite view of the outside in. LED TV with an aero-gel
backlight for some locations.
Review your local building codes. Remove penalties for improvement and
demand better total insulation packages for homes and businesses.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Fusion would change everything, no doubt, but you can't really blame the lack of progress (only) on cutting budgets. The "always 20 years out" is as much about the fact that "20 years out" is the same as "no useful progress" as anything else. But there is, after all, a quite powerful fusion reaction going on overhead, and I suspect that the problems with harnessing that will be solved much faster. Mostly we just need a dense, safe battery, and progress on that is evident yearly.
As far as fission fuel reprocessing, we're just ultra-paranoid about nuclear proliferation. From an energy perspective it's quite silly, but as any veteran engineer knows: sometimes the non-engineering factors do need to determine outcomes.
As far as safety - I think we can make reactors fairly tolerant of operator abuse, if we can at least avoid really stupid shortcuts when the thing is built (no Chernobyl-style reactors). For all that Fukushima is a mess, it's still pretty trivial compared to the natural disaster that caused it. Three Mile Island was about as much operator error as it's possible to make, and still the failure mode just wasn't that bad. Modern designs are far safer than either - safer I suspect than a refinery/chemical plant.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.