Slashdot Mirror
India's New Delhi Now Most Polluted City on Earth, Air Quality Well Beyond 'Hazardous' Level (cnn.com)
New Delhi residents are suffocating only to find little to no relief. The city, as well as much of Northern India, home of over 400 million people, is blanketed by a thick layer of smog. The air quality has severely depreciated, hitting alarming 1,000 AQI PM2.5 level -- over 15 times of the safe limit. The air quality index hasn't gone down 400 reading, which is considered hazardous. From a report on CNN: Measurements taken at the US Embassy in Delhi put the city's Air Quality Index at 999 on Monday, off the standard chart, which finishes at the "hazardous" level of 500. By comparison, the highest AQI level recorded Monday in Baoding -- China's most polluted city -- was 298. Beijing was a pleasant 30, while India's next most polluted city, coal and industry-heavy Chandrapur, recorded levels of 824, according to the World Air Quality Index. Research released earlier this year found that air quality levels exceed World Health Organizations guidelines for 80% of those living in urban areas around the world.Though Delhi has been one of the most polluted cities for decades, burning of tens of millions of crop stubbles in the recent months and the Hindu festival of Diwali (which sees many people set off fireworks) have been held responsible for the severe air quality.
Story is too vague. What kind of crackers do they burn? Oyster crackers? Saltines?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
It's a filthy, polluted hell hole, but their outsourcing services are cheap! So it is all good. God forbid they would raise their prices and improve their living standards.
Somewhat related, a fascinating set of images from a Chinese tourist trip to India.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
I used to marvel at the brown smog that hung over Californian cities like the SF Bay and LA. You can only really see it from afar. Then I landed in New Delhi....
New Delhi is so bad you can't see down the length of a short street for the brown fog that seems to permanently hang over the place.
I got a bit of a sore throat too.
Would I go back to New Delhi?
In a heart beat. Lovely people, the Indians, food was superb and I had a few good nights out there.
The best thing about New Delhi is that it's an hour or two in a coach bus to Agra and the Taj Mahal as well as many other beautiful historical buildings.
I'd sooner spend a long weekend in New Delhi than the SF Bay or LA (you won't run into any DJT supporters in ND either)
http://www.albartlett.org/pres...
Either we choose from the list of ways to solve the population problem, or nature will choose for us. India is grossly overpopulated. Nature is running its course. You cannot build a society, a philosophy, a religion, a way of life that's built around reproducing as quickly and exponentially as possible while discovering new resources (land, energy) at a rate slower than exponential. The math doesn't work.
Their next strategy is to try and spill over into the other less-overpopulated parts of the world and make *those* places just as overpopulated as India, if not more. They just don't seem to get it.
A few years ago when people talked about air pollution, they talked about China. The AQI in Chinese cities was routinely over 400, and before the 2008 Olympics, they shut down hundreds of factories and banned half the cars from the road in an attempt to make the air temporarily cleaner. But now Chinese air seems to be much better - Beijing's AQI is said to be just 30 in this article (though it must vary substantially by day, like it does everywhere).
It seems China has passed the stage of building polluting heavy industry, and reached the stage where there is enough of a middle class to demand tolerable air. It seems India is just now reaching the first stage.
This story has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. It is about particulate pollution: more specifically, PM2.5: that is, particles suspended in the air with diameter of 2.5 micrometres or less.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The crackers thing is BS. Delhi has the pollution that it does due to both the number of cars/buses/trucks/... as well as the factories. The crackers are 1, maybe 2 days in a year, which would do squat in terms of pollution. Not to mention that in India, a lot of people have been moving away from fireworks under the pretext of being more eco-friendly.
And, in fact, the actual story says that the problem is not Diwali fireworks:
"images published by NASA suggest that burning of crops in the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana could be the biggest reason why the air quality in the world’s most polluted city refuses to clear."
With a link to a NYT article discussing it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11...
and to interesting satellite images on the NASA website
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The Ugly Indian The speaker makes the point of India can't expect to consider itself a world class country until it cleans itself up. He goes into the culture of "someone else will deal with it" so he organizes cleanup events that target the worst areas so that people see how nice an area can become and then start to take pride in keeping that way.
The problem is the federal structure of India. Delhi actually has very clean public transport with it being the first city in the world to go to all Natural gas public transport and a very large metro system (growing very fast with it projected to be bigger than the Tube in 4 years). Most of the smoke is coming from burning of farm waste in Punjab and Haryana which are 2 separate states whose govts dont really care if their burning is creating smog in Delhi. As their natural levels are much lower a little extra smoke doesnt hurt them. However with Delhi being a metropolis larger than Los Angeles in Size and with more population than New York there is always going to be some vehicular pollution. Most industries have already been shifted out of Delhi and power plants closed down and now Delhi buys its power from States 1000 kms away. But till everyone walks or bikes car smoke will be there. Another problem is the massive amount of construction going. A lot of the particulate matter is construction dust. Due to the scarcity of water in a city which is after all just 50 kms away from the Thar Desert construction companies tend to cut corners and not use liberal water sprinlling to keep the dust down during construction. Another massive problem is the homeless who tend to burn branches from all the trees in Delhi (Delhi has a higher green cover than New York but the parks have become places for homeless to hang out). If Delhi govt could move the homeless from the parks into homeless shelters it would help. Unlike China which can use heavyhanded measures , in India even the homeless vote so its not so easy to move them out. Nor can the Delhi govt force the Punjab and Haryana govts to go police every farm. Only educating the farmers will work, there are not simply enough police to actually try and enforce a ban. Unlike the US which has 1 security officer(local police, state police or federal security officer) for every 100 citizens , India has 1 security officer for every 5000 citizens. India is woefully underprepared to enforce anything through force.
**Life is too short to be serious**
The concept is simple. Cows give milk which is essential for babies whose mothers are not able to produce milk so they are considered sacred as in mothers are sacred.
If you want the historical reasons behind it when the proto-Aryans first moved from the Iranian plateau into India and met up with the remnants of the Indus Valley Civilization (first civilization in world history to have cities with sewers which is ironic considering the state of sewers in India today) , they brought high yielding cows with them. However these cows did not take well to the heat of the subcontinent and had to be bred with local cattle to create a special breed which could survive and give enough milk in India. Hence cows became too valuable to be eating them and religious stricture came in making them sacred so that they are used only for milk.
All this does not justify cows roaming around in city streets. I am in favour of city governments catching any cow they find on a city street and taking it at least 100 Kms away and gifting it to a farmer or a milk cooperative.
**Life is too short to be serious**