You should be worried about IAQ - indoor air quality.
This is because you spend 90% of your time indoors.
It is also because IAQ is far worse than outdoor air quality. The kitchens of most homes would be closed down by inspectors if they were commercial.
Correctly ventilating a home with a ERV/HRV, bathroom ventilation and oven hood (harder than it sounds because many designs are snake oil) solves the problem. Few people have gone to such lengths, not even the wealthy.
The "Building Performance Podcast" has more information if anybody's interested. There's a lot of good information online from US government websites.
Most American homes share a leaky wall with their garage. A garage with shelves of highly toxic substances that offgas through the wall when the weather gets hotter.
I intend to design my home so it does not contain these drawbacks.
> Most American homes share a leaky wall with their garage. A garage with shelves of highly toxic substances that offgas through the wall when the weather gets hotter.
I don't buy this... what substances exactly, and wouldn't this imply that spending any time in one's garage is extremely dangerous, given that the concentration must still be orders of magnitude higher inside than out.
Also, why is bathroom ventilation important? Nothing neurotoxic there, just gross.
The problem with having toxic gasses/particulates in your home, as opposed to in your garage, is that you spend way more time in your home. Brief exposure to low levels of toxic materials is usually not a terribly big deal. Chronic exposure is much more serious, even for the same low levels.
As to what substances, the garage is used by many people to store household volatiles, which will gas off no matter how tight you screw the cap on. Add to that the exhaust fumes and it makes for a fairly unpleasant atmosphere.
Now to be fair this is all very likely to not be a problem in 99% of cases, otherwise it'd have been in the news already, but it's still a good idea to keep in mind when deciding how to store chemicals.
You need decent ventilation in your bathroom. If the room stays too damp (steam after a shower, etc.), you'll end up with mold, some of which can definitely be neurotoxic.
> mold, some of which can definitely be neurotoxic.
Nope. Bad for you in general. But no evidence of bathroom mold that's particularly neurotoxic. If you google it, you find mostly court cases (not a good sign).
Hey so, I read your comment and have a few concerns.
-you seem extremely confident in city evaluations of IAC for businesses. My city has shit OAC, water quality, etc. why would I believe they have good IAC standards? TBH i doubt they even measure it. I live in a top-5 US city by population and I honestly believe what you're saying about local government enforcing quality standards is crap.
-offgassing is a thing that happens with solid objects exposed to high temperatures (container walls inside a tokamack, for example). Liquids inside a container don't off-gas on their containers unless the container leaks.
Are you saying your average oil can container leaks toxic gas, or are you lying through your keyboard again?
I live in Beijing and we use the air purifiers from Xiaomi to measure indoor air quality (and clean it up). It's true that eg frying bacon really makes the air quality index spike up a lot.
Off topic but I have a ton of questions about air in Beijing - I can hardly believe what I've heard. It's kind of off-topic but if you'd have a minute, could you shoot me an email (see my profile here) or reply with yours? Thanks.
I wouldn't be surprised if some future historians are able to look back at modern cities the same way that we look at granny pictures of a soot-streaked city of the industrial revolution.
"Yes, some of them thought that it was bad to have all that stuff around, but most thought it wasn't too serious compared to the immediate economic benefit it brought."
Nonsense. This has nothing to do with the planet being destroyed, but minor health effects of air pollution. Which in first world countries, is vastly less than it used to be. And could be eliminated entirely in a few years with technology like solar power and electric cars. Possibly it could have been seriously cut back decades ago, if environmentalists hadn't fought so hard against nuclear.
Yea. The real problem was fightng against a technology that is more expensive yhan cleaner options, has massive NIMBY problems that are not yet resolved, gets more expensive as time goes on, has led to massive cpncentrated disasters and still is unable to find a solution to its long term problems.
A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough".
Nuclear: The one trick the evil environmentalists won't tell you about that will solve all your energy problems.
This was researcher was completed by the United Aircraft Corporation in the late 60's and early 70's before it was canceled by Nixon along with the Mars program. It was under a NASA contract for space exploration so the literature is in the context of a rocket engine but it is even more compelling as a terrestrial reactor as it uses a tiny amount of fuel (tens of kilos instead of tens of tonnes) and actively keeps that fuel at supercritical so if power is lost the entire thing fizzles out. This is a fast neutron design with an extremely high neutron cross section, far beyond that of any other reactor, easily allowing you to feed nuclear waste into it and very efficiently transmute much of it into fuel or more manageable waste that is then separated out by centrifuges (which are already in the design to separate usable UF6 from the neon exhaust). UAC was set to win a contract to test the reactor with nuclear fuel when NASA pulled the plug so the anti-nuclear crowd isn't to blame for that line of development dying.
However, all of the technological breakthroughs in computation, material science, and nuclear engineering needed to make this happen at an industrial scale have all been discovered since the project was canceled. If it weren't for all the anti-nuclear hysteria, we might have actually had someone willing to take the risk to bring the nuclear lightbulb reactor to market. Sadly, almost all of the scientists and engineers that worked on this design have passed on so the institutional knowledge is gone and the design was classified for a while so no other nations picked up on it in time. You may be able to find the original papers on NASA/JPL's archives but AFAIK they were reclassified a few years ago.
There is also a prolific guy on YouTube. He's all about the liquid salt thorium reactors. I don't recall his name, but searching YouTube for that phrase will almost certainly find him.
I believe they have a project in the works. I just watch documentaries, I am not a nuclear physicist or anything. It sounds like it is safe and efficient. We've got a huge supply of thorium.
If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue. Solar power is only just now catching up to cost effectiveness with nuclear. And only on sunny days, the storage problem is very far away from being solved. Maybe coal is cheaper, but only if you exclude externalities. The amount of radiation released by nuclear is tiny compared to coal. Not to mention mercury, carbon dioxide, etc.
>If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue.
Then we would have even more problems with final disposal than we already have, that's the topic none of the pro-nuclear people ever want to touch on because they fully realize it's quite an issue.
As is, it's already bad enough how plant operators socialize these long-term costs while keeping all the profits private, which is the only way these operations can turn a short-term profit. Case in point: http://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-de...
It's even more infuriating to see that quote of Sigmar Gabrial boasting that "society alone doesn't have to bear the costs". How generous of them to pay a little bit into a fund for the disposal of their own waste, while the German taxpayer will end up picking the brunt of the bill when, as always, everything ends up going way over the estimated costs.
Just take a look at Fukushima: TEPCO has a book equity of $US20 billion, total cleanup costs are estimated at $US250 billion, who's paying for that? Right, the Japanese government aka the tax payer.
Even despite that, it's still better than coal. The costs are just more concentrated, and therefore more apparent. But the fact it's concentrated also make it at least possible to contain and cleanup. No one would even attempt to cleanup the environmental damage caused by coal, and it would cost vastly more than hundreds of billions. The estimated deaths are much larger than from nuclear accidents.
If we had invested more in Nuclear it would be less of an issue. We've invented much safer reactors, and more efficient ones that produce much less waste. Probably much more would have been developed if the investment was there.
Another problem with going fully nuclear: society is going to be highly dependent on basically a hand full of reactors so it's not that easy to shut them down in case unexpected defects are found or if they simply get too old without newer ones being built in time. We see this e.g. in France which largely runs on nuclear power: they still operate some old reactors with serious known issues. There also were some winters in the recent years where their grid was close to a blackout because a substantial part of the nuclear plants where in maintenance mode and electrical heating is widely used. It is only possible to prevent this because neighboring countries like Germany are able to reliably produce a lot of excess electricity (still too much coal unfortunately, thanks Merkel :() which they can import.
The only reason nuclear is even viable today is because nuclear technokogy isn't as bad today as it was a few decades ago.
Every time we have a massive nuclear disaster the defense (a valid one!) Is that the disaster happened from a poorer technology that isn't used anymore today.
If we had built out nuclear earlier we would have had a lot more nuclear disasters.
The problem with nuclear is solely that by the time the technology became good enough that it could be used fairly safely it became way more expensive than almost all competitors including most other renewable sources.
And this is even before including the geopolitical limitations of nuclear. Would we be living in a better world if every country including countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan had easy access to nuclear.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't regulatory burden a significant reason for nuclear being so expensive?
As of May 2017, the People's Republic of China has 37 nuclear reactors operating with a capacity of 32.4 GW and 20 under construction with a capacity of 20.5 GW.[1]
Compare:
As of 2016, there are four new reactors under construction with a gross electrical capacity of 5,000 MW, while 33 reactors have been permanently shut down.
I'm lead to believe the reason China can have 5 times the number of new nuclear builds is because China seems to be able to get shit done while infrastructure in the US languishes. I could be wrong, I'm just going by what internet would have me believe.
Take Australia as an example: relies on coal for around 85% of electricity production [1], also has some of the most expensive electricity in the western world [2] at around 29c / USD Kilowatt hour (that is over 2x the US national average).
Until Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and The Wilderness Society come out and publicly claim responsibility for the mess Australia's electricity generation is I won't take "Environmentalism" seriously.
I live in Tasmania now, I think most of our electricity comes from hydro. Thirty hydropower stations operating in Tasmania[1], but we still pay ~26 cents a kilowatt-hour here.
Curious, what did (or didn't) those organizations do? I donate to some of them and would gladly change that by donating elsewhere if there is good reason not to.
Generally campaign hard against nuclear and hydro. There hasn't been any new hydro in Australia since The Wilderness Society blocked the Franklin Dam project[1].
I'll admit that no new hydro is arguably a good thing for certain aspects of sustainability, but it could be argued that new hydro is better than new coal or gas. That's sort of a false dichotomy because there are other options:
An in-principle agreement has been reached to build a new 144MW wind farm in central Tasmania[2], the first new wind project in the state in almost a decade[3].
The Franklin Dam project was to be 180MW, with arguable much greater capacity factor than wind.
Electric cars surprisingly don't reduce particulate matter air pollution by much. A big part of the pollution comes from wear of the tires and the road. It's higher with heavier cars and electric cars generally are heavier because of their batteries. Then you have the effect of reemission of PM already lying on the road that stays the same.
Another way of PM emissions that is not tackled at all is agriculture.
And it does not just have minor health effects. People are dying because of it.
The authors regret that as Victor Timmers did not carry out the research under the auspices of the University of Edinburgh, nor in collaboration or consultation with any personnel at the University of Edinburgh, the affiliation of “University of Edinburgh” has now been removed from this work at the request of the Institution. In addition, subsequent to the publication of the Paper, Victor Timmers has disclosed a potential Conflict of Interest with regard to the work, namely: “non-financial support from Innas B.V, during the conduct of the study”.
But I do agree with the sentiment that anti-nuclear environmentalists fell victim to perfect is the enemy of good, and unintentionally stuck us with the dirtiest option.
And the question is "were they wrong?" Soot-streaked cities of the industrial revolution had to be soot-streaked. They didn't have any other technology. They had to use what they could to make better things. It provided better economic benefit, and ultimately better life for us all (such as antibiotics).
We're at a point where we have better things, but choose to not use them. It's intrinsically different than the industrial revolution. It's more like slavery in the relatively modern Western world. They knew better. They just chose to argue against their core morality because they could make more money.
I think there is a good argument to be made that we did (and typically do) opt for speed and low cost over safety unnecessarily.
Though I think you could also argue that speed and low cost bring chain benefits that may balance it out. I feel we may never get quantitative answers without quantum computers crunching these numbers.
I think the more-useful question is whether folks knew the tradeoffs and made an informed decision in the first place.
Should someone have made more effort to determine the tradeoffs before widespread implementation? Were any facts withheld or investigation curtailed? Did one group (wrongly?) benefit from another group's ignorance?
Probably a lot nicer than it did in the 1800s. You are also ignoring that many of the people of these former ages prematurely lost their life due to working with unsafe chemicals and/or machinery. Nevermind the mode of warfare where we would throw millions of unvalued lives into a meat grinder.
On the whole I still think things look pretty good. We're getting better at reducing our impact environmentally. We're getting better at purifying things we already messed up. We're also making tech to do all this cheaper so that if and when the rest of Asia become more modern, they might, just might, get to skip the polluting parts.
>We're getting better at reducing our impact environmentally.
We are getting better at reducing our environmental impact from tech that have been in use for decades. And that too after decades of negligence and denial.
But we are still mostly blind about how todays new tech will impact environment if it becomes widespread. For example, most people who consider electric cars as something that will undo the environmental damage from fossil fuels, fail to consider what new kinds of impact these automobiles have on the environment. For ex. The batteries. If all of todays cars started going electric, that is a lot of batteries, right? How does the environmental impact look like after 30 years of growing use of these batteries? Just an example.
The point is, the problem is our boundless affinity for new and better things. If it is cars, then we want suvs and we will have three of them if we can afford it. We throwaway old stuff and buy new stuff without a second thought. Most of the industries of the world are producing stuff that is planned to break in a couple of years. "Planned obsolesce", they call it. All of these tendencies are the dangerous ones. Not the use of a single thing like burning of fossil fuels or coal or using fertilizers.
So I think it is the tendency of our current system to maximize consumption, the real danger, and I think there is very little hope that will change, and that will be our undoing...
I definitely get a little worried about fumes, in a modern urban city. Diesel pollutants are local, and when I walk across a 4+ lane street with traffic, I always find myself practically gagging on exhaust fumes. That can't be healthy.
We should really ban big diesel rigs from areas with population density above a certain threshold. Especially considering how little the regulations around diesel emissions are actually complied with.
I think national emissions standards would also be nice. My state doesn't emissions test vehicles (not even commercial vehicles), and it's obvious when you're driving or biking behind someone with a clearly malfunctioning car. Ick.
You can really tell how much cleaner modern cars are though, when you pass a "classic" 1950 - 1970s model on the road. You can smell the unburned fuel/exhaust distinctly. And back in the day you'd have gotten a dose of lead along with it.
Someday people may also look back at the television and the smartphone and compare the garbage we call mass media that we put into our minds to the lead in Roman water pipes.
If they did, I would hope people around them recognized that their conflation of neurotoxins in water and largely benign electronics makes very little sense.
I think I understand the sentiment, but I don't think the three are the same. And if they had similar results, hypothetically, they would be for entirely different reasons.
edit: I'm interested to know more about peoples' concerns about smartphones and other devices emitting harmful radiation. I've never seen anything conclusive at all, but my girlfriend is positive research will eventually reveal something, for example. Very curious if anyone knows more about this. Perhaps I'm totally incorrect.
You can't get addicted to dopamine; dopamine mediates one vector of addiction. It conveys something like reward prediction-error or precision of action-based prediction errors. Without it, you can't concentrate; with too much, you're forced to concentrate without control over what you concentrate on.
I agree with that to a point. It does count for something for sure, but I think the analogy breaks down pretty quickly from there. I don't want to be pedantic or overly demanding of the statement either though. I just thought, when I read it, that the issues are much more complex than that, and the analogy overly simplifies the matter.
I'm a big fan of electronic devices, and a huge believer in them being a medium for addiction and escapism. But I think societies need to look at the root of that issue rather than dismiss any medium for dopamine addiction as harmful (as harmful as lead in your water in this case). That becomes extremely subjective, and maybe not worth pursuing because I admit, I'm not educated on the matter. I simply believe that (based on my experiences) the misuse of electronics will often stem from a lack of stimulation, satisfaction, and/or engagement coming from other aspects in life. There is too much room for this form of addiction in modern life in many parts of the world.
If we blame the devices, we fail to blame ourselves for better educating ourselves and striving to develop society in such a way that people feel they have better things to do than escape into a screen.
I'm totally open to being called out as clueless or full of it - that's just my take on things. It's a very fascinating conversation, but probably not a great one for the internet. I worry I'll come across as thinking I'm an authority on this stuff or something, when it's quite the opposite.
Are societies are expected to re-engineer our brains rather than put addiction in context? Or are they expected to create societies where our reward pathways are firmly under their control?
I like having fun games to play too, and I'd be upset if someone stopped my dopamine drip too. That said, lets not pretend there isn't a wave of weaponized addiction sweeping through the software design world. What other solutions exist to that problem?
> If they did, I would hope people around them recognized that their conflation of neurotoxins in water and largely benign electronics makes very little sense.
Right now we consider these electronics, and their emissions, largely benign but that doesn't mean that's actually the case in the long term.
Think about the amount of wireless stuff constantly going on around you: GSM, EDGE, UMTS, LTE, bluetooth, several WLAN standards, radio, satellite and so on. Humanity has never been blasted with that much EM radiation before and the blast is constant and pretty much ever-present.
I find it hard to believe that all those EMR don't have any effects at all on living things. Sure, we get doses of it anyway from space and the sun and so on, but that doesn't mean that adding our own won't make the doses cross a threshold.
Wouldn't be the first time humanity underestimated the long-term effect of something just to realize, a couple of decades down the line, "Oopps.. wasn't as healthy as we thought".
Of a single device, but how do we account for the accumulation of the dosages when there are literally dozens of those devices constantly around us?
Let's also keep in mind that we haven't been living like this for very long, 10-20 years ain't really that big of a timeframe. For all purpose and effect, this is a rather recent development in human history.
That's stuff bad dystopian sci-fi stories are made of: 30 years from now developed countries will reach "peak ERM" and people's brains suddenly start shriveling to raisins ;)
IMO the issue isn't media-consumption per-se, but the mechanisms used in advertising and how our society condones certain tactics for one group "hacking the brains" of another.
Is there anything yet to show negative effects? My understanding is that there hadn't been conclusive study, but from what we know of thermal radiation there aren't known mechanisms for damage to occur within the FCC(think it's their rules?) guidelines.
They refer to "mass media", so I assume the point is technology as a dopamine button... however, cell phones have been linked to damaged / lower quality sperm in men. That could subtly damage society in the same way that lead-based paints hurt Rome.
It's not so much how close the stuff is together as what is being burned to power it, how much of that stuff is being burned, and how close that is happening to where people live. Rural areas with coal plants nearby are going to perform very poorly on these particulate matter metrics.
Can anyone recommend an air quality detector for personal use. My second floor office is in downtown Oakland by a busy road. The windows are closed and an air filter is always running. Perhaps the air filter is providing a false sense of security and not trapping any sub 2.5 micron particles.
My last air quality detector seemed questionable. I could leave the windows open during rush hour it would always just say the quality was good. Meanwhile there is soot on my window sill.
There are sufficiently many aspects of air quality (NOX, PM2.5, PM10, O3, SO2, CO, CO2, VOCs, humidity) that a basic trustworthy monitoring station would set you back at least $500. I'd say get a trustworthy temp/humidity/CO2 sensor, since those are the only ones you really emit yourself, and get the remaining data from your local environmental info agency - check e.g. aqicn.org .
Edit: is your air filter a HEPA unit? (Does it look like a big car engine air filter?) Do you change the filter every 6 months? Those should help.
I have foobot if you want an IOT device. Seems to work. I have a brand new house and the formaldehyde/VOC levels were very high. It's sad that it's not regulated in the USA for residential (it is for office...). Opened the windows as much as possible. Now levels are low and I'm not as concerned.
I also got a cheaper monitor (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N0MJJRO/ref=pd_aw_sim_sbs_... this has no reviews, but on mobile and don't feel like searching more) and this works as well for fast instantaneous readings. One day my wife was using moisturizer and it went crazy. Found out many bath and cosmetic products use formaldehyde (DMDM hydrogenate or whatever...different name but essentially formaldehyde)
Clean diesel is the biggest industry scam since smoking. Thousands die every year from small particle emission from vehicles. Smog damages baby brain development.
Most diesel cars emitt up to ten times small particles like pm2.5 than car regulation and it's really bad for human health.
They didn't mention whether the effect remained constant regardless of population density.
I'm a big proponent of "you probably shouldn't be inhaling more than you need to of any sort of particle" but I wouldn't be surprised if the small amounts of extra stress of day to day life in a more densely populated area isn't good for you.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the small amounts of extra stress of day to day life in a more densely populated area isn't good for you.
Extra psychological stress is always detrimental. They did mention other variables, including noise and other gasses, were not controlled for.
However, the mouse study removed those variables:
> He exposed mice to high levels of fine particulate air pollution five times a week, eight hours a day, to mimic the exposure a human commuter might receive if he or she lived in the suburbs and worked in a smoggy city (Molecular Psychiatry, 2011). After 10 months, they found that the mice that had been exposed to polluted air took longer to learn a maze task and made more mistakes than mice that had not breathed in the pollution.
>
> Nelson also found that the pollutant-exposed mice showed signs of the rodent equivalent of depression. Mice said to express depressive-like symptoms give up swimming more quickly in a forced swim test and stop sipping sugar water that they normally find attractive. Both behaviors can be reversed with antidepressants. Nelson found that mice exposed to the polluted air scored higher on tests of depressive-like responses.
I suggest reading the article. There were other disturbing changes that strongly suggest pollution may be the modern analogue to the Roman Empire's lead paint. It's definitely worth significant and rapid research investment.
This doesn't prove that smog is the cause. Perhaps the people in smoggier districts had lower education levels and didn't stay as mentally active in old age? There are too many other variables that could be at fault.
This is because you spend 90% of your time indoors.
It is also because IAQ is far worse than outdoor air quality. The kitchens of most homes would be closed down by inspectors if they were commercial.
Correctly ventilating a home with a ERV/HRV, bathroom ventilation and oven hood (harder than it sounds because many designs are snake oil) solves the problem. Few people have gone to such lengths, not even the wealthy.
The "Building Performance Podcast" has more information if anybody's interested. There's a lot of good information online from US government websites.
Most American homes share a leaky wall with their garage. A garage with shelves of highly toxic substances that offgas through the wall when the weather gets hotter.
I intend to design my home so it does not contain these drawbacks.