• DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    This is why regulations are important.

    Functional regulations are why you don’t vote for conservatives.

    Source: I live in a valley that used to have way worse air quality until stricter SMOG and gasoline refinement laws took effect.

    • Grannymcgrannypants@lemmy.nz
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      5 hours ago

      I was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as a child in the 70s and 80s we had smog warnings where you weren’t allowed outside.

      It’s not a big city, but the topography meant that pollution would sometimes get trapped over the city by the surrounding hills. Obviously it’s not like that now, but I’m sure it’s why we all got asthma.

  • SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip
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    16 hours ago

    This is kind of misleading. Delhi commonly experiences fog in the winter months. Since the same weather conditions that form fog (atmospheric stability) also cause pollution to accumulate rather than blow away, the city gets AQI spikes and fog at the same time. The photo on the right is smog, but also representative of what you’d see if there were no air pollution.

    • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we’re going to rape the shit out of this planet until it’s a lifeless husk. It is in our nature. And it’s not like we have to rape the whole thing. Just the surface.

      Even if we got really good at recycling, we’ll always produce waste and use resources that can’t be reproduced in a reasonable timeframe. 8 billion of us and counting. Raping.

      • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus
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        13 hours ago

        Its not our nature, this entire thing is huffing the momentum of a couple thousand rich assholes who own everything. What we are wired to do is not change jack shit until we get fucked up. If we could conquer that and throw these assholes out you’ll see a better world in a single generation.

        • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
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          13 hours ago

          been thinking about this a lot, feeling so accelerationist because of it.

          • nforminvasion@lemmy.world
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            12 hours ago

            Mood AF. I hate feeling this way, but I almost feel things need to get worse before they get better.

            I won’t actively work towards that, and I’ll work to make my community and city a better place in the midst of that. But I think humanity will only change when things are really drastic.

      • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus
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        17 hours ago

        If I could snap my fingers and all the world’s billionaires disappear I would, or oil refineries. Not people though. Humans aren’t the virus.

          • huppakee@lemmy.world
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            14 hours ago

            If the half of the population includes the part that owns cars perhaps, but the carbon footprint of a person varries greatly. In general the more money someone has the higher the burden they are on the climate.

          • Seleni@lemmy.world
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            17 hours ago

            The problem is mathematically it just doesn’t work. Humans are too good at reproducing. We’d be back in force before too long.

            No, the only way is more death note style, taking out billionaires and some of their bootlicking buddies, and those who put profit over the planet’s health. It’s perfectly possible for the rest of us to patch things up—we almost did it with the ozone. (Until guess who decided they wanted to throw money around to force us to stop.)

            • huppakee@lemmy.world
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              14 hours ago

              I think we humans have grown to a population size where anyone’s profit hurting the planets health should be stopped. We need to take protecting the planet’s (in some ways fragile) ecosystem as serious as we take protecting children against abuse for example. Future generations will have to learn or we will find out together what fucking around gets us.

          • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus
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            17 hours ago

            Idk, I feel like targeting living beings is different than targeting structures, even though I know a sudden lack of refined oil would lead to death. I’m just convinced they’ll never stop until their own heat deaths.

          • kettuli@lemmy.world
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            17 hours ago

            They don’t refine oil for people to consume it, they refine oil to generate shareholder value.

      • alekwithak@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been force-fed their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.

        • SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world
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          17 hours ago

          Population is definitely an issue there’s no many problem that wouldn’t be instantly solved by going down to a hundred million people.

          • alekwithak@lemmy.world
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            16 hours ago

            If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.

            You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?

            And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!

            Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.

            We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.

              • alekwithak@lemmy.world
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                15 hours ago

                Did you actually read what you provided? It’s really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn’t agree more!

                The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a “sustainable” population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today’s average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.

                You’re taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That’s not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!

  • IWW4@lemmy.zip
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    18 hours ago

    Good lord… I wonder if overall things were healthier for them during the pandemic than now.

    It is very similar to how people in the UK were actually healthier during WWII as the food rationing program meant they weren’t eating a total shit diet.

    • The_v@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      They also got more exercise as more of the population was engaged in physical labor (women’s land army) and factory work to produce food and war goods.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    17 hours ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_Delhi

    Air pollution in Delhi, the capital of India, was found to be one of the most lethal of any city in the world in an August 2022 study of 7,000 world cities by the US-based Health Effects Institute.[2] Air pollution in India is estimated to kill about 2 million people every year. India has the world’s highest death rate from chronic respiratory diseases and asthma according to the World Health Organization.[3] In Delhi, poor air quality has irreversibly damaged the lungs of 2.2 million children.

    On 25 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India expressed their sentiments on the pollution in Delhi, saying “Delhi has become worse than narak (hell)”.[4] Supreme Court Justice Arun Mishra remarked that it is “better to get explosives, (and) kill everyone.”[5]

    During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in India, the air quality in Delhi significantly improved.[6][7]

    India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences published a research paper in October 2018 attributing almost 41% of air pollution to vehicular emissions, 21.5% to dust and 18% to industrial emissions.[8]

    If the largest single factor is vehicle emissions, I wonder how far people there typically go. Like, if it’s people who are only driving around the city, that might be a good candidate for EV use.

    EDIT: Sounds like they’re already on it, just started some major push.

    https://www.outlookindia.com/national/delhis-petrol-bike-ban-should-you-still-buy-a-two-wheeler-in-2026

    Delhi’s new EV Policy 2.0 introduces financial subsidies for electric vehicles starting July 1, 2026, and implements a phased ban on new petrol/CNG vehicle registrations (including petrol two-wheelers by April 1, 2028), though existing registered petrol vehicles can still be legally driven

    • Delhi will stop registering new petrol and CNG three-wheelers from January 1, 2027. Registration of new petrol two-wheelers will also end from April 1, 2028.

    • The ban applies only to new vehicle registrations. Existing petrol vehicles, or those bought before the 2028 deadline, can continue to be used legally until the end of their permitted lifespan.

    • dil@piefed.zip
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      16 hours ago

      Highway there is like literal hell, 50 ppl sharing one lane, you are quite literally bumper to bumper on the highway going highway speeds, youll see 3-5 ppl sharing one moped somehow, like poor families that need to travel for whatever reason.

      Somehow no one crashes, no turn signals, just constant never ending honking which lowkey feels like sonar. (they can tell the distance without looking)

  • PapaSquat@lemmy.ml
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    18 hours ago

    And a brand new sun gets buried alive roughly twelve hours after it sprouts. /s

    Without additional data, this only tells me that visibility is lower and the lighting has changed.