
Air pollution in London passes levels in Beijing (2017) - sandGorgon
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/01/24/air-pollution-london-passes-levels-beijingand-wood-burners-making/
======
hiharryhere
The picture halfway down with the jogger is extremely misleading. That's not
smog, that's a foggy morning in a comparatively rural area over 60 miles north
of London.

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Nux
Wood burning stoves should be banned outright in the capital.

It's mostly hipsters and posh people using them anyway, they will survive.

~~~
Angostura
That would be simple to do. When I bought my wood burning stove (I'm a posh
hipster) I bought one that was specifically certified by the Department for
the Environment to be used in smokeless zones (of which London is one).

Either the certification/regulation isn't stringent enough (although I can't
see smoke emerging from my chimney from the adjacent lost room when it is
running) or people are fitting non-DfE approved stoves, in which case
enforcement needs to be improved.

Of course, I originally got the wood burner to minimise my CO2 footprint - the
same reason I bought a diesel rather than petrol car.

~~~
dogma1138
Why burn wood for heating if you care about CO2 footprint? Even electric
heating is more efficient the reason why no fireplace is allowed to be
classified as heating in a flat anymore (they are all decorative) is that 90%
of the energy is wasted down the chimney.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Why burn wood for heating if you care about CO2 footprint?

Presumably because (assuming sustainable forestry) burning wood is carbon
neutral.

> Even electric heating is more efficient

It's not more _net carbon emissions_ efficient. Energy efficiency and carbon
impact are not always aligned.

~~~
dogma1138
Sustainable forestry is a myth it can take centuries to sequester the carbon
back into wood that you would burn in one winter.

Electric is by far more net carbon emission efficient than wood burning stoves
(wood boilers are a bit better but not by much) especially considering the
percentage of nuclear and renewable energy in the UK.

~~~
Angostura
A sitka spruce grows to full size in about 35 years. With the amount we burn,
a single large tree lasts around 5 winters.

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PakG1
I would love to see a summary of what's been happening in Beijing. What are
their policies? Because Beijing air has apparently been awesome these days for
the entire winter. My friends who live in Beijing confirm this for me. In the
dead of winter, this would have been unheard of even one year ago.

[http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/](http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/)
[http://www.stateair.net/web/historical/1/1.html](http://www.stateair.net/web/historical/1/1.html)

~~~
lumberjack
Beijing uses very heavy handed policies, that would be harder to implement in
London. For example: cars with numberplates starting with A-M are banned on
certain days of the week and the rest are banned on other days of the week.
They also confiscated wood burning (or was it kerosene?) stoves and although
it lessens the pollution, lots of poor people are living in freezing homes
because of that.

~~~
theBobBob
I know that Paris had similar restrictions on cars a few times recently. If
your car had an even number it could be used on one day, odd on another. If I
remember correctly they also made all public transport in the city free for
them days too.

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kbart
Alarmist article. It's more like "best day in Beijing / worst day in London"
conditions comparison. See the data, last year average air quality is 3 times
worse in Beijing[0] than London[1].

0\.
[https://air.plumelabs.com/en/year/beijing](https://air.plumelabs.com/en/year/beijing)
1\.
[https://air.plumelabs.com/en/year/london](https://air.plumelabs.com/en/year/london)

~~~
clw8
My thoughts exactly. When I read the headline I thought, how did London
suddenly get to 500 AQI? Then I read the actual article and it's "just" 200.

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whatyoucantsay
Beijing gets much higher than 190, though... many times over 500 (some from
Jan 2017, the month of this publication, even).

See historical data from the US embassy in BJ:
[http://www.stateair.net/web/historical/1/1.html](http://www.stateair.net/web/historical/1/1.html)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
January and February 2017 were particularly bad for Beijing last year. This
year they have definitely been trying harder with getting coal out of the near
capital zone in rural Beijing and surrounding Hebei. Still gets polluted a
lot, it’s the orange and red zone regularly, but much much better than last
year (doesn’t get into the purple and dark red zones as much as it used to).

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avcdsuia
That's because the Beijing authorities simply ban burning coal and limit the
gas supplement in nearby areas.

check this out
[http://www.xinhuanet.com/local/2018-02/05/c_1122367331.htm](http://www.xinhuanet.com/local/2018-02/05/c_1122367331.htm)

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chatmasta
> Demand for the [wood-burning] stoves, which cost between £400 and £7,000,
> has tripled in the last five years – partly down to the savings they can
> make to energy bills.

This raises lots of moral questions. Should London ban wood stoves,
effectively increasing costs for some of its poorest inhabitants?

Burning wood might produce pollutants, but how does the net effect compare to
the production of the oil/gas/electricity required to produce the alternative?
Of course that production is done off-site, not in urban centers, but it
wouldn't surprise me if wood-burning is better for the environment than
manufacturing the necessary amount of coal/oil/gas/electricity required to
heat the same house.

~~~
tyfon
Burning wood is also CO2 neutral as the forest has captured this CO2 in the
last few decades compared to fossil fuel that is accumulated over many
millions of years.

In Norway you actually get a higher (greener) energy rating for your house if
you have a wood stove, and our electrical power almost entirely hydroelectric.

The article doesn't say, but the wood pollution is relatively minor compared
to diesel etc. This Greenpeace article[1] doesn't even mention wood.

[1] [https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2016/11/03/causes-
londons-a...](https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2016/11/03/causes-londons-air-
pollution/)

~~~
varjag
> In Norway you actually get a higher (greener) energy rating for your house
> if you have a wood stove, and our electrical power almost entirely
> hydroelectric.

You can possibly get a higher rating when you replace an old stove or an oil
stove (parafinbrenner/oljekamin) with "clean-burning" stove, or do I miss
something? Otherwise the rating depends on how tight the house is insulated,
does it have balanced ventilation and so on.

And CO2-neutral sounds a bit hand-wavy tbh. Sure forest captured it only
recently, but there's no advantage releasing it back to atmosphere.

~~~
tyfon
Yes, but if you have electric only and install a "peis" your rating is
increased. There are better options regarding particular pollution like the
pellet burning oven, but you do get higher rating from wood alone.

The CO2 part is not hand-wavy, unless you clear-cut the forest and do not let
it grow back. Unfortunately that is what is happening in the rain forests of
the Americas.

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kwhitefoot
How come they need to introduce 'no idling' zones? Where I live (Norway)
idling is banned all over. As far as I know idling for more than one minute is
banned all over Scandinavia. Doesn't stop inconsiderate drivers doing it of
course.

In fact it is already illegal in the UK. Here is a quote from Confused.com:

"Stationary idling is an offence under section 42 of the Road Traffic Act
1988," ... The Act enforces rule 123 of the Highway Code which states: "You
must not leave a vehicle engine running unnecessarily while that vehicle is
stationary on a public road."

And doing this can incur a £20 fixed-penalty fine under the Road Traffic
(Vehicle Emissions) Regulations 2002.

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gvurrdon
My house has a stove. Perhaps I am simply a poseur for having one, but it does
get the most-used room in the house up to a comfortable temperature whilst the
rest of the house can be left cooler to save on central heating bills. The
house was built without central heating, electricity or indoor plumbing and so
had fireplaces and had a stove when I moved in.

If, like me, you can wander around the woods near your house (it's not in
London, or any other city) and gather fallen branches to cut up and put in a
wood store to season, then fuel only costs the time taken to gather and cut
it. There are other sources of free wood as well but I still have to pay for
it from time to time.

Any savings from free fuel are offset by the fact that the chimney has to be
swept at least once a year, ideally twice or more. Getting a sweep in gets the
job done a lot more cleanly and quickly but costs about £50-60 a time.

~~~
Asooka
Please don't burn wood, or if you do, use a gasifier/pyrolysis stove. They are
also called "smokeless" stoves. Smoke from a normal wood fire is a really
awful pollutant.

~~~
gvurrdon
Perhaps when such stoves are readily available for home use, and the time
comes to replace the old one I've got, that might be worth doing.

~~~
m_t
Apparently, Angostura found one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16324367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16324367)

~~~
gvurrdon
I suspect that's one of the ones that runs on certain sorts of solid fuel,
such as this:

[https://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/appliances.php?country=s](https://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/appliances.php?country=s)

AFAICT these still require chimneys but presumably the smoke they produce
contains fewer particulates than that produced by wood in a standard stove,
hence allowing them in these zones.

Presumably Asooka was thinking more along these lines:

[http://brightstove.com/](http://brightstove.com/)

This looks very interesting, but appears not to be available.

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acd
Diesel cars shut down their emission cleaning when its gets cold. In Germany
BMW, Volkswagen had todo a "upgrade" fix but in other countries there wont be
a cold weather update.

[https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/06/europes-diesel-cars-
may...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/06/europes-diesel-cars-may-be-
spewing-nox-more-flagrantly-than-previously-thought/)

[https://dieselnet.com/news/2017/08vda.php](https://dieselnet.com/news/2017/08vda.php)

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Arnt
Those stoves are "responsible for 10 per cent of winter pollution", the
article mentions. What makes up the other 90%?

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indescions_2018
Air purification at environmental scale is actually an excellent space for new
startups ;)

In NYC, there are initiatives for electric vehicle adoption. But we would
still require an array of "scrubbers" to remove existing containments.

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IronCore864
OK finally we are not the worst

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osrec
I've spent time in both these places, and based on my experience, London is
nowhere near as bad as Beijing.

~~~
forkLding
experience is subjective, numbers is objective, so what maybe one kind of
experience is different for someone else

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arekkas
This is from Jan 2017, please add that to the title. I thought this was about
today.

~~~
sctb
Thanks, updated.

