
Delhi’s air pollution monitors have recorded the highest levels they can measure - okket
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/15/delhi-blanketed-by-smog-so-toxic-it-cant-be-measured
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yadavmahesh
Being from the region, The couple of days in question were more to relate with
climate change than man made pollutants.

There was dust over most of northern India for about 4 days, that was carried
by dry winds from the desert in west India and Pakistan.

Having lived in North India (Chandigarh) for more than 30 years, i don't
remember such an earlier episode.

Earlier the city i live witnessed seasonal storms, but the sky was clear as a
storm passed. But this time the sky was filled with small dust continuously
for about 4 days and at noon Sun was looking like moon.

The rains have made things normal. But it was a first of an episode as per my
experience.

~~~
overcast
I mean the article blatantly says this was the dust storm, in the second
heading. Followed by a photo of the storm, with a caption saying it's a dust
storm.

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vinni2
I landed in delhi yesterday I could not see anything on the land until the
flight descended very low for landing. There was an eerie orangish glow
blocking thesun. It lookeed like a doomsday scenario.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I was in Delhi a couple years ago when the pollution was also literally off
the charts - at the time it was the worst pollution in over a decade.

It totally reminded me of Blade Runner. Whenever the illustrious recent
leaders of government in the US talk about loosening environmental
restrictions that are killing jobs, I wish they could spend a week in Delhi
(with no air filters) every time they said that.

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alienallys
Straight out of the article: "India’s air quality crisis is usually most acute
after the Hindu festival of Diwali in autumn, when hundreds of thousands of
Indians release firecrackers".

I think Indian Hindus should go easy on their festival celebrations,
especially given how it pollutes the already messed up air.

~~~
jaldhar
Fireworks are the best part of Diwali. Banning them would go over as well as
mandating tofurkey on Thanksgiving. This is a big problem with
environmentalism IMO. Thing which propenents think are just common sense get
viewed as attacks on a way of life (aided and abetted by exploitative
politicians.) and what could be rational public policy debate details into
kulturkampf.

I think there is a better solution. Last year New Jersey legalized firework
sales and we celebrated Diwali with an arsenal which could make an Afghan
warlord jealous. One of our guests visiting from India marvelled at how little
smoke there was. So the best course would be to improve the quality of Indian
fireworks then everyone wins.

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deathhand
I am not Indian so please take this with a grain of salt.

My senior project was creating a business plan for India. I guess the
professor was farming for ideas. The one thing he berated over and over was
that due to the multiple municipalities and mass corruption, conducting
business between their states is not a trivial matter. This means that there
is no group cohesiveness. Pollution knows no borders and I do not think this
will be an easy problem for the Indian people to solve due to said internal
struggle.

~~~
state_less
Neither am I, so take with two grains, but from an outside westerner's
perspective, it seems the government is quite impotent. I was surprised to
find how small the roads are for New Delhi's size. If they can't raise better
roads with their clear time saving advantages, perhaps millions of hours per
day, it's hard to imagine how they can do much. In this case, the health of
the entire population is at risk and the governments apathy rings through it
all.

If I had to guess, the cause could be due to how much focus is spent on non-
secular issues. There is little time left for issues like better air, water,
roads, etc... If this hurdle is cleared, you then have to get past the
selfishness and corruption built into the system. Set your gods, ideology and
your selfishness aside for half a minute so you can at least breath a little
easier. It's going to take some work and sacrifice, but in reality it's not
that bad.

~~~
Thriptic
To be fair, many US cities also have severe transportation infrastructure
problems which governments at many levels are too weak to address

~~~
cobbzilla
Experience a traffic jam in Delhi first-hand and your analogy to US cities
might acquire some nuance. It's really not even close.

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ronzensci
The air pollution event that the article refers to was for a very short
duration & was an episodic event due to a meteorological phenomenon.

The dust storm in the western region started on 13 June around 18:00 hrs and
ended on 16 June around 05:00 hrs. The data from the official monitors in one
of the western regions of Delhi NCR can be seen here:
[http://bit.ly/CPCB_Haryana_1Jun-16June2018](http://bit.ly/CPCB_Haryana_1Jun-16June2018)

The headline in the above article is over-dramatic & is lacking a proper
understanding of the actual ground-level monitored situation of those two
days. What is more harmful is sustained levels of 500 ug/m3 of PM2.5
pollutants rather than a couple of spikes (each lasting less than a few hours)
of 999 ug/m3.

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mehly
Make the chart bigger.

~~~
brianjking
lol, clearly the best solution. (please note sarcasm.)

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onetimemanytime
isn't pollution a price we, kinda, have to pay to move to the next step? See
USA until EPA, China etc... You reach a certain level of industrialization and
then let other countries choke

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _isn 't pollution a price we, kinda, have to pay to move to the next step?_

Not this much. When the West industrialised, we didn’t have natural gas or
nukes. Today we do. The problem is (a) Coal India is a jobs factory and (b)
India’s massive corruption makes regulation more challenging than it was in
the West or is in China. (China has done an excellent job of moving pollution
away from population centres.)

~~~
onetimemanytime
_> >When the West industrialised, we didn’t have natural gas or nukes_

Is natural gas cheap in India? Nukes have their own issues. See Chernobyl and
Fukushima...unless you build them 1000 miles away in a desert (not feasible--
water and transmission issues.) Pollution in horrible and takes lives, but so
does poverty. The lesser of two evils might be found somewhere in the middle.

>> _(China has done an excellent job of moving pollution away from population
centres.)_

But they had it there initially. So did the USA, you can still see the old
chimneys

~~~
cfadvan
_Nukes have their own issues. See Chernobyl and Fukushima...unless you build
them 1000 miles away in a desert (not feasible--water and transmission
issues.)_

This is like saying that airships have a lot of issues because of the
Hindenburg disaster. Technology has come a long way since either Chernobyl or
Fukushima were built! Nuclear plants can be made very safe, and as a bonus
won’t contribute to the deaths of millions from pollution.

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ramshanker
Well, well, unlike winter, when vehicular emission and neighboring farm burns
pollute the sky, this time it's mother nature lifting sands off the desert and
dust from the fields. Approx 2 more weeks to go when the monsoon arrives and
everything would be back to normal.

~~~
krtkush
It'll be years or maybe even decades before things will be back to normal in
Delhi.

~~~
wcoenen
Are there any indications that things will get better instead of worse in the
next decades?

~~~
ShorsHammer
Not at all, Delhi's population has consistently grown by 1 million a year for
the last decade and shows no signs of letting up. The trend towards
urbanisation is strong.

The prospect of clamping down on agriculture burnoffs that plague the city
during winter is limited too.

Meanwhile China has cleaned up it's award winning polluted cities quite
quickly and continues to do so.

