
Air pollution is a big deal - MarkMc
https://patrickcollison.com/pollution
======
bjourne
It is insane how we (as a society) have been so blind on this issue. In many
countries, people have been debating why crime rates rose sharply from the
60's to the 90's. The explanation may have been simply that airborne lead
particles caused brain damage in kids. In the 80's and 90'l leaded gasoline
was phased out in most of the Western world so there is a clear temporal
correlation between the crime wave and lead particles.

An euphemism for brain damage is "cognitive defects" but it is of course the
same thing. Now imagine someone caused brain damage to your children (for
example by causing a head trauma), would you be ok with that? Probably not.
Not even a very small brain injury would be ok, but millions of cars doing the
exact same thing, no problem!

~~~
postpawl
Lead is still used in light aircraft fuel in the US:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas)

The FAA says “more than 167,000 piston-engine aircraft operating in the United
States rely on aviation gasoline (avgas)“:
[https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/](https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/)

------
nl
This is pretty interesting, since the effect is _so_ big.

I did a bit of reading and it looks like the best thing to do is to run an
indoor air filter _and_ have indoor plants that are effective at absorbing CO2
with indoor lighting[1] (not all are!).

Unfortunately recent research indicates plants aren't great at removing
general particle pollution though.

[1] [https://www.matec-
conferences.org/articles/matecconf/pdf/201...](https://www.matec-
conferences.org/articles/matecconf/pdf/2017/17/matecconf_iscee2017_05004.pdf)

~~~
supercanuck
What plants are effective at absorbing CO2?

~~~
nl
The linked paper has some. The top one they tested was the prayer plant, which
lowers CO2 by 7% in 7 hours in 300 lux.

