Before getting too excited about the experimental prevention they used, IL-1B blockade, let me say that blocking the innate immune system to prevent cancer seems ill-advised. The innate immune system is with us for very good reasons. This would be roughly equivalent to preventing table saw accidents by prophylactically removing all fingers.
Yes, table saw accidents are terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (SawStop), and fingers are useful for many other things.
Yes, lung cancer is terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (energy from renewables + nuclear), and the innate immune system is useful for many other things.
Exactly right, tire and brake dust are still awful with EVs, though contra the slight implication in the headline, it's no worse than the current situation with ICE vehicles. And the brake dust aspect may slightly reduce due to regenerative braking.
"Electric vehicles are estimated to emit 5-19% less PM10 from non-exhaust sources per kilometre than internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) across vehicle classes. However, EVs do not necessarily emit less PM2.5 than ICEVs. Although lightweight EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less PM2.5 than ICEV equivalents, heavier weight EVs emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than ICEVs"
So. It depends. It's sometimes slightly better, sometimes slightly worse. But it doesn't really solve the issue.
True, but these are all less than 20%, a change which is likely indistinguishable for any sort of risk factors, and likely well within the measurement error for something difficult to measure like this.
The true change we need to make is drastically reduce car use, to a tiny fraction of its current use. This is a hard social problem, however, particularly for the older generations who tend to wield power in most governments. Younger folks seem pretty excited to allow more biking and walking and rolling, though.
Willingness over your lifespan to reduce car use is not merely "because they're getting old", but rather directly correlated with a city's existing transit infrastructure. I've been able to spend a few weeks here and there in London or other transit-dense cities, and I just about never desire a car there, but I do in the states.
Government leaders in the states can't imagine this reality or, if so, can't imagine it changing sufficiently in their lifetimes to invest the political capital in. The US will never change.
Well many government officials (especially those in the planning departments) can imagine that future, as can many younger elected officials.
And honestly, I take it back, there are nearly as many older folks punching for changes to city design to allow waking and bikes as young people. But in genera the older generations have the time and money needed for local political involvement in a way that younger generations do not, so we tend to get a future shaped by those who do not want change from the status quo (which is a radical departure from the eta of urban growth focused on cars).
Interestingly the first article flagged ebikes as particularly problematic, which are a pretty common way to extend bike range. Although, they must surely be better than cars just due to mass.
Anyway. Cautiously in agreement with you, but it depends a lot on where you live. Western Europe, at least at present, is blessed with a fairly mild climate. Less so than North America which seems to alternate between harsh winters and hot and humid summers. And it's a bit much to ask everyone to move somewhere nice. We probably need to figure out how to make braking systems and wheels less polluting.
Quoted this Douglas Adams once on New York when this came up...
"In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do, that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very equable, but it's quite another to be the
sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet's orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin's bubbling."
[edit] (aside, my theory is the Frastrans live on an aging neutron star like in "Dragon's Egg" ;) )
And really the situation gets worse a few states down. :)
To say nothing of Texas or Arizona.
Looking at the OECD report (possibly the wrong one?) I couldn't find any mention of bicycles except as an alternative to cars to mitigate the problem... Given the faaaar lower mass even of heavy bicycles, I would want to see the actual evidence before worrying too much about the bike contribution to particulate pollution.
(rider mass / vehicle mass is a lovely shorthand for vehicle efficiency, as it says a lot about how much acceleration you're 'wasting' on the vehicle. Braking, of course, produces a negative acceleration, so lower mass ratio ~> better efficiency. Aim for a ratio of < 1.0...)
> Interestingly the first article flagged ebikes as particularly problematic, which are a pretty common way to extend bike range. Although, they must surely be better than cars just due to mass.
Only tangentially related, but I'd assume that most of the emissions from ebikes would be related to brakes, as stopping from higher velocity would wear down brake pads faster.
One interesting thing that hybrid and electric vehicles do is that they do regenerative braking, which ends up with less wear on brake pads (and emissions) from slowing down. Justin from Grin Technologies (an ebike part shop focusing on DIYers) has done a presentation on how that works on ebikes, and mentions that he's barely using brake pads now that he's using regenerative braking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYCj4asp9pE&t=970s
The opposition is coming from people past child rearing years. Other parents like me are one of the strongest contingencies for getting rid of car-dependency. Cars are one of the greatest threats to kids in terms of death, disability, and maiming. And building cities around cars makes having kids a huge huge hassle, you have to drive them everywhere and they have zero autonomy.
Cars and kids are an absolute terrible combo.
I'm not sure if you've seen the huge rise of cargo bikes that I have seen, but they are nearly all parents with kid seating on the back in my town. We are trying to make do with terrible infrastructure and city planning, but it wouldn't take much change to make it all very much better.
Hear hear - I want for my kids to be independent and for me to not be their damn taxi for 18 years. A car-dependent home is a prison for kids. If my 10 year old says "I want to go to the movies" I want to say "Awesome! Have fun! Who's going with you?" not "ugg I'm busy with work and can't drive you".
I don't view any of these as a problem in the least. And sorry if it comes across as as a strong critique, I don't mean any of it personally, but have heard people say these same things but never from people that actually bicycle with their family.
We do all sorts of things that increase property value, why is it suddenly only a problem when bikes are involved? And the problem is only because we do a little amount of transition and not a lot? This is a completely fabricated concern in my estimation, the type of thing that people come up with instead of simply saying "I don't like this and don't want it."
Similarly, the concern about the cost of bikes is completely invalid, as bikes are always cheaper than a car, even brand new cargo e-bikes are only a few months of car expenses at most.
And I haven't seen that window where kids can't bike on their own or ride with another parent, and I know families that bike with kids of all sizes and ages.
Okay. It appears that you haven't read what I wrote. I'll try just one more time:
> And sorry if it comes across as as a strong critique, I don't mean any of it personally, but have heard people say these same things but never from people that actually bicycle with their family.
As I already said, we have built cycling into our lives. Our kids (4 and 6) cycle to school with one of us. I cycle to work. And I am saying this.
> We do all sorts of things that increase property value, why is it suddenly only a problem when bikes are involved?
That is nothing to do with what I was saying. Property is finite; schools, clubs, and employers are too. A car is one of the few levellers that allows people to live somewhere cheaper and access places they need to get to. Places that are close enough to schools to cycle them to school and then cycle to work are expensive.
> Similarly, the concern about the cost of bikes is completely invalid, as bikes are always cheaper than a car,
That only works if you don't need a car. If you need both, which, see previous point, is extremely likely, then it's an extra expense, not an alternative one.
> even brand new cargo e-bikes are only a few months of car expenses at most.
An admittedly quick Google and I'm not seeing any for less than £2.5k. That's years' worth of car services, tax and MOT. On top of the cost of the car they almost certainly need.
> And I haven't seen that window where kids can't bike on their own or ride with another parent, and I know families that bike with kids of all sizes and ages.
Here's an example of what I mean: nursery is in one direction; school is another. How do we get our 4 year old to nursery and 8 year old to school? Should the 8 year old cycle on his own? Or is he in the window where he can't cycle far enough by himself, but too heavy to be safely steered on a cargo bike?
Broadly: if Facebook's taught us anything, it's the power of being in a social circle and thinking that must generalise to everyone, or even most people. Having a job where we can work from home, or rock up 20 minutes late, where we can afford to live in a nice location that has good access, and where we can afford expensive secondary transport, is all great. Wonderful, even. But having grown up in a reasonably deprived area, I believe that's not most people's experience.
> Or is he in the window where he can't cycle far enough by himself, but too heavy to be safely steered on a cargo bike?
My wife cycled me around in her cargo bike, and a couple of other adults (not at the same time). I'm not a light chap, fairly sure I'd outweigh both your kids together. Steering on those things is pretty good, they're not light in and of themselves.
edit: we actually cycled both our kids to school in the cargo bike when they were 8 and 5. I'd forgotten, it was a few years ago.
Fair enough. I might have imagined badly a situation where it's not easy or possible in terms of time using a bike for two separate children.
On the cargo bikes, I have thought about it but I'd probably steer clear til they have some safety standards attached (I think there's a German standard, but nothing else I've seen).
Some drivers rely too much on one pedal driving only to brake in a panic when they realize it will not stop the car in time. This creates a very uncertain environment for other participants in traffic and I can't tell you how many times I had to step back from a crossing because a driver clearly misjudged the breaking distance of their car using regen braking. It creates a bit of complacency where the expectation is that "the car will take care of it" and one pedal driving does not give the same control over braking as it does over acceleration (or as the regular brake pedal does).
Other drivers assume max regen settings will bring max benefits and end up taking more out of the battery to accelerate only to get far less back (regen braking is ~70% efficient in any EV) when the car regen-brakes, when braking was not really required. Many times coasting is far more efficient than regenerating regardless of what pedals you're using.
Last but not least, all regenerative braking systems are combined with hydraulic braking at low speeds because the torque applied to decelerate is not enough in any of them. So at low speeds the car will actually combine it with friction braking and eventually not regen at all. Take the Zoe where there's no regen at all below 15km/h (9 mph). Emergency braking from high speed is the same. City driving will see a lot of those situations.
So whether you realize it or not, when you are coming to a standstill you use the hydraulic brakes. There may be options to break at low speed with no friction at all but they will not be called regenerative because they will inevitably use energy to do it.
Where I live residential neighborhoods have 4-way stops at every intersection so preferably everyone would be braking all the time, yes.
They obviously are not and cruising through stop signs (and sometimes killing children!) is the norm. If EVs encourage this driving style that is another strong point in favor of "electric cars can't solve the problem of cars."
>They obviously are not and cruising through stop signs (and sometimes killing children!) is the norm. If EVs encourage this driving style that is another strong point in favor of "electric cars can't solve the problem of cars."
You reap what you sow. A grid of 4-way stops where the traffic flow is not appropriate for them is a textbook perfect way to train drivers to habitually roll stop signs.
I swear sometimes it seems like urban planners are hellbent on re-learning everything they learned in the 1920s.
I mean, the real issue is that American traffic engineering is usually loathe to put anything other than a 4-way stop. Americans do not properly yield at yield signs, roundabouts take too much room, and we haven’t figured out how to routinely build speed bumps or raised crosswalks for less than six figures.
Also, it is a stretch to call some of that planning “learning” or “science.” As a general example, parking regulations for uses tend to be arbitrary, oversized and wildly out of date; most US retail parking lots are not full even on major shopping days like Black Friday before the advent of online, and now online is making all that space even more wasted.
Roundabouts don’t have to take up more room than a stop-signed junction. We call them mini-roundabouts, and they’re often just painted on the ground and slightly raised so that you can still drive over them.
Unfortunately, US civil engineering is very dogmatic, so if it isn’t approved by AASHTO it won’t be done.
The civil engineers also like absurdly wide turn radii to accommodate 53 feet trailers and large fire trucks even in residential streets, so you end up with comically wide roads even for dead end suburban streets. https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/suburban-street-2779407.jpg
I agree it's stupid but can you imagine how HNers would react if a trailer so much dragged an outside dual on their shrubbery. The hand wringing would probably start a fire.
Fortunately for traffic engineering, they often remove those too, to maintain a “clear zone” for road safety. (The clear zone is intended for keeping cars at high speed from killing their occupants when they decelerate into stationary objects.)
I would like to see the numbers on this to quantify it. Because the places where EVs still do use brake pads is when they come to full stops at lights and stop signs, which tend to be far closer to people.
That may be the case for a Tesla (never driven one) but the ride-share Smart EVs we have around Paris absolutely need brakes to come to a stand-still. They will decelerate fairly quickly to 20-25 kmph, but after that, the deceleration rate slows down, and it actually will never stop by itself.
For some reason I can't understand, they tried to imitate ICE automatics that don't stand still if you don't have your foot on the brake pedal.
For some reason I can't understand, they tried to imitate ICE automatics that don't stand still if you don't have your foot on the brake pedal.
Even more annoying, as an owner of a Nissan Leaf that does this, is that the behavior is what I consider to be a bug in automatic transmissions. Manual transmissions don't do that, and there's no good reason for automatics to do that (and a hundred really good reasons for them not to). It's an artifact of the viscosity of the fluid it turns in, and it annoys me that my EV is bug-for-bug compatible with a device the car doesn't even have (a transmission).
No, "PM10 for non-exhaust sources per km" and then the following line has more info about about pm2.5. Please just go read the thing it's not our duty to quote it at you piece by piece to disprove your assumptions about how good EVs are especially when the article is right there and not even long or very technical.
If you have trouble reading or understanding english then I apologize and of course please continue to get the information this way if that is best for you. I mean this seriously and not as an insult. I had a TBI once and had a hard time parsing information like this for a couple years after.
I would expect the brake dust component to go down significantly for full EVs with Tesla-grade regenerative braking. Source: Model S owner. I can go whole trips without touching the brakes. Based on what I've seen, I suspect the FSD would be even more likely to make full trips without using the disk brakes.
> And the brake dust aspect may slightly reduce due to regenerative braking.
This might be underselling it. I hardly use the brakes on our EV at all. In a journey yesterday of 180km, I only touched the brakes at the end, when pulling into a car park.
I'm having trouble believing such findings because even in the most congested of cities PM counts are generally low as long as other sources (like heating) are kept in check.
NOx emissions kick in as the main pollutant much earlier in such places.
I wanted to find an account of what the biggest sources of PM2.5 are in the US. This article discusses traffic fumes (24% of PM2.5), but I was surprised to learn that by far, the largest source of PM2.5 - 45% - is “unspecified sources of human origin.”
Where does that stuff come from? Well, it’s created in the atmosphere via secondary reactions between agricultural NH3 emissions, SO2 and NOx emissions from shipping and industrial activities and power generation, and NMVOCs from industrial processes and consumption of solvents.[1]
Those reactions seem like an interesting area of study and those chemicals involved are far less-often discussed as sources of air pollution even though they seem to combine to form the biggest source
The other thing people don’t often talk of is PM2.5 inside their home while cooking. Lot of people have poor ventilation or insufficient air movement capacity in their kitchens.
Unfortunately, this is not simple to rectify. My previous house was expensive and difficult to retrofit to have an externally vented range hood, and I'm renting now, where basically nothing has externally vented range hoods, and looking to buy a place that does. This is a hard non-negotiable requirement for my next house, but the pickings are very slim. This is a severe issue (in the US anyway), and it's difficult to retrofit for most kitchens since most houses in the US are designed with the stove on the interior wall rather than the exterior wall.
Cooking fumes are the primary pollutant in my life, and honestly is one that I struggle with since I have severe asthma but love to cook. I do what I can, but this is something I wish was taken more seriously in society because there's a huge economic hill to climb to solve it yourself vs having to deal with what's available on market.
While it's true that gas stoves are a significant source of kitchen fumes, they are not the only source, just the act of cooking food produces fumes. As an example, when searing meats, significant amounts of fumes are released, as is also the case when bringing anything beyond the boiling point, steam is given off, and steam can contain other particulates. Just using an electric stove (which I use currently in my rental) alone does not solve the issue, and is not even that large of a reduction. Most of the fumes from cooking are from the act of cooking, not from the heat source.
I have an induction cook plate and the AQI indoors still goes in the hundreds when cooking on it. It takes about fifteen to thirty minutes of the air purifiers running at full blast to get down to single digits AQI.
The last place I lived-in had a hood over the electric stove/oven. The exhaust-port included a steel-mesh grease-filter before the fan. Then the exhaust entered a zinc-coated-tin (?) duct about 6 inches in diameter and 10 feet long. It travelled straight above a row of cupboards to a side-wall and to the outdoors ... exiting through a louvered vent.
I suspect such a setup doesn't have to cost much. In return I enjoyed many years of cooking, summer and winter, without mostly without the odors & humidity.
I missed it as soon as I moved here ... although the vent is up-through-the-roof vertical, it's very ineffective ... and I can no longer cook most things I once took for granted.
The typical American kitchen doesn't exhaust cooking fumes out of the house - the rangehood (typically part of the microwave) just sucks the fumes up and blows them over the head of the cooker, distributing food particles and steam around the entire house (perfect for mold growth!).
It blew my mind seeing this as an Australian, where externally venting fans are standard.
You're not quite wrong nor quite right.... I've lived in the USA all my life, in perhaps 20 or so different houses or apartments over the years, in half a dozen states through both the northeast and midsouth and in my experience.... both ways are common in the USA, unfortunately. I'm not sure why, but I agree kitchen vent fans that don't actually vent outside are terrible
A lot of it is from the natural gas combustion, but the food itself also contributes. The day I got an air quality sensor (to assess risk from wildfire smoke), I realized that my kitchen is basically an asthma factory for the kids. (I haven't actually assessed the risk from that, as its different from wildfires smoke, but j just keep the kids out of the kitchen now until the air clears)
I have some air filters with air quality sensors on them, and we have an electric range so there's no natural gas combustion happening. Often when cooking (pan frying especially), those sensors will max out and send the air filters into turbo mode for a good while.
Yes, hot oils trigger the formaldehyde sensor every time for me. For doing wok frying, I got an outdoor propane burner so that it's far more dilute, and that delicious cancer-causing wok hei is delivered only to our stomachs rather than lungs and stomachs. The outdoor wok burner is also far superior to any indoor residential gas stove too for this purpose.
The actors at Conner Prairie, an 1836 "living museum" in central Indiana, explain that some of the nicer houses have a separate out-building just for cooking, to keep the heat away from the main living space, and reduce the risk of burning down the whole house too. Maybe we'll move back to that design, to keep the pollution in the main space down.
combustion (burning) byproducts are the primary harmful particulate matter created by cooking, whether that be from gas or food. like most issues, incidental contact isn't enough to worry about, but if you're a cook (commercial or home), then you're likely getting meaningful exposure. it's not an issue for kids unless they're doing the cooking every day. the range hood should either be vented to the outside or sufficiently filtered (or both), but most filters are inadequate, so venting to the outside is the more foolproof strategy.
but this is likely a very small factor for nearly all people. cars (oil) and electricity generation (coal and gas) create most of the harmful particulate matter in the air (and water and ground), so that's where we should focus our anti-pollution efforts first and foremost.
Getting an air quality monitor during covid really blew my mind when I saw the amount cooking pollution and how long it can linger. No one should be cooking inside without a vent running or a window open.
> No one should be cooking inside without a vent running or a window open.
...or perhaps, it doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things, and you're worried about it because you bought a measurement device and started measuring something you hadn't measured before.
This isn't a minor point. It's a recurring theme in biological and medical science where researchers start to measure things for the first time, discover a previously unknown level, declare it significant or "alarming", and ignore that there's no causative link to any known harm.
When you measure things, you find things, but most things you find are uninteresting.
Except here there is a causative link of combustion byproducts of that size causing real harm. I've also lived in lots of apartments that don't have external-venting range hoods, so all that PM you generate while cooking is just in your living space until you filter it or breathe it. Introducing a PM counter, better filters, and enhanced ventilation practices (such as running the upstairs bathroom fan while cooking) dramatically reduced the eye irritation and stuffy nose I tended to wake up with.
For what it's worth, the same particulate counter will also spike off the charts when anyone takes a shower, but as far as we can tell those salt pm's aren't dangerous.
No, here is a link between car fumes and lung cancer in mice. Unless you routinely have a car running in your kitchen while cooking (for mice), it's not related.
PM2.5 particles are not all the same, nor are periodic exposure levels in a household kitchen in any way comparable to those used in a laboratory animal study.
> For what it's worth, the same particulate counter will also spike off the charts when anyone takes a shower, but as far as we can tell those salt pm's aren't dangerous.
Yes, exactly. You are perfectly illustrating my point. You have just as much evidence for this claim as for the kitchen one (i.e. none), but you assume one is fine and the other is not.
You're not wrong... but running a vent or opening a window while you're cooking to mitigate PM2.5 exposure, which we know can be carcinogenic, seems like incredibly minimal intervention. I'd rather change my behavior slightly than wait for more conclusive data in this specific case.
Yes, of course. I'm not reacting to the idea, so much as the "everyone MUST do this" implication.
It's probably not a bad idea to open a window or run a vent (depends on where you live, I guess), but I wouldn't panic or deploy a particle meter, or stop cooking if I couldn't do it, either.
I wonder how important the raw amount of emissions is. Density should decrease at a cubic rate of distance, so being close to a small source of emissions might be worse than being somewhat far from a heavier source.
Interesting. One question totally non-sequiter to the toxicity conversation, but why do people that use maps orient the image in a direction other than North being up so that they have to add a label to the image indicating the direction of North?
For local navigation (e.g. your phone screen, laying a map on a table, etc) it's generally considered best practice to orient the map so that North is North. For abstract purposes North is up is the standard. I can't think of a good reason to do otherwise unless you're trying to illustrate a point specifically about local navigation (e.g. orienting a map so that the headwaters of a navigable river are at the top).
It's pretty hard to separate correlation from causation. There's way more sources of carcinogens than just car generated pollution. And lots of them will tend to correlate with poverty/working class which will tend to correlate with living next to highways.
Is it really the cars that are the problem - or just a high concentration of particles in the air from having so many people and things jammed in a tight space?
Dense cities themselves are the real problem. I have started carrying portable air sensors around (they are surprisingly cheap and measure a wide variety of things from particles to VOCs and CO2) and simply not being in or near a large city dramatically improves air quality. But hey, lump everything in and bash cars while you are at it - double bonus :p
Remember when the pandemic first started and literally no one was on the roads? I hiked up into the mountains of LA. You could see to long beach and even catalina clear as can be, 50 mile visibility. It stayed like that until traffic started kicking back up again. The same dense city, the only difference was people weren't driving to work and the air was noticeably clearer both to the naked eye, and on purple air.
EVs will help some but honestly these days, a lot of particulate pollution cars put out comes from sources like the tires and brake dust. EVs are heavier vehicles overall and would produce more of both for a given class of vehicle. The best thing to do would be to improve service quality of bus transit in order to move more people with fewer vehicles; giving busses signal preemtion and their own lanes would go a long way to make them more convenient than cars for more people. Bike lane networks would also help people feel more confident riding a bike in cities to more places. Not enough people take the lane while biking, certainly.
Yeah, PM2.5 is listed as a known carcinogen, and there is strong epidemiological data supporting the link between respiratory tract cancers and pollution.
This work provides a mechanism for how this happens, where air pollution promotes the transition of cells into a malignant state, without directly damaging DNA.
The news here is not that air pollution is linked to cancer, but about what the underlying mechanism could be:
> "However, the biological basis for how air pollution causes cancer has remained unclear. Unlike smoking or sun exposure, which directly cause DNA mutations linked to lung and skin cancer, air pollution does not cause cancer by triggering such genetic changes."
Yes, but only the older people who have good memory, or the young people who bothered to keep themselves informed by reading some 'history' or talking to smart older people.
I know essentially nothing about this topic, but it seems likely that some particles are more dangerous than others (though I've seen no suggestion of that). I'd prefer to go after the elephants in the room before the hamsters.
There are MULTITUDES of particles in circulation everywhere everyday. If the impact of only some these are especially dire, we should be able to triage each particle simply by: 1) looking at who suffers most from 'lung cancer of unknown etiology' and what environmental particles they were exposed to, and to a lesser extent, 2) looking at who is exposed to each type of particle and whether they suffer from it.
It'd be nice if we had some clear hypotheses in mind before charging off in all directions.
One thing that shocked me about cancer treatment is how little they asked me about environmental factors. I assumed there would be questionnaires asking about all kinds of specific products and foods, maybe even asking for soil and water samples from my home. But there was none of that, and this was a major research hospital. The only thing was that they asked permission to use my biopsy for additional research.
I know the data would be messy, and if released to the wild it could lead to sensational news stories that affect the sock market, but surely there is some value in collecting up all this data? How long did it take for glyphosate to be linked to cancer? How much sooner could it have been caught?
There is the NHANES dataset, which has a ton of blood/urine test data for various environmental contaminants, along with tons of other data columns like cancer diagnoses, age of onset, etc.
> If you have air purifiers at home that does help.
Does it? Or does merely having them make you feel more comfortable. Anyway it also means that I would have to live in a tightly sealed building, but I rather like having the window open.
Seeing how a large portion of the population have never used a wake up call as a service, they just think it is some rude telemarketer calling that just gets added to the block list. Problem solved
Yes. When I lived in a drafty street level apartment in SF on Oak St (busy artery) I would have to wipe my inside window sills 1-2x a week of the brake dust and black rubber particles that would accumulate
Similar things happen in the country, but it's dust from gravel roads, and/or from farming (discers, plows, combines, and so on). House can be 100 meters from the road and you still get tons of gravel road dust. Though, perhaps, that's not as bad for you as brake dust. In some corn towns it "snows" crap from the processing plants for part of the year. Can't imagine that's good for the lungs.
Same here— in the east bay (Milpitas). I was alarmed by how much silt built up on any outdoor surface. I assumed it was due to nearby highways and busy roads. Left that living situation after 2-3 months due to the concern.
Climate change propaganda. I know this, because I am in the healthcare industry. No breakthrough happens by changing environments, only by figuring out interventions.
Yes, table saw accidents are terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (SawStop), and fingers are useful for many other things.
Yes, lung cancer is terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (energy from renewables + nuclear), and the innate immune system is useful for many other things.