Low Emission Zone Led To Better Lung Size, Function Among London Children (theguardian.com) 65
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian:
Children's lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found. Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city's ultra-low emission zone found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution... "Traffic pollution in cities damages children's health and development," said Chris Griffiths, a professor of primary care at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, and the study's joint senior author. "We provide the strongest evidence yet on how these harms can be prevented. Ambitious clean-air zones should be considered a priority for cities globally with traffic-related air pollution."
Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children's lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere. That impairment, which scientists said was the result of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, put them at increased risk as adults of developing respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and premature death.
Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children's lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere. That impairment, which scientists said was the result of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, put them at increased risk as adults of developing respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and premature death.
Blank (Score:3, Funny)
From the department of no shit, Sherlock.
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Even to this day, it's best to avoid breathing the air in Los Angeles. Especially near freeways. And it's getting worse. The air is a bit cleaner down here in the south bay, but the whole LA metro area is pretty toxic overall, and will deduct a few years off of your natural lifespan.
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That's why I became poor after AI made STEM degrees un-hirable
As for why you're not hirable, I have no idea, but what I can tell you with certainty is that it's unrelated to AI.
because my "Greatest" generation grandparent's and Boomer parent's generation pulled up the ladders behind them with Prop 13, requiring an income of $650k/y to break even housing class-wise.
And yet it's doing the same thing in other states where there is no prop 13. Be glad you're not in Canada, where housing affordability, or the lack thereof, is roughly three times as bad as California's is. Usually what you guys (as in, progressives) attribute to boomers is really due to your own expectations exceeding theirs, and you live under the false assumption that what you have today is
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It's not just air pollution either -- cities have always been unhealthy to live in. It's actually only recently that cities have been growth centers, which is largely thanks to sanitation and flame resistant construction. But despite these, they're still measurably worse to live in, and this is just one data point. Air pollution itself isn't new either; even ancient Rome had some restrictions on burning for this very reason.
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This is just not true in any consistent way. US mortality data is better for cities than rural areas, for example. Cities tend to deliver higher incomes for populations, and income is strongly associated with life expectancy.
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This is just not true in any consistent way. US mortality data is better for cities than rural areas, for example. Cities tend to deliver higher incomes for populations, and income is strongly associated with life expectancy.
Well yes, and. That's probably directly due to Rural areas in the US having greatly inferior healthcare than what is found in cities and especially having a lack of specialists. And that is due to money, as you say, higher incomes for populations.
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None of what you're saying contradicts what I just said. The fact is, cities are bad for your health. Period. You can be overall unhealthy but still live longer solely due to the fact that emergency services are minutes away instead of hours.
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That’s not what drives population life expectancy! C’mon, it’s not about who survives a stroke or not, it’s about how long people live healthy lives in the first place, and the key determinant, *especially* in the US because of inequality, is wealth. Cities generate more wealth for populations than rural areas, and thus healthier populations who live longer. It’s very sweet that you think that frolicking in the open country air purifies the lungs or whatever mechanism you think
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You say that but people have been fighting tooth and nail against it, and they often use the excuse that it won't work. I think they often convince themselves that's true.
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I love that the Tory outer boroughs who fought hardest against the ULEZ have ended up the biggest benefits improvements of the ULEZ.
Sadly, their voters don't understand. Sadly, they don't get that their chosen politicians hate them and care little for their health.
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It was very interesting listening to Any Questions on Radio 4 on Friday night (why yes, I am a middle aged middle class British man, what gave it away?). There was quite a long discussion of climate change and the consensus among the audience was very clearly with Zoe Williams when she said that politicians were just wildly out of touch with the population in being so slow to act on climate change. The Reform/Restore/Tory anti-mitigation bloc is really much smaller than it appears to be. To the extent it
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2. A failure to frame this as âoeelectrotech = growth,
Quite. This is kind of insane really. Building infrastructure at home is always going to be better than spending money abroad when the end result is the same (energy).
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Heres how I think about the most important race of all: it took 70 years for the world to get to 1TWh of solar capacity deployed, by 2022; it then took three years (!) to get the second TWh deployed, done by 2024; and now it’s taken less than two years (!) for the third to be deployed.
The UK is never going to deploy vast amounts of solar, we don’t have the insolation for it. But we sure as shit have the wind (and tidal) and there’s all the rest to do as well: EAFs, induction cookers, heat
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The UK is never going to deploy vast amounts of solar, we donâ(TM)t have the insolation for it.
Indeed, but even so, we do get enough that relatively expensive rooftop solar is generally worth it.
But we sure as shit have the wind (and tidal) and thereâ(TM)s all the rest to do as well: EAFs, induction cookers, heat pumps, EVs, blah. We need to race or be left in the dust, like Americans with their shitty payments systems with cheques etc (and obviously with fossil fuels too).
Yep, we have a lot of w
High Aspirations (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: High Aspirations (Score:1)
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*One* benefit is you can charge them at home.
Others:
1. Quiet for me and for my neighbourhood
2. Smooth linear acceleration with no lag
3. Vibration free
4. No stinky unhealthy tailpipe
5. Cheap to run
6. Cabin pre-heat / pre-cool
7. A much larger array of places to charge, often coupled with a place where I can do something useful while the car charges so that I can charge while stopped, not stop to charge:eg supermarkets, hotels, restaurants, pubs, places of work, municipal car parks, tourist site car parks, the
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Re: High Aspirations (Score:2)
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Your response is just nonsensical. I’m not the King of EVs. It’s not my job to solve for your situation. Your situation is getting solved for right now, with the advent of new chemistries that offer much longer ranges (solid state being deployed by Geely from 2027) and much better low temp performance (sodium being deployed by multiple marques now). No-one can solve your whiny problems about your home charging complications for you, and no one can solve for the problem that you could only list a
Re: High Aspirations (Score:2)
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What the fuck are you talking about? Just because you love huffing the smell of petrol or diesel, most people don’t. It’s not a nice smell. And it’s bad for you.
And it’s not a fucking binary, you numpty. The fewer ICE cars, the quieter and less smelly the roads are. How this is difficult for you to understand is beyond me.
Re: High Aspirations (Score:2)
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It’s beyond silly! It’s just desperate.
Re: High Aspirations (Score:1)
EVs are now a direct replacement for ALL consumer use cases. If you need to tow your shitty trailer home from London to Prague twice a week then bad luck. Charging stations are common enough now.
Re: High Aspirations (Score:2)
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a) 800km in a day is beyond being a rare edge case. The % of the population that has ever done, or will ever do, 800km in a single day would be below 1%.
b) In 800km of driving, you will take more than 45 minutes worth of breaks anyway. You just need to use your brain a little and plan it to stop at a charging station. Although, if you're American, I do understand that brain use is quite the ask.
c) There are now EVs capable of going 800km in a single charge, if you truly are doing 800km in a day with any deg
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a) I don't believe you. You're lying and there's nothing you can say that will change my mind. I live in Australia where I probably drive to a weekend dinner a distance that you call a "road trip". The number of people here who have done 800+km in a day is vanishingly small. 800km is NOT 8 hours. It'll be around 10 at a minimum even if you're on highway the whole time. There's pee stops. There's traffic and animal slow downs. There's leg stretching and snacking. The fact that you think 800km can be done in
Re: High Aspirations (Score:2)
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Hopefully now this has been proven to work, we can accelerate the process.
The issue is political. A lot of people in London and the wider are poor, and can't afford a new car or even a used EV when petrol bangers are as little as a few hundred quid. At least sales of new ones are increasing steadily, and the Chinese manufacturers are offering them at reasonable prices. That competition seems to have driven down prices from European, Japanese, and Korean manufacturers too.
Re:You have every reason to ... (Score:4, Informative)
Regarding 1. In fact, post-pandemic traffici levels are as high as they were before the pandemic. In fact, traffic levels were already close to normal by October of 2020 in London, while the pandemic was still going on, in part due to people being less willing to take public transit. See https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/changes-london-road-traffic-march-2020 [london.gov.uk]. and https://fleetworld.co.uk/uk-road-traffic-back-at-pre-covid-levels/ [fleetworld.co.uk]. World-wide, we've seen pretty similar trends. https://inrix.com/blog/2023-global-traffic-scorecard/ [inrix.com].
Re 2 and 3: Aside from that being highly exaggerated at what happened, it also isn't relevant to evaluating this study or making this study become "dishonest propaganda." If your claims are accurate, then they would be reasons to see there as being tradeoffs. But it wouldn't be a problem with this study or this study's claim. I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make with point 4. Are you claiming that the reduction in lung issues is due to less use of boilers due to climate change? While climate change is having an impact, it isn't remotely large enough yes to have had that big an impact on heating that way. It isn't what is going on here.
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Very little of what you are saying is true.
Firstly you're wrong about traffic levels. Secondly you're wrong that they have not accounted for that kind of change.
The rest of what you say is insane. No you don't have a right to kill people with your pollution due few because you're lazy and cheap. If you think that is viscous I don't know if there's anything approaching common decency and sense that will get through to you.
Re:You have every reason to ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you been to London? The traffic in the centre is as bad as it ever was. It's faster to cycle.
Work from home has increased traffic in the outer boroughs during the work day.
The ULEZ brought the biggest improvements in air quality in the outer boroughs. Inner boroughs benefitted too. Sounds like a win.
The rest of your post is inarticulate. Take a breathe next time and explain the points you're trying to make properly.
Better Lung Size?! (Score:5, Funny)
This is woke nonsense. These people should be happy with the lungs they've got. What's next, outlawing cars and mandating bicycles? Free healthcare for all?
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
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Don't fret good sir. The right honourable Farage will bring us British lungs for British people in the best traditions of the empire and Victorians. You know, stunted.
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Except his. He has a range of houses that he can move to as the bad air moves around. All of them paid for through by sleaze and corruption.
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Except his. He has a range of houses that he can move to as the bad air moves around.
With all the fags he puff on? He rings the bad air with him.
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Ban ICVs and subsidize nextgen batteries EVs (Score:2)
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Blunt yet very very true
Pandemic bias. (Score:1)
The team measured and monitored the children’s size and health at annual school visits from 2018 to 2022..
Uh, what school visits? You mean the empty schools a team was visiting during a global pandemic?
You sure those lung results weren't possibly skewed because the kids were actually at home for a good portion of this study, and not being exposed to anywhere near as many daily toxins before the pandemic hit?
A planet was reacting to a global pandemic in ways we hadn't seen in a century or more. Yes. Statistics are going to be affected by this.
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Although the impact on children was big, the schools were only really closed for under a year. Lockdowns started Easter-ish 2020 and then the UK was going through its lockdown easing steps a year later after the vaccine program had been going full-steam since January 2021, with about 90% school attendance by March 2021. I remember American colleagues shocked at our levels of freedom so soon! London was buzzing again very quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, our losses were substantially higher than they otherwise would have been. It’s part of the reason Johnson got booted out.
Why an American try to do sarcastic humour in a thread where British people are posting is beyond me. This is not your forte, sweetcheeks. Stick to things you can manage, like raging about your guns.
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So, so fragile. Hilarious!
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I don't really get your point. Maybe some American thing? As an outsider, it looked like Fauci was trying to do the right thing whilst being undermined by the political "leadership". We got many things wrong in the UK, but the Covid vaccine program wasn't one of them: in this we excelled with a fast, well-planned rollout and very high uptake and levels vaccination. That vaccination programme showed fantastic results in reducing Covid deaths and led us to be one of the Western countries with the fastest
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This is a literal personal measure that I have used myself while living here, and it is much improved. I haven’t had black snot for a few years now, and I absolutely attribute it to the ULEZ and the growth in London’s EV fleet.
This paper is nonsensical (Score:1)
They are trying to say in London which started out and remained more polluted than Luton throughout the entirety of the study period reached parity with Luton in terms of expiratory volume of children.
This premise seems rather insane for multiple reasons:
1. London remained significantly more polluted throughout the entirety of the study. The effects of the NPI had only marginal impact on pollution levels yet the spread of NO2 levels between London and Luton started out and remained enormous... London retai
This paper is nonsensical (Score:2)
Reposting due to censorship.
This premise seems rather insane for multiple reasons:
1. London remained significantly more polluted throughout the entirety of the study. The effects of the NPI had only marginal impact on pollution levels yet the spread of NO2 levels between London and Luton started out and remained enormous... London retained basically double the pollution level of Luton throughout the entirety of the study period. In relative terms the shrinking delta between them was tiny. London started out