from Hacker News

Are we running out of clean air?

by oxqbldpxo on 4/4/24, 2:29 PM with 8 comments

• by giantg2 on 4/4/24, 2:44 PM

  Depends on what you consider clean. By most standards, most of the air on earth is clean. The part that gets people is that because of population density, many people live in areas without clean air. We also have some events like forest fires that can affect large areas for relatively brief times.

  So it's not about running out of clean air on earth, but more so about specific locations and individual exposure.

• by mac3n on 4/4/24, 3:17 PM

  https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/the-great-oxygenation-e...

• by emestifs on 4/4/24, 4:31 PM

  Reminds me of the monologue from Network (1976) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug

  It's uncanny how relevant this quote is 50 years later.

• by locopati on 4/4/24, 4:43 PM

  to borrow from William Gibson, clean air is here, it's just not evenly distributed

• by PeterisP on 4/4/24, 4:26 PM

  The premise isn't really accurate - "clean air" is a local phenomenon, not a resource that gets spent or that we run out of; and furthermore, breathing doesn't consume clean air, so it's irrelevant how many people there are for that aspect. When we talk about "clean air" we mostly mean things like particulate matter or pollution by sulfur or other contaminants. Breathing does create CO2, but growing CO2 doesn't make air "unclean" but "only" affects the greenhouse effect, and also the breathing of people/animals is not a major driver of CO2 growth, fossil fuels are.

  That being said, the air situation is generally improving because of people getting wealthier. Because air cleanliness is local, it matters much more where pollution is happening than how much pollution is happening, as e.g. indoor wood burning for cooking or warmth affects you much more than a much larger pollution through a power plant, and improved technology also makes a big difference even if you're burning the same quantity of the same thing.

  In developed countries, air is cleaner than ever - London had notoriously unclean air, being the center of the industrial revolution, but looking at current data (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_the_United_Ki...) 2000 London had immensely cleaner air than 1900 London, and 2024 London has much cleaner air than 2000 London. Similarly, while global deforestation matters for global issues like climate change, in developed countries there is no deforestation - Europe has reforested in the last century, increasing its forest cover, and USA has kept a rather stable forest area over the same time.

  In developing countries, the industrialization does come at a cost of local air pollution until the country's wealth grows enough that they "choose to buy the luxury of clean air" by changing local laws to favor more expensive but cleaner ways to do the same thing. So currently the most polluted air is in places like Bangladesh and Pakistan, but there's a clear path for improving that when they come to prioritizing that - because it's inherently some tradeoff between the material welfare of your people and the physical welfare of air quality, because poverty can kill or hurt as much or more than polluted air. That being said, e.g. China seems to have peaked at its local air pollution and is expected to get cleaner air over the coming decades - it's not "running out" of clean air.

• by Grimeton on 4/4/24, 2:51 PM

  We have too much water to run out of air.