This is the second in a series of articles about Environmental Pollution, prompted by Susanbhu’s diary about the 10 most under-reported stories.
Part 1 of this series can be found at:
Part 1
In that first diary I have asked for others to sign up for writing diaries on the enormous and wide ranging problems related to pollution all over this earth, from the oceans, to the air, to forests, rivers, lakes, streams and in our home. I guess a good question would be, “where is there not pollution?” So please, if you are concerned about our lives and our health as I know you all are, consider a diary.
The subject of this diary is Diesel Pollution which is a very serious threat to our heath. As an asthmatic living in the belly of the beast, so to speak, as I live near an industrial area, just filled with diesel trucks, I can testify to the fact that the fumes do indeed effect my breathing on a daily basis.
There are so many different sources of info on this so I will just post two references articles:
Diesel Pollution Poses Growing Health Threat
Thursday, February 24, 2005
By Todd Zwillich
Pollution from diesel engines is expected to shorten the lives of 21,000 Americans by the year 2010, according to a new report.
In addition to 3,000 deaths from lung cancer alone, diesel soot also contributes to an estimated 15,000 hospital admissions, 27,000 nonfatal heart attacks, and more than 400,000 asthma attacks each year, concludes the report, published by the Clean Air Task Force.
“This makes it one of the most significant public health risks out there,” says Conrad Schneider, the group’s advocacy director and a co-author of the report.
The Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to begin enforcing diesel rules in 2007 that will force new trucks, buses, farm equipment, and heavy machinery to use particle filters and cleaner fuel technology. The rules are designed to cut total diesel emissions by 90% over the next several years.
But the lag time leaves a “gap” where existing vehicles and equipment will keep on spewing concentrated diesel fumes for up to 30 years, the time it takes the average diesel engine to wear out, Schneider says.
The group wants the federal government to increase spending to fit diesel filters on public vehicles like garbage trucks and millions of transit and school buses. They also are calling on cities and state legislatures to identify areas where the highest concentrations of diesel particulates circulate in the air.
Twenty-one states already require the use of reduced-sulfur diesel fuel.
(snip)
Diesel Deaths and Cities
The report lists the top 50 cities, in order of deaths per 100,000 adults. (For the complete list, see below.)
City/Deaths per 100,000 Adults:
- Beaumont, Texas/ 29
- Baton Rouge, La./ 27
- New York/ 25
- Philadelphia/ 22
- Trenton, N.J./ 20
- Baltimore, Md./ 19
- Huntington, W.Va./ 18
- New Orleans/ 17
- Pittsburgh, Pa./ 15
- Cincinnati/ 15
(snip)
But a diesel industry representative criticizes the report, noting that the health estimates in it use 1999 data that do not accurately reflect lower particulate levels seen today.
“They’re overstating the risk. They’re using data that is six years old in this case,” says Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum. Overall diesel emissions dropped 37 percent between 1990 and 2000.
This is an excellent article from Union of Concerned Scientists:
Diesel Pollution Primer
soot formation, emissions, dispersal, and health effects:
At some point or another, we’ve all gotten caught behind an 18-wheeler, a garbage truck, a tractor, or a bulldozer and seen, smelled, and even felt the clouds of soot coming from their tailpipes.
But how and why does diesel fuel produce this haze of soot, or particulate matter (PM), and how does it affect the bodies of those who breathe it in? In this backgrounder we take a look at the lifecycle of soot and explore its implications for your family’s health.
(snip)
The Birth of Soot
Soot, or particulate matter (PM), begins its life in the belly of both gasoline and diesel-powered engines. These engines create chemical and organic compounds from the combustion of hydrocarbon-based fuels (fossil fuels). These compounds then cluster together in particle form to create soot, which is released into the air as exhaust. Soot may also come to life as the indirect byproduct of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur dioxides (SOx) reacting in the atmosphere. Soot’s composition often includes hundreds of different chemical elements, including sulfates, ammonium, nitrates, elemental carbon, condensed organic compounds, and even carcinogenic compounds and heavy metals such as arsenic, selenium, cadmium and zinc.1
(snip)
Soot’s Trip Through Your Body
As soot travels through the air in your community, you breathe it in, and so it starts the next phase of its journey: a trip through your body’s respiratory system. Large soot particles (>10 microns) deposit in your nose, throat, and lungs, causing coughing and sore throat, and are ejected from your body through sneezing, coughing, and nose blowing. Coarse particles (10 microns) are inhaled into your windpipe and settle there, causing irritation and more coughing. Fine and ultrafine particles (less than 2.5 microns) are the most successful in invading your body, small enough to travel all the way down deep into your lungs.
(snip)
Once there, these soot particles can irritate and mutate the most sensitive tissues in your lungs: your alveoli. These air sacs line your lung’s alveolar ducts and are the primary gas exchange units of the lungs. Surrounded by networks of blood capillaries, alveoli exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide from the air you breathe in with blood in your capillaries, thus allowing your circulatory system to carry oxygen to the rest of your body. Soot particles, however, make this task more difficult as they cause inflammation and scarring of these alveoli.7 Scar tissue builds up and slows oxygen flow to your capillaries, straining your heart because it must work harder to compensate for oxygen loss.
(there is much more info plus charts and animations on this site listed above, so please check that out.)
Face it folks we are in a pollution nightmare and we need to get active and do something about this before it’s too late. I just hope it isn’t already. It is worth noting that in my poll on the first diary 60% (of a very small sampling of 10, said the environmental cup was cracked, not half full or half empty, but cracked. Interesting!
Any ideas about action that can be taken to get a grip on this everlasting and eternal pollution problem????
Another story on pollution, folks, please sign up to do more diaries on this subject.
To Susanhbu, please post link to your diary on the 10 Most under reported stories.
There are only two stories left. Volunteer signed up to do one — Volunteer, if you see this, send me an e-mail. Thanks!
The two remaining stories from the United Nations list of the 10 most under-reported stories:
Sign up by sending me an e-mail. (Note: The U.N. site has almost everything you need to do a story, so it’s very straightforward.)
I posted my diary on the growth of human rights institutions this morning. One week late, but posted.
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Virus infections, mutations, hygiene to the present vectors for infectious disease due to travel, airlines, economic globalization, and the loss of boundaries. Perspective needed to educate the public as well as those involved in controlling disease.
The interrelation to human kind in society, vocation, religion, and its effect on risk for epidemics. The virus infection is very much in our modern everyday life and we need to do combat it before things get much worse!
I am not thinking of any specific relationship to the environment. What do you think? I will target coming weekend to have article ready.
See website
Oui – Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité
“”Today, there is considerable evidence that a fourth wave is building due to the dynamics of industrialization, globalization, population growth, and urbanization.””
This comment in your referenced link above I think supports the connection between Environmental Pollution, which comes from Industrialization.
So I think your topic will fit very well with this framework of this series..
I would add that many of our present woes have their foundation in or as a result of E/Pollution.
Your timing or perspective of article is fine with me, however or whenever you choose.
It would please me if you would include in this series, this and any further articles on this topic you may choose. I am really trying to get an interactive thing going with members to contribute to one topic, which is so far ranging. When all is said and done, nothing much else will matter if the Earth is continuously damaged in this manner.
Thanks Oui, for all your efforts.
The Kyoto Treaty commits industrialised nations to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, principally Carbon Dioxide, by around 5.2% below their 1990 levels over the next decade.
Drawn up in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, the agreement needs to be ratified by countries who were responsible for at least 55% of the world’s carbon emissions in 1990 to come into force.
The agreement was dealt a severe blow in March 2001 when President George W Bush announced that the United States would never sign it.
KEY POINTS
Finance – funding for poor countries to develop new technology
Mechanisms – tough systems in each country to verify and report carbon emissions
Sinks – heavily forested countries can use their ‘tree sinks’ to offset greenhouse gases
Compliance – countries that fail to keep to their greenhouse gas reduction targets should face legally binding consequences
A scaled-down version was drawn up four months later and finalised at climate talks in Bonn in Germany in 2002. The treaty now only needs Russian ratification to come into force.
If and when the revised treaty takes effect in 2008, it will require all signatories, including 39 industrialised countries, to achieve different emission reduction targets.
With that aim, it will provide a complex system which will allow some countries to buy emission credits from others.
For instance, a country in western Europe might decide to buy rights or credits to emit carbon from one in eastern Europe which could not afford the fuel that would emit the carbon in the first place.
Bonn compromises
The US produced 36% of emissions in 1990, making it the world’s biggest polluter.
The revised Kyoto agreement, widely credited to the European Union, made considerable compromises allowing countries like Russia to offset their targets with carbon sinks – areas of forest and farmland which absorb carbon through photosynthesis.
The Bonn agreement also reduced cuts to be made to emissions of six gases believed to be exacerbating global warming – from the original treaty’s 5.2% to 2%.
It was hoped that these slightly watered down provisions would allow the US to take up the Kyoto principles – but this has not proved to be the case.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/2233897.stm
As I understand it, the probelm is not the use of diesel fuel per se but the badly adjusted and insufficiently filtered emissions from the current vehicles in the USA. From an environmental point of view, I believe deisel engines are preferable to petroleum (gasoline) engines. The enmission figures I have seen in “Which” – the Consumers’ Association magasine here – deisel engines emit about 20% less CO2 than the equivalent gasoline engine. In addition, deisel is more easily produced from green renewable sources such as oil seeds and recycled food oils. The oil used to fry your BigMac can be used in a diesel engine with only filtering and the addition of a simple additive.
The other aspect to conside is whether the emission that are not visible from gas enginges are in fact causing more problems than the visible pollution from diesel. If producing “clean air” actually produces more grenhouse gases you are merely exchanging one probmem for a far greater one. There is indeed the perverse argument hat by making ground level pollution worse if it means the upper atmospehre does not receive greenhouse gases, you aremore likely to accelerate the change to greenere means of transprot.
The issue of soot pollution from Diesels has received broad attention here in Germany recently, and the consensus seems to be that the issue is diesel fuel per se, even though diesel engines (as you point out) are significantly more fuel efficient. The French carmakers in particular are equipping their passenger diesels with soot filters as standard, and the German OEMs are also starting to follow suit.
Another factor is that our urban environment contains considerable deposits of fine particulates, which get stirred up and “put back into circulation” e.g. by conventional street cleaning technology.
LBear-
Big Macs are deep-fried now? Cool! I’m going to go out and have a couple, see if I can land myself in a hospital with heart failure……
That is a problem locally. I did one search and can see that it is a problem that manifests itself in many ways and in many places around the globe.
There is also another issue that could be environmental; the area where I grew up has an abnormally high cancer rate. There were rumours of a government study being done over a period of years. Many water tables in the area have been contaminated with mine water for years. We had both deep mining and strip mining, all defunct coal operations. I will poke around and see if I can dig up anything interesting. (so to speak)