Air pollution is a hideous thing. But though its consequences are as real and immediate as anything we face, it is a cultural phenomenon. In Europe, pollution is a subject like war or religion. We fight about it, we argue about it, we think about it, we assign blame to it, we study it.
Americans rarely talk about it. Partly that is because American economists no longer worry about pollution. Partly it is because we lack a language to talk about it. We are used to talking about things in terms of costs and benefits. But in the case of pollution, costs don’t count. You can’t put a dollar sign on a dead child or a sick building. And that is what pollution is: death, illness, destruction.
Yet we still talk about pollution in terms of costs and benefits. The economists who talk about pollution are right to do so, because pollution does have costs. But their cost-benefit analysis is flawed. They mistakenly assume that costs and benefits are the same thing. They are not.
A benefit is a gain from an investment. A benefit is what you get back, a return on what you put into an investment.
A cost is what you get for putting something into an investment. A cost is what you get back, a payment for what you put into an investment. A cost-benefit analysis works only if you can assign costs to benefits and benefits to costs. You can’t do that in the case of pollution. You can’t put a price on the dead child, you can’t put a price on the sick building, you can’t put a price on the lost years, you can’t put a price on life itself. You can’t put a price on the value of someone’s life. You can’t put a price on the fact that people can’t breathe. Ways of reducing air pollution.
Recycle and Reuse
Recycling is a great way to reduce air pollution. But recycling has limits. For instance, recycling paper requires large amounts of clean water. If you recycle paper from a common source, like an office, you reduce air pollution, but you raise water pollution. Recycling also involves energy. If you recycle paper, you burn coal or oil. But burning coal or oil also causes air pollution.
Recycling is better than nothing, but even better is reusing things. One way to increase reuse is to build things out of recycled materials. The buildings at Burning Man, for example, are made of things found in the desert. Another way is to buy used things. If you buy a car, for example, you reduce the pollution caused by making a brand-new car.
Reusing and not buying new things also has other benefits. It’s better for the environment, and it’s better for the workers who make the things you buy. However, recycling and reusing only go so far. If we stopped recycling, all paper, all glass, all metal, all plastics, would pollute the air. And if we stopped reusing things, all we would need to do is make all new things from scratch. There are limits. Recycling and reusing seem easy. But actually, they are hard to implement. It’s not easy getting people to recycle or reuse. And it’s hard to make reusing and buying used things easy.
Avoid usage of crackers
As we learn more about air pollution, we are all learning to think about pollution in a slightly different way. In the past, our thinking about air pollution was almost entirely negative. We worried about getting cancer, or asthma, or heart disease, or lung infections. We worried about smog, acid rain, smokestacks, and tailpipes.
But pollution is more than just negative side effects. Pollution can, on its own, be good.
For example, if you burn charcoal in a stove, the charcoal will emit a considerable amount of carbon monoxide. Too bad, you might say, that that’s a bad thing. But in fact it is a good thing: carbon monoxide kills germs and bacteria. If you put a carbon monoxide detector in your house, you will have learned that a good thing can sometimes be a bad thing.
And air pollution itself can be good. The particles of soot and acid that come out of a burn stove contain large amounts of something called iron. The iron, in turn, is converted into other forms of iron, including the kind that is absorbed by plants. So air pollution can itself be a source of food.
And air pollution can be good for our health. Carbon monoxide is good for lungs. At high enough levels, smokestacks purify the air. And air pollution has other, more subtle, benefits. It confuses people, for example, and makes them less aggressive. It makes us less dependent on fossil fuels.
Smokestacks, purifying air, and confusing people: air pollution seems to have a lot of upside. And as we now know, air pollution is not just one thing, but a whole range of things.
Pollution comes in three forms: particles, gases, and noise. Pollution in
Use filters for chimneys
A chimney without a filter is like a car without a muffler. It will smoke, and it won’t be pleasant.
Today’s chimneys are made of clay, an extremely porous material. They trap smoke and soot and carry it up the flue, where it can burn in the firebox. But the soot remains, and smoke still accumulates. Unless you have a chimney sweep or a chimney cap, your chimney will smoke.
If you happened to live in medieval Europe, you might have had a steel chimney. The steel and masonry made it much cleaner. But the steel wasn’t much good as a filter, and as masonry it was extremely expensive.
The modern chimney is made of clay or cement and steel. The steel is cheap, and the chimney still traps most of the smoke. The soot does go down the flue, but it can’t all burn in the firebox. So it builds up on the ceiling. A thin coating of soot on the ceiling is harmless, but a thick layer can make it hard to breathe. It also looks pretty ugly. Today’s chimneys can catch more soot than medieval ones, but they can’t trap all of it. That means the ceiling has to get cleaned. Modern chimneys have smokecaps. They sit on top of the chimney above the flue. They collect the soot and filter it. But smoke still gets through.
A smokecap can be made of copper, galvanized metal, or glass. They used to be made of wood; today they’re made of cement or plastic. The smokecap floats on a perforated metal grid that rests on the brick or block chimney. The grid is perforated so the smoke