Every state has an air monitoring network. The data is publicly available. Gollie.
But there are those who were raised in the be cool don't pollute era and have been brainwashed to think the earth is in constant degeneration. Even though cars are a gazillion times cleaner. Even though homes a gazillion times more energy efficient. Even though we don't heat homes with wood and coal anymore. Even though we closed the giant hole in the ozone caused by halocarbons. Don't burn coal in power plants in problematic areas. Don't use leaded gasoline. Have added all sorts of control equipment to the dirty plants of the 1950's and 1960's, control equipment that keeps getting better and better. Ship by highly efficient locomotives. All this stuff and there are still those who blindly believe air is getting worse, water dirtier, more deforestation, brownfield sites weren't cleaned up by EPA's Superfund and private businesses making deals with municipalities...
To even suggest our environment hasn't been getting cleaner is insanity.
This, to me, is much like the notion that our society is getting more violent and dangerous all the time. People will boldly state such as plain fact when in reality the opposite is true.
b_line
Well-Known Member
lets see your data. You can not find 50 years of air quality data, because the earliest data collected on this kind of stuff was 1977. You are just throwing numbers out of nowhere.
https://www.airmonitoring.utah.gov/trendGraph/historicaltrend.htm this website has a lot of the data monitored, and, yes there are things that are improving, but there are trends that are staying the same. That is good, because there are more people in utah now, but the fact remains that the air quality is not vastly better than it was fifty years ago, when there was a fraction of the people.
Cars may be cleaner, houses may use less energy. The fact still remains that there are more people, and more cars, so even though efficiency is improving, the result is still air pollution, just due to the sheer number of polluters.
Pretty much. When I want or need to learn something I pick a fight on the Internet with someone who refuses to believe otherwise. Makes the learning more entertaining.
All those graphs point downward. Between that and the fact that we use less gasoline in more efficient autos and equal power from way more efficient sources.... Yeah, let's blame population growth. We can never build a sustainable society and the EPA has not done a single thing. Its useless let us give up.
That one too. I like how immoral we all are even though we don't have brothels on every street corner, don't wed our 13 year old daughters off to grown men, etc.
I've found that the more culturally embedded ideas are the further from the truth they tend to be. "We don't manufacture anything anymore" followed with "China's going to dump our debt" is not only self contradicting in goal but is also total b.s. Yet everyone believes its fact.
b_line
Well-Known Member
Seriously though where are you getting your numbers from that say it is significantly better? The only significant stuff I have seen is the sulfur and nox. Co2 is basically the same( other than a couple of outlier years in the 80s) yeah they are going down, but more change is needed as we get more and more people. The air quality in salt lake has been consistently top five worst in the country for decades. To me, improvement would be something like not on the top ten list for bad towns for your lungs.
b_line
Well-Known Member
I have noticed this one as well. It's odd that they focus on how "good it was I the 50's" when overall, the world is a better, more tolerant safer place now than it was then.
When you say "consistently top five worst in the country for decades" are you talking about the list EPA puts out on a daily basis? I'm unaware of an annual list or anything. The reason for getting stuck on the daily list is because of inversions. Utah's air is pretty good outside these events.
As far as doing more goes, we are doing a lot more. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to revisit the regs something like every 7 years and tighten them up. EPA has also lowered the standard several times (Utah wouldn't have any violations based on the old standard). The new regs on business are far and away stricter than the old regs, and we have several state specific regs dealing with our unique geographic areas. We're talking 300-400 page regs replacing the 2-3 page ones put in in the 1970's. The new control technology is also far and away better than the old.
One thing that'll help see the improvements is learning a bit about combustion. High temp = high NOx, low temp/inefficient combustion = high CO and particulates. Presence of sulfur = SOx. As a general rule, engine manufacturers usually give up a little CO for a gain in NOx efficiency, and vice versa. Back in the old days, they shoveled coal in boilers and cranked up the heat as high as possible in effort to increase combustion efficiency. The result was high NOx, and pretty high CO as well as combustion wasn't the greatest. Same thing with cars. Dump fuel through carburetors and watch the tailpipe. Black smoke and you were too rich. No smoke and the spark might be too hot, risking per-detonation (pinging). So we set them somewhere on the spectrum in between the two pollutant inefficiencies.
Since those old days, we've added combustion technology that gets the fuel to the spark more efficiently, so we can burn at lower temps while getting an improved burn. This means lower NOx and lower CO. We've also added vacuum bags, scrubbers, and catalysts to clean stuff from the exhaust streams. We also started capturing waste heat and converting it into energy. This has been a great source of "pollution free" new energy as the heat that was being wasted is now producing energy without any additional fuel consumption.
The next stage was using a better fuel. Natural gas is 10x less polluting in NOx and CO than the old coal, which is probably better than 100x less polluting than the old plants. Burning nat gas also doesn't release particulates (think diesel fuel vs. gasoline engines as a dumbed down equivalent). It's also pre-scrubbed for SO2 so we don't have the SOx problem. The same goes for diesel fuel. The old stuff just a few years back was up to 500ppm sulfur. Then we went to 50. The new rules require 15ppm, and most places can't get anything higher than that in Utah anyway. We've done similar with coal and outlaw burning the high sulfur stuff which caused the Eastern acid rain problems. So we're talking possibly a 1000x+ improvement in efficiency while population has doubled or quadrupled.