When I was very young, where I lived, a city of 100000, I would say less than 50% of the people there drove plus most worked in the city they lived in. Now, almost every household has at least 2 autos and most drive at least 10+ (16km) miles to work.
But, I also wonder if this is tied to the general increase in cancers for people under 50.
To some extent heavy metals are being distributed in the air by the wheels in heavily populated areas.
This can be greatly improved by limiting traffic in heavily populated areas. Trump removed such a rule from New York City recently for reasons I can not comprehend.
Many european cities have improved air quality successfully and hence increased life expectancy by limiting car traffic.
The majority of air pollution of particles however, is caused by the industry (the companies making those cars, among others).
In fact, you are a worse polluter of the earth today if you buy a new Tesla than if you kept driving your 1980s gasoline car due to the amount of pollution created by producing a single vehicle.
Just, so, gross.
And it truly is the _vast majority_ of cars going by with exactly one person in them. So wasteful, so much pollution, so hot... frustrating.
Back when SUV's started to get popular, this was a trend they noticed as well. Back then, it was met with a lot of guffaws about yuppie housewives and all that. (This was before the term Karen had been coined)
There are several ways to view the story.
Another commenter mentioned failing to design cars for women (totally fair! Volvo famously had a botched attempt at this)
What I have come to appreciate is how vulnerable women feel in the world. It is hard to appreciate how that plays into car choice if you are a man. Most men will never be able to understand, imo.
It may be small in the grand scheme of things but it is wrong to do this, in exactly the same way, but a much smaller degree, it is wrong to shove a child out of your way to escape a burning building.
So, yet another case of cars not being designed for women (for those that don't get what I'm going on about - crash test dummies are modeled after men, leading to significantly worse crash outcomes for women [1])... it's infuriating.
Even a "small" BMW i3, a car one might think to be suitable for people of lower height - my wife tried out one at carsharing, and even despite the seat being all up front, she was barely able to drive the thing. The Mercedes Sprinter we rented for our last moves? Once she understood how the dimensions of that thing worked, absolutely easy going.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/nhtsa-female-crash-dummies-vehicl...
It's fuel efficient. It's not big. It's a decent people mover. It has more cargo space than many SUVs that are larger. Is low enough the roof racks are easily accessible. Added a hitch, mostly for more cargo space.
I'm starting to wonder if I've done more "truck things" than many of the people with trucks in the neighbourhood at this point. If I ever need to haul more, I'll just rent a truck/van for that moment in time. I'm not going to buy one to drive to the office.
You don't need a gigantic beast. A kei truck is more than adequate for the vast majority of what people use pickup trucks for.
My mini-suv seems to be getting about double the gas milage my old normal car did.
In more ways than one. A lot of "poor" countries have life expectancies comparable to the US. The big difference is they don't have a culture of every single person needing to own a car that spray carcinogens all over the place.
Obesity, which is its own massive wrecking ball, is also significantly lower in these "poor" countries.
The arrogance of laughing at poor people riding bikes to work when that would create a drastically healthier society.
Imagine if you had a 4km x 4km city with no consumer vehicles ( emergency and delivery exempt). Just walking paths and bike lanes. The people living there would be drastically healthier.
Or hell, it might just be luck. A lot of smokers live until there 80s enjoying a fat cigar once a day
We're talking like literal orders, plural, of magnitude when comparing between the generally no cats automotive fleet of the 70s with anything since the advent of both cats and computerized fuel injection. Any old timer can tell you of the smog that used to be frequent in urban areas. These days it's mostly gone, at least when California or Canada (depending on where you live) isn't on fire.
(INB4 people who are a net negative to public discourse construe this comment as some sort of endorsement for everyone driving everywhere all the time)
This was the air you were breathing back then (1, 2, 3).
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/SKYSCRAP...
3. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satev...
Well, that tells a lot: overfocusing on a single cause because it is obvious and major. Well, let us hope the medical science learns this lesson.
ETA: not that I blame them, it is a reasonable attitude but not so good in science.
(One of many cases mentioned in the article.)
Before you head for the lab, to start researching "why" - maybe you should tighten up the standards for diagnosis and testing? That could enormously improve the qualities & quantities of life for a huge number of patients.
In the countries the OP is talking about, people cook over literal fires and fire pits (sometimes enclosed). Even when that happens in the US, unless you are talking about camping, you are likely talking about something like a well vented wood stove or wood stove oven like my grandma had.
An example of what I'm talking about: https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financ...
And here's what wood fired stoves look like in the US even 100 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XcuznPQjLs
I wonder if that's really true.
Radon is a big deal where I live. Most homes have a radon mitigation system which is a 20-watt fan that goes over your sump pump hole, and runs continuously to a vent on the roof.
Barometric pressure, temperature, and HVAC all seem to have some bearing - tightening the house for air leaks actually did a lot of good in keeping levels low. Also, sump pump failures or ground water levels can "push" radon into the house. I dug a deeper sump pit and also put a secondary radon fan to pull air out of my sub-foundation drain pipes to ensure the air below the house is cycled.
Still, in Boulder County, my house will fail its radon test after a 2 hour power outage.
I am an evangelist for continuous radon monitoring, alerts and tests.
I've never seen above 0.7pC/L which is pretty good, although I don't know what proportion of the activity that is there is natural, or how much more it would be without the fan. I'm not sure what the natural radon levels even are in my area, I think the radon fan is just part of code here.
Wait, really? Intuitively I would expect the opposite, that a draftier house is better for radon levels indoors
Drafts form either from temperature differential and wind outside pushing in.
Radon coming up from the ground is still heavier than air, so it won't mix in very well if it can't displace anything.
It's not a perfect solution, as air movement from circulation will help it mix in, but a good envelope will help a mitigation system out quite a bit.
What's the process, usually, adding some special ventilation system to the house?
1. The ventilation isn’t really “in the house” - the fan pulls from below the slab (and exhausts outside) to prevent radon seeping through. 2. Based on the best guess about my home age/area and radon patterns in my house, the slab was probably poured around the furnace, so the mitigation will include disassembling/reassembling my furnace to seal underneath.
We tested for radon when we bought our house and found the levels to be very high.
Fortunately the builders had installed a passive mitigation system so all we had to do was install a fan.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408084121
If I recall correctly it can accumulate more readily in basements, so that's another factor. The house I grew up in had an exhaust system installed due to elevated radon levels.
https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-ca...
Very few Chinese American women smoke (~2%), so if smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of getting lung cancer not caused by smoking, then the number of non-smokers with lung cancer will be a larger proportion.
If 100% of some group would be non-smokers, then obviously 100% of lung cancer cases in that group will be in non-smokers.
It's similar to misinterpreting the fact that most people that were hospitalized from Covid-19 were vaccinated.
Of course this is all moot because vaping will be revealed to be the current #1 cause of lung cancer in the coming decades, by a long shot. No citation necessary.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/lung-cancer/risk-factors/index.html
[2] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/lung-cancer/causes/
[3] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
Besides the base rate fallacy there is the fallacy of assuming only the biggest factor is what matters, when other factors are nontrivial weights already. Another fallacy is the fallacy of relativizing a problem framing by insisting on comparison with an obsolete problem --campaigns against smoking have done a lot, so why are we still comparing today's problems against the problems of the 20th century. It smacks of "well, things were even worse back then", which surely the base rate fallacy is not trying to suggest.
When I moved from that apartment after 4 years. I was shocked by the amount of black dust covering everything. from the walls to the shelves and floors. I think it was all tire pollution so switching to 100% electric won't mitigate.
It was pretty shocking and I wondered how much i increased my risk for lung cancer or other cancers.
also, they would periodocially dump "more dirt" onto the field, once every year or so. Not sure if they vacuumed the old stuff up or just dumped more on top, but sometimes you would go out there and there would be a huge pile of rubber in the middle, which I guess got spread out later
A number of schools, and public facilities, near me have switched to plastic pitches for this reason. I'm not advocating for them but there is a rationale.
BTW it's not just that being very muddy makes it difficult to play on but that using the pitch in that state trashes the grass.
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2. Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) •Purpose: Byproducts from extender oils and carbon black. •Danger: Known carcinogens, mutagens, and endocrine disruptors. Persist in the environment and can leach from tire wear particles. •Status: Regulated in the EU; linked to air and soil contamination.
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3. Benzothiazoles (e.g., 2-mercaptobenzothiazole) •Purpose: Vulcanization accelerators. •Danger: Toxic to aquatic organisms, possibly carcinogenic, and bioaccumulative. •Status: Found in tire leachate and considered a contaminant of emerging concern.
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Nothing definitive about harm to human welfare yet, as far as I know.
[1] https://www.hna.de/lokales/kreis-kassel/kreis-kassel-eu-verb...
[2] https://playground-landscape.com/de/article/2033-gesundheits...
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that inhaled microplastics were causing an increase in lung cancers. We know they end up deep in the lungs.
I only realized later that all the black dust everywhere must have been tire particles, when I realized other places DON'T have the black dust. Given the toxicity of tire pollution, it doesn't seem like my reaction was irrational after all. Sucks for all the people that still live there, who may not even realize what's going on.
> Resuspension of dust already on the road’s surface is the most significant contributor to non-exhaust PM by far, however these particles are difficult to characterize and manage because they could come from anywhere before landing on the road. Brakes are the next most significant source, and may also be particularly hazardous because of their small size and high metal content. Tires contribute the least, but they release large amounts of particles which act as microplastics in ecosystems.
The null hypothesis is "it's something in the air", but with the increase in non-lung cancers in young people[1] noted over the past decade, it's entirely possible it's something else, and lung tissue is one of the susceptible ones to whatever it is.
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2025...
Asian American women are getting lung cancer despite never smoking
https://pfasproject.com/2023/08/25/asian-americans-have-much...
Because hypocrisy does not live long. They blamed cigarettes for lung cancer, ignoring all other causes. "Oh, you have cancer but didn't smoke ? You surely were inhaling cigarettes smoke from somebody else.". We can polute further with no repercursions.
But like half of smokers ultimately end up with COPD, which can be like taking years to drown to death.
Site is flagged as it hosts pedop. material.
What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often?
I think action is better than decision paralysis, but I wish I could make much more informed decisions.
Edit: E.g. the numbers from this site suggest, for 15 out of the 16 listed fan models, the lifetime electricity cost is likely to be significantly larger than the install cost unless you are already much older at the time you start using the system or you have extremely cheap electricity (or both) https://www.radonaway.com/radon-fan-operating-cost-calculato...
For the cost, preventing cancer seems like it's a wise investment. I say this as a cancer survivor.
If in 20 years I find out I got ripped off, I won't really be upset about it.
For the other 7% that then need to really do a cost-benefit the data is out there but you do need to go through your specific circumstances to get a meaningful number. The risk levels vary vastly (orders of magnitudes) between both the radon level and your life choices/situation, so it's relatively meaningless to share individual cost-benefit analyses.
Spend $15 or $100 for one or two measurements, *then* worry about cost to mitigate.
You'll never know. The same way people in the exclusion zone will never know if their thyroid cancer was always destined to be or if it really was related to the Chernobyl meltdown.
But spending (closer to $1000) to mitigate some risk from a known threat vector does seem thrifty.
Perhaps. I smoked for 30 years and I lived on and off in Devon for at least 15 years.
There is a bloody great pluton underneath Dartmoor in Devon and Bodmin in Cornwall and so on. Hence lots of lovely granite and radon and stuff.
This is the SW of England (UK). Radon emanates out of the earth and pools in cellars and the like and is a major health hazard. Ideally you know about the hazard and dissipate it. A simple fan will do the job.
I'm not sure it is the second leading cause of lung cancer. There are plenty of other pollutants to worry about.
We can catch things early, it shouldn’t be limited to only for smokers.
I suspect certain perfumes may be causing it.
Another potential explanation is cleaning products.
I think these are both far more likely than perfume, as there is a much stronger link between AQI and lung cancer than perfume and lung cancer (if there is any at all).
alexcos•11h ago