After 9/11 all flights were grounded for 3 days. Because there were no planes flying around over the US constantly for the first time in a long time they were able to observe insane drops in air pollution all across the US.
When the stay at home order kicked in at the start of COVID and practically every car in the US stopped driving around we noticed a similar drop in air particulate buildup in the air all across the nation.
The issue isn’t that the wind doesn’t blow it around and it eventually settles out of the sky into our drinking water or whatever. It’s always doing that. The problem is we are just also continuously producing the pollution.
I don’t think we need to go full dark ages and stop all planes and cars, but I do think it would be nice to work towards less planes and cars or at the very least less pollution producing vehicles. I think short range domestic flights should all be electric planes maybe they can figure out how to get solar panels all over the wings and battery tech will get to the point where one day they can fly across the oceans on battery as well.
Now it’s not all bad news. We have already gotten SO much better about these things in the past ~80 years alone. The smog in major cities back in the 50s was horrible.
“In the 1950s, a toxic shroud of pollution settled over New York City for six days as a shift in the weather trapped emissions from local coal power plants, factories, and cars. Some people called it “smaze,” a portmanteau of smoke and haze; the word smog hadn’t been fully popularized yet. After pollution levels spiked, dozens of people died. The same thing happened in 1963 and 1966.”
After 9/11 all flights were grounded for 3 days. Because there were no planes flying around over the US constantly for the first time in a long time they were able to observe insane drops in air pollution all across the US.
When the stay at home order kicked in at the start of COVID and practically every car in the US stopped driving around we noticed a similar drop in air particulate buildup in the air all across the nation.
The issue isn’t that the wind doesn’t blow it around and it eventually settles out of the sky into our drinking water or whatever. It’s always doing that. The problem is we are just also continuously producing the pollution.
I don’t think we need to go full dark ages and stop all planes and cars, but I do think it would be nice to work towards less planes and cars or at the very least less pollution producing vehicles. I think short range domestic flights should all be electric planes maybe they can figure out how to get solar panels all over the wings and battery tech will get to the point where one day they can fly across the oceans on battery as well.
Now it’s not all bad news. We have already gotten SO much better about these things in the past ~80 years alone. The smog in major cities back in the 50s was horrible.
Heres a snippet of this article: https://aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/news/the-origin-story-of-the-air-quality-index-and-the-toxic-smaze-that-came-before-it/#%3A~%3Atext=In+the+1950s%2C+a+toxic%2CDaily+News+Archive%2FGetty+Images]
“In the 1950s, a toxic shroud of pollution settled over New York City for six days as a shift in the weather trapped emissions from local coal power plants, factories, and cars. Some people called it “smaze,” a portmanteau of smoke and haze; the word smog hadn’t been fully popularized yet. After pollution levels spiked, dozens of people died. The same thing happened in 1963 and 1966.”