Yet another evening of bad Los Angeles air quality
We won’t bore our readers by pointing out that last night [January 29, 2014] was yet another “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” bad air quality day in Los Angeles. (Sensitive Groups includes those athletically inclined.) You can read about the trials and tribulations of our air purifiers from previous days this week and this month.
“Lower your standards!”
We had a comment exchange on a social media site with someone in Shanghai regarding China’s consideration of spraying water from skyscrapers. China hopes this can bring PM2.5 down to 35 micrograms per cubic meter. We point out this is at the US 24-hour average but still way above the US annual average exposure limit (but below where it has sometimes been in Los Angeles recently). We previously discussed this new technology, and whether it should be applied in the U.S.
“Lower (weaken) your standards!” was the response from a commentor in Shanghai. Shanghais air pollution apparently hasn’t touched 50 in weeks, and topped out around 115 micrograms per cubic meter recently. (Today was an EPA action day in Los Angeles, and we have been approach 50 micrograms several times in the last week. The screenshot of our app showing “Unhealthy” conditions was taken back in October 2013, when outdoor PM 2.5 air quality as determined by our free app hovered around 115 micrograms in our location for a few hours. While those disconcerting conditions aren’t as everyday or prolonged as in Shanghai, we still say Los Angelinos can look the people of Shanghai in the eye when it comes to air pollution. Although the debate sort of reminds us of someone from Moscow bragging their weather is more extreme than that of Chicago; it’s not clear if that’s something worth bragging about. It’s import to remember that good, clean air which you can achieve your home through simple steps like air purifiers, properly managed through monitoring devices such as those supported by our app, has anywhere from a 1/10 to 1/100 these outdoor levels of dust and allergans.
Americans as terrible people?
Now I know we Californians and Americans in general are terrible people. In California we have these labeling laws that are forcing big corporations like some cola manufacturers to warn their products contain known carcinogens. (According to Consumer Reports, the cola product in question actually reduced its levels of that particular coloring cancer-causing chemical to one quarter of the New York level for the California market. But still not enough to get our labeling laws. I have no idea what elevated levels of known cancer causing chemicals are doing coloring colas; the diabetes factor is bad enough.) We Americans watch the grammies while bombing people in Somalia.
And now we Left Coast hippies are imposing our burdensome health standards on places like Shanghai. Wait a moment. Isn’t the other way around? Our U.S. EPA health standards (and the World Health Organization’s standards, which are much stricter than the EPA’s standards) are driven by scientific studies as to what levels of dust pollution are unhealthy. And, anyway, our blog in particular is not telling Shanghai what to do (or even Los Angeles what to do) — pollution controls can be expensive and are legitimate matters for public debate. We’re simply stating facts — a Chinese target of 35 micrograms per cubic meter would still be at or above the US 24-hour average exposure limit, better than 115 micrograms but still not super clean air.
What we do try to do is empower individual consumers to take control of their air quality, especially their indoor air quality, through new inexpensive home monitoring technologies, the internet of things, air purifiers, respirator masks, bird masks, Angry Bird masks, and, heck, maybe even promote vacations to a clean air parts of the world (a major reason people used to take vacations, before work became so deadly stressful).
With “lower your standards” isn’t Shanghai trying to impose their standards on us? Aren’t they telling us we should ignore science and adopt less vigorous standards so their air quality looks better? (And yes, the official standards are much less strict than in the U.S., although the government there has recently decided to consider handing out respirator masks to the general populace.) Lowering your standards and applying social pressure to get people to “move along” in the interests of creating an industrial empire is how one ends up with PM2.5 dust pollution levels so bad they compare with blizzard white conditions. Traffic accidents do negatively impact industrial growth.
But hey, it’s not as we didn’t have a warning that some societies might look askew at citizens monitoring their own air quality levels. One of the reviewers of our iOS app pointed out some governments would not willingly encourage independent monitoring.
But then we realized … governments are actually our real customer.
Announcing Government Backdoor Mode for AQcalc
We’re planning to add a new feature to future versions of AQcalc that will allow authorized, legitimate government users to modify the AQcalc readings to make them less strict.
Authorized governmental entities (after a thorough approval process by their internal ethics boards and our corporate lawyers) will be able to modify the standards messages in AQcalc. For a small fee, they will be able to change “Hazardous” to something more informative such as “Señor, air clean now. No pollution. Please stay in our hotel.” Higher fees will apply for shorter modified messages in more convincing, better English that actually fit in the GUI text area. Higher fees may also apply to greater levels of modification (changing “Hazardous” to “Good” or “Excellent” instead of the still alarming “Very Unhealthy”).
A version still being tested will also estimate the socioeconomic status of the user for additional message payload “targeting” options. For an additional fee, authorized, ethical government entities will be able to “target” the degree of message modification based on selected user criteria. (The exact use case for this “Fat Cat messaging mode” is not clear. Loaded vacationers might be targeted to receive greater message modification, since they would presumably have more dough to spend in hotels, and thus convincing them the air was clean would be more profitable. Alternatively, members of the 1% might be more politically influential and less gullible, so they might receive less message modification to avoid scandal. We’ll leave this to our prospective “customer entities” to figure out.)
Assuming successful approval by both their internal ethics boards and our corporate lawyers, interested governments should inform us which dark alley they will be dropping off their suitcases full of cash. (Or better yet, suitcases full of Bitcoin. We understand that Bitcoin cannot be traced and leaves no permanent records, so sounds perfect for this. Also, it has risen seven orders of magnitude, and apparently what goes up just keeps going on up forever. Moreover, there is apparently a limited supply of Bitcoin. California real estate agents were also telling us similar things about real estate a decade ago, and unfortunately we did not invest then.)
Towards International Standards
Obviously, we are not being serious above about government backdoor mode. We take the accurate information provided by our products very seriously.
We think air quality standards should be international, based on the very best science. At present, their are licensing restrictions on the use of some government’s data that requires their standards to be applied. We think the combination of individual sensors and the internet of things, that will go away. You’ll be able to decide which air quality standard you want to apply to your own data, which scientific studies to believe, and what you personal air quality target should be.