Despite being banned by the supreme court, farmers are still burning the crop stubbles. And nobody wants to enforce the rule because it’s a political suicide. Another instance of failed democracy where you need to appease to a vocal minority even if it means smog and deaths for the rest.
1. Lack of political willpower. It is still not considered to be a very high priority thing by those in power, and even the people who live in the region.
2. Again, due to politicians, bureaucracy, and their corruption. Example -
> In two years, Delhi (state govt^) spent Rs 68 lakh on stubble decomposer, Rs 23 crore to advertise it [0]
> ‘No other option’ — as its fields turn black & skies smoky, why Punjab won’t stop burning stubble [1]
This is a weird situation where the interference of the Supreme court feels inappropriate.
For one, the Supreme court has no job interfering in what should be bills and governance related problems. With the Supreme court making it their job, the govts get to raise their hands and shirk responsibility.
Stubble burning sounds like one of the dumbest ideas ever. Just leave it there and plant through it with your no till drill.
Leaving the residue on the field means your soil is protected against erosion and from exposure to the sun. The carbon in the residue isn't relevant but after three years the residue has decayed enough for the trapped nitrogen and phosphorus in the plant to become available to the soil.
Farm fires are partially a result of legislation to prevent ground water levels from going too low [1]. Fairly multifaceted issue, not just electoral appeasement
I’ve had to stop visiting Delhi in the winter for my health. I left India over a decade ago and used to visit every winter for Christmas.
At some point I stopped being able to function properly there. I’d have constant migraines, nose bleeds and the last time I went I was passing out regularly.
The pressure inversions causing the higher smog density in winter is just horrific. Coupled with these farmers burning crops, it’s a nightmare.
There are days when you’re driving and you can’t see the vehicle in front of you.
I miss home, but I’ll really only now go back in the fall or spring. Summer is too hot to enjoy a visit.
Fall has the advantage of being after the monsoon so it has cleared a lot of the air and the temperatures are much cooler.
I have been to Delhi many times in my previous jobs. On one occasion one of my colleagues got massive breathing problems and needed hospitalization and oxygen. On really bad days cleaning your nose turned the tissue black.
Air purifiers are not able to keep up with the pollution especially if your house is not air tight. What works well is to make use of positive pressure systems with high performance filters [1].
The first time a coworker in Mumbai shared their screen for something I was shocked to see that the Windows weather widget in the taskbar had "Smoke" as an option for the current type of weather.
The combination of Google Scholar and sci-hub.se is pretty great:
(2021) Sources and dynamics of submicron aerosol during the autumn onset of the air pollution season in Delhi, India
> "Local sources of primary PM in Delhi include transportation, domestic biomass and trash burning, cooking, and industrial and construction activities. Delhi is also downwind of many agricultural states such as Punjab and Haryana, which can be a source of PM from agricultural burning. Delhi experiences cool winters with shallow boundary layer heights and frequent temperature inversions, which trap
pollutants within the boundary layer causing especially polluted conditions."
It's pretty seasonal, with the end-of-harvest agricultural burning seeming to be the biggest culprit.
Interestingly, California passed a law 20 years ago banning agricultural burning in the Central Valley (one of the worst air quality regions in the USA), but only started to enforce it last year. As ever, it's about cost: chipping up ag waste and composting it back into soil costs more than just burning it, cutting into profit margins for Big Ag.
I lived near Salt Lake City for a few years, and occasionally (being a city built in what is effectively a giant bowl) you'd see inversions there. It was insane. Warnings not to go outside if you don't have to, visibility absolutely enters the gutter, and it can last days or weeks.
Utah has pretty damn clean air normally as far as I can tell. I couldn't imagine how much worse it would be in Delhi. I really hope they can get their air cleaned up, but it's hard to get people to give a shit about something like that when they don't earn enough to even know if they'll eat every day.
And it's like that for large parts of the winter every year in Delhi. When I was there in Jan/Feb 2019 I remember checking the AQI at night and it was always 450-600. When I got back and all my friends/co-workers in the bay were freaking out that year about wildfires and AQIs of 160 you realize you get desensitized to it. I just kept thinking back to Delhi and how 160 would have been a relief after sleeping in an old house in Hauz Khas with no air filtration.
Also, it's wild to take off from Delhi in an airplane with smoke that thick -- you go from grey, smokey, low visibility to a bright blue sun shining sky. You just look down and see an orb of smoke engulfing the city.
On multiple occasions Delhi has exceeded 999, which is the maximum reading on the government monitors. I recall being there with 1000+ AQI levels. It's extremely saddening as most have no choice but to endure the toxic air.
> Concentrations over 300 AQI are deemed hazardous by the international AQI rating system, which warns of serious health effects at this level of pollution. On Friday, some parts of New Delhi were even recording more than 600 AQI
Whole generation of kids going to have shortened lives and quality of life.
BTW this exists also in the USA, legally allowed toxic zones in populated areas
Not just toxic sites. Wildfires can really do a number on your lungs. As bad as Delhi's air pollution is, for a brief moment the air quality was worse in Portland Oregon due to a nearby wildfire.
Much as I love living out West, this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
This is a dumb take. NYC for example is 68th on the list. Mecxico City is in a depression in a mountain plateau, and car exhaust and other stuff gets trapped there. Dehli has the problem of agricultural burning in a neighboring state. Bejing among other things is still surrounded by industry and gets a lot of its power from coal, both of which are resolvable issues and they've made progress.
Everything in the top 25 of the list but Seoul is in a developing country and most of them use coal power or are in unfavorable geographies for clearing smog/air pollution.
What does this have to do with COP and climate change?
Whilst this is of course an environmental issue, its a local, seasonal problem that is due to the geographic location of Delhi and farmers burning their fields among other factors.
it's not an unsolvable problem but more like a political issue. year after year it's the same and yet no one does anything. from what i recall it's the farmers from one state burning crop stubble and the resulting smoke gets carried into the other state (in this case Delhi - which is technically not a state). central government has beef with the Delhi government so they won't intervene.
My understanding is that the same party is in Delhi and said other state (Punjab) so I think it's a bit more than just the central government not stepping in (not to say that isn't also a part of it).
Finally an article on one of these crappy news site CMS where the non-JS pseudo-placeholder blurred out photos are only a tiny bit blurrier than the actual photos that you get shown when you execute their code.
I was in Delhi in June for the first time. The air was initially ok as it had rained the days before, but by day 3 our throats burned and we felt exhausted after a few hours outside. At that time, it was 110+F and the AQI was 300+.
The impact of that hit me when I was sitting in a taxi at a stop light and watching brick layers work. No mask, no sun protection, and in the middle of rush hour traffic.
Oct 2019 I flew to Mumbai and was a bit scared because of smog, only to find a huge and vivid city where everything ran on gas, as it seemed. No smog! How great. 2 weeks later my returning flight home was from Delhi and we haven't even landed in Delhi my eyes started to burn... I hope you guys over there will find a solution for this.
This is a unique year, because for the first time Punjab and Delhi are run by the same Govt (Kejriwal). The Delhi Govt. can't start its annual complaint about burning biomass in Punjab, because for once, they have the power to actually curb it.
> Kejriwal called for an end to “blame games and finger-pointing” over the smog and farm fire issue. “Farmers need solutions,” he said. “The day they get a solution, they will stop burning the stubble.”
The hypocrisy of politicians is deafening, all while millions of human-years are lost every year to this primitive practice.
The hypocrisy goes even deeper, as the farm bill would have directly addressed this problem. One of the 3 main demands of the mostly Punjab driven protests to the farm bill were to decriminalize crop burning. Additionally privatizing farm trade was expected to lead to more lucrative non-rice crops, but that too was revoked after the protests. The farm bill was arguably the most progressive and well-thought out bills proposed by the Indian Govt., and the reaction by the English speaking commentariat can only be described as deliberate sabotage. This is partly their burden to bear.
I might seem partisan in my comment, but after a year of being talked down to and called names by every respected western outlet, twitter and India's trigger happy-to-please-the-west commentariat, I do feel a degree of schadenfreude. I just wish them 'getting a taste of their own medicine' was purely metaphorical and not this literal.
> The air quality could further dip in the coming days as a large section of sown area in Punjab will be harvested this week, as only 45-50% area has been harvested till October 24. There is a 34% rise in farm fires in Punjab this year compared to last year. Haryana, however, has been able to bring down the farm fire events this year with 1,701 such incidents reported from the state between September 15 and October 28 compared to 2,252 incidences for the same period last year, which translated to a reduction of about 25%.
I was going to call out the BJP (which runs Haryana in a coalition) for being just as useless, but they have been the lesser of 2 evils, as Haryana contributes a small and ever decreasing percentage of crop burning instances in the region. Still think they were spineless in revoking the Farm Bill, despite having an overwhelming majority mandate and many years before the national elections.
__________
I'm glad neither me nor any of my loved ones live in Delhi anymore. I spent a winter there, and the smog would make me break out int spontaneous hives across my entire body. It is not fit for human habitation.
You know what always interests me about this is that life expectancy at birth is 74 in Delhi (3 years more than Mississippi). I wonder what a DALY-adjusted life expectancy looks like. Surely they must be all suffering from emphysema near the end.
Motorbikes in general, especially the cheap 125 cm^3 that are ubiquitous in the developing world, pollute horribly - especially relative to the power they generate.
I wonder when electric power trains will get cheap enough to replace them. Today, a rather bad electric-assisted bicycle is about the same price - so no one will buy one when for the same price they can get the rugged underpowered noisy smog-spewing mule that bears all the light duty transport imaginable and that everyone knows how to maintain.
AFAIK it's not that kerosene per se is such a poor-burning fuel.
Kerosene is heavily subsidized, so that poor people can afford to cook. So gas stations blend in the cheap kerosene into the gasoline. The effect is that it lowers the octane, so the engines need to be detuned compared to what we might be used to in the West. And since modern engines are pretty finely tuned and finicky, might well be that detuning them causes an increase in emissions.
Also, I think the pollution comes more from lots of old and poorly maintained vehicles with little or no pollution abatement equipment like catalytic converters.
The auto rickshaws and two-wheelers are polluting, but I don’t think they’re a primary cause of Delhi’s smog. That’s probably industry and agriculture. The buses were heavily polluting as well. I know there was a major push to get cabs, auto rickshaws and buses onto LNG. I haven’t kept track of how much that has happened.
"Too Many People" is actually an idea with roots in fascist ideology, did you know that?
If you think about it, you can come to that conclusion yourself - just ask yourself, what is the ultimate ratio of this way of thinking? And who can decide between who belongs to the "too many" group and who not?
Also it is not a very analytical approach to solve problems. The problem is usually not "too many people", but people doing things in a wrong way, using old technology or doing things that should not be done at all.
[+] [-] whywhywhydude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prashantsengar|3 years ago|reply
1. Lack of political willpower. It is still not considered to be a very high priority thing by those in power, and even the people who live in the region.
2. Again, due to politicians, bureaucracy, and their corruption. Example -
> In two years, Delhi (state govt^) spent Rs 68 lakh on stubble decomposer, Rs 23 crore to advertise it [0]
> ‘No other option’ — as its fields turn black & skies smoky, why Punjab won’t stop burning stubble [1]
[0]: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/05/11/in-two-years-delhi-go...
[2]: https://theprint.in/agriculture/no-other-option-as-its-field...
^: Not in the original article headline
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
Also, what are the downsides to just leaving the stubble on the land?
[+] [-] screye|3 years ago|reply
This is a weird situation where the interference of the Supreme court feels inappropriate.
For one, the Supreme court has no job interfering in what should be bills and governance related problems. With the Supreme court making it their job, the govts get to raise their hands and shirk responsibility.
[+] [-] imtringued|3 years ago|reply
Leaving the residue on the field means your soil is protected against erosion and from exposure to the sun. The carbon in the residue isn't relevant but after three years the residue has decayed enough for the trapped nitrogen and phosphorus in the plant to become available to the soil.
[+] [-] rishsriv|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588016682060378112.html
[+] [-] morbidious|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dagmx|3 years ago|reply
At some point I stopped being able to function properly there. I’d have constant migraines, nose bleeds and the last time I went I was passing out regularly.
The pressure inversions causing the higher smog density in winter is just horrific. Coupled with these farmers burning crops, it’s a nightmare.
There are days when you’re driving and you can’t see the vehicle in front of you.
I miss home, but I’ll really only now go back in the fall or spring. Summer is too hot to enjoy a visit.
Fall has the advantage of being after the monsoon so it has cleared a lot of the air and the temperatures are much cooler.
[+] [-] ahaucnx|3 years ago|reply
Air purifiers are not able to keep up with the pollution especially if your house is not air tight. What works well is to make use of positive pressure systems with high performance filters [1].
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/blog/positive-p...
[+] [-] HideousKojima|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netsharc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
(2021) Sources and dynamics of submicron aerosol during the autumn onset of the air pollution season in Delhi, India
> "Local sources of primary PM in Delhi include transportation, domestic biomass and trash burning, cooking, and industrial and construction activities. Delhi is also downwind of many agricultural states such as Punjab and Haryana, which can be a source of PM from agricultural burning. Delhi experiences cool winters with shallow boundary layer heights and frequent temperature inversions, which trap pollutants within the boundary layer causing especially polluted conditions."
It's pretty seasonal, with the end-of-harvest agricultural burning seeming to be the biggest culprit.
Interestingly, California passed a law 20 years ago banning agricultural burning in the Central Valley (one of the worst air quality regions in the USA), but only started to enforce it last year. As ever, it's about cost: chipping up ag waste and composting it back into soil costs more than just burning it, cutting into profit margins for Big Ag.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/business/agriculture/article2...
[+] [-] kulahan|3 years ago|reply
Utah has pretty damn clean air normally as far as I can tell. I couldn't imagine how much worse it would be in Delhi. I really hope they can get their air cleaned up, but it's hard to get people to give a shit about something like that when they don't earn enough to even know if they'll eat every day.
[+] [-] epgui|3 years ago|reply
India is a wonderful country, but the pollution really ruins it.
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdelpret|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtalantikite|3 years ago|reply
Also, it's wild to take off from Delhi in an airplane with smoke that thick -- you go from grey, smokey, low visibility to a bright blue sun shining sky. You just look down and see an orb of smoke engulfing the city.
[+] [-] imsd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ch4s3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nells|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|3 years ago|reply
Whole generation of kids going to have shortened lives and quality of life.
BTW this exists also in the USA, legally allowed toxic zones in populated areas
https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
[+] [-] Bjorkbat|3 years ago|reply
Much as I love living out West, this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
[+] [-] myth_drannon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lob_it|3 years ago|reply
Mexico City... Bejing.... Trends are something :)
https://www.iqair.com/world-air-quality-ranking
COP27 makes no mention of this. Climate change in india seems like 18th century standards
[+] [-] ch4s3|3 years ago|reply
Everything in the top 25 of the list but Seoul is in a developing country and most of them use coal power or are in unfavorable geographies for clearing smog/air pollution.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tacker2000|3 years ago|reply
Whilst this is of course an environmental issue, its a local, seasonal problem that is due to the geographic location of Delhi and farmers burning their fields among other factors.
[+] [-] perfectstorm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotnet00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfrye0|3 years ago|reply
The impact of that hit me when I was sitting in a taxi at a stop light and watching brick layers work. No mask, no sun protection, and in the middle of rush hour traffic.
[+] [-] paines|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] screye|3 years ago|reply
This is a unique year, because for the first time Punjab and Delhi are run by the same Govt (Kejriwal). The Delhi Govt. can't start its annual complaint about burning biomass in Punjab, because for once, they have the power to actually curb it.
> Kejriwal called for an end to “blame games and finger-pointing” over the smog and farm fire issue. “Farmers need solutions,” he said. “The day they get a solution, they will stop burning the stubble.”
The hypocrisy of politicians is deafening, all while millions of human-years are lost every year to this primitive practice.
The hypocrisy goes even deeper, as the farm bill would have directly addressed this problem. One of the 3 main demands of the mostly Punjab driven protests to the farm bill were to decriminalize crop burning. Additionally privatizing farm trade was expected to lead to more lucrative non-rice crops, but that too was revoked after the protests. The farm bill was arguably the most progressive and well-thought out bills proposed by the Indian Govt., and the reaction by the English speaking commentariat can only be described as deliberate sabotage. This is partly their burden to bear.
I might seem partisan in my comment, but after a year of being talked down to and called names by every respected western outlet, twitter and India's trigger happy-to-please-the-west commentariat, I do feel a degree of schadenfreude. I just wish them 'getting a taste of their own medicine' was purely metaphorical and not this literal.
> The air quality could further dip in the coming days as a large section of sown area in Punjab will be harvested this week, as only 45-50% area has been harvested till October 24. There is a 34% rise in farm fires in Punjab this year compared to last year. Haryana, however, has been able to bring down the farm fire events this year with 1,701 such incidents reported from the state between September 15 and October 28 compared to 2,252 incidences for the same period last year, which translated to a reduction of about 25%.
I was going to call out the BJP (which runs Haryana in a coalition) for being just as useless, but they have been the lesser of 2 evils, as Haryana contributes a small and ever decreasing percentage of crop burning instances in the region. Still think they were spineless in revoking the Farm Bill, despite having an overwhelming majority mandate and many years before the national elections.
__________
I'm glad neither me nor any of my loved ones live in Delhi anymore. I spent a winter there, and the smog would make me break out int spontaneous hives across my entire body. It is not fit for human habitation.
[+] [-] renewiltord|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moritzwarhier|3 years ago|reply
It's impossible to reliably conduct long-term analysis for a lot of environmental problems.
The problem at the center is not technological innovation, to the contrary.
The problem is scale.
Exponentially scaling the destruction of the environment, is kind of what we do as a species.
[+] [-] unicornporn|3 years ago|reply
> So, we can teach or children to wear masks (and send them too school)
I'm sorry, but those masks won't help at all :'(
[+] [-] prirun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liotier|3 years ago|reply
I wonder when electric power trains will get cheap enough to replace them. Today, a rather bad electric-assisted bicycle is about the same price - so no one will buy one when for the same price they can get the rugged underpowered noisy smog-spewing mule that bears all the light duty transport imaginable and that everyone knows how to maintain.
[+] [-] jabl|3 years ago|reply
Kerosene is heavily subsidized, so that poor people can afford to cook. So gas stations blend in the cheap kerosene into the gasoline. The effect is that it lowers the octane, so the engines need to be detuned compared to what we might be used to in the West. And since modern engines are pretty finely tuned and finicky, might well be that detuning them causes an increase in emissions.
Also, I think the pollution comes more from lots of old and poorly maintained vehicles with little or no pollution abatement equipment like catalytic converters.
[+] [-] gautamdivgi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zelienople|3 years ago|reply
True for the entire planet; the effects are not evenly distributed.
[+] [-] POPOSYS|3 years ago|reply
If you think about it, you can come to that conclusion yourself - just ask yourself, what is the ultimate ratio of this way of thinking? And who can decide between who belongs to the "too many" group and who not?
Also it is not a very analytical approach to solve problems. The problem is usually not "too many people", but people doing things in a wrong way, using old technology or doing things that should not be done at all.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] moritzwarhier|3 years ago|reply