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Harmful PM2.5 emissions in Dhaka, Bangledesh prompting researchers to study emissions during winter and monsoon season.

helena.dav
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Assessing the PM2.5 impact of biomass combustion in megacity Dhaka, Bangladesh - PubMed (nih.gov)

This article is about crop burning in Dhaka, Bangladesh and attempts to figure out if there is more or less harmful PM2.5 particulate air pollution caused by either fossil fuels or biomass, and during which season is one or the other higher in the air pollution it produces. During monsoon season, fossil fuels lead in the most PM2.5 releases at 44.3%. When it is not monsoon season and is the winter season, the percentages are way higher for PM2.5 air particulate releases at 41.4% for the remainder of the year. Across the globe, there are now people stepping up to uncover the true and real environmental and health impacts this harmful particulate byproduct causes in different parts of the world and with differring weather conditions than what we see in North Carolina. 

Emissions from Biomass Burning in South/Southeast Asia; correcting the miscalculation about the PM2.5 emissions from burning.

helena.dav
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351209404_PM25_Emissions_from_…;

This study is set in South/Southeast Asia and uncovering that, when trying to count the percentages of PM2.5 put off during biomass, the true amount of emissions were being gravely undercalculated. Specifically rice straw burning becuase the amount burned varied so much because of different harvest and burning practices that it just wasn't taken into consideration. What this study does is go bottom up using these strategies: "subnational spatial database of rice-harvested area, region-specific fuel-loading factors, region, and burning-practice-specific emission and combustion factors, including literature-derived estimates of straw and stubble burned"(Lasko et al. 2021, 1). 

The Clean Air Act and the EPA laws and regulations against harmful PM2.5 air pollutant matter

helena.dav
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The most common air pollutants are called criteria pollutants and are regulated by the Clean Air Act and the EPA. These pollutants are: particles, ozone, nitrogen oxides, sulfer dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead. The EPA have sections under the CAA that help regulate factories and air pollution in the environment. For example section 108 requires the EPA to identify the pollutants that are criteria pollutants, listed above, and determine if where they are coming from and if they "endander public health or welfare". Under section 109 the EPA had to set standards across the board for air pulltion in regard to human health and to the environemtn sperately (Christopher D. Ahlers 2016, 51-52).  There are many more sections that go into detail about what the CAA can do and what the EPA members are required to do as well. 

Ahlers, Christopher D. “Wood Burning, Biomass, Air Pollution, and Climate Change.” Environmental Law 46, no. 1 (2016): 49–104. 

second thoughts on willowick

mikefortun
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Katie Cox Shrader10:44 AM Today@kimfortun@uci.edu I know what you mean about that anxiety. Two thoughts: 

- Re working with urban planners and others on gentrification: Santa Ana has a long, rich history of anti-gentrification organizing, and many of the groups involved in those have worked with UCI including planners. I recall from my time working with Montoya that some of the politics there are sensitive. I think an important next step is to be researching/documenting some of that history and reaching out to groups like el Centro Cultural de México and the Kennedy Commission. Maybe the OC library archive too. It seems really important to include gentrification as a central part of our analysis of EiJ in SA and I think we have a lot to learn from them. Those conversations may give us some insight into how outside planners might help or support, and how they might already be doing so.

- This kind of discursive risk does seem really important to track... AB 617 certainly comes to mind here. I also wonder how we might discern the difference between instances where well-intentioned interventions are captured or coopted in implementation, and those where legislation is compromised from the outset. Not to be cynical, but I am very curious about what developers supported the Surplus Land Act. Is the kind of development that Rise Up Willowick is fighting a "detour from intent" or is it a predictable/anticipated outcome of incentivizing the auction of public land for (private) redevelopment? In other words, is the Surplus Land Act a mechanism for progressive redistribution (golf courses become affordable housing), or neoliberal privatization of public assets (city-owned green space becomes a Jamba Juice)? Such a very California question.Show lessReassigned to kimfortun@uci.eduKatie Cox Shrader10:46 AM Today@mike.fortun@uci.edu  ... Now am thinking we need to have a workflow for moving these side-bar conversations into PECE as analysis of field notes. Maybe we could be in the habit of having these conversations in the text of the document, rather than the comments?

Collaborations

pedlt3
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I would love to have the community that has come together around this project to collaborate on creating some resources that could be interesting to broader academic and non-academic communities. For example, it would be great to work together to create some timelines on the platform around various themes relevant to COVID-19, and to do critical readings toghether of key scientific or official documents using the annotation features.

Beyond creating the "products" themselves, I think we would get a lot out of exercise in terms of thinking together on these kinds of projects.

Fall 2020

pedlt3
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I plan to have my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class do both the fieldnotes and rapid interview project, and use both the fieldnotes and interviews generated by the class to write papers about the pandemic around the themes of belief and uncertainty; resilience and vulnerability; or political imagination and engagement. I may also have my Understanding Technological Society students do the community case studies, perhaps including making a timeline.

kaleidoscopics and/at speed

mikefortun
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First: Another list on another google doc and just looking at it https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1UTQvW_OytC37IatMNR5qJK7qKfSylNpI2fT3pdteVZA/mobilebasic gets me started: we're all barely keeping up and just trying to direct the firehose into some readily available container like a google doc because we can't drink any more and it's the easiest thing to hand.  I'm happy with the dangerous "we": all we humanists and all them scientists are trying to do kaelidoscopics at speed, saving the excess for future analysis while trying to do the analysis right now and get something in print right now which is aleready too late.  "They" have better containers (infrastructure) and that matters, but I think it's important to note the shared space of urgency and excess and ask about the effects these have on analysis, ours and theirs and: ours.

It has to be hurried, the only take worth anything these days is the hot take, for scientists, science journalists, science analysts. An exaggeration, but I'm rushed. We know that air pollution (two words harboring such complexity and excess on its own: PM2.5, ozone, NOX, etc.etc.) impacts health in numerous ways, in and beyond our repiratory system; we know that those physiological logics are compounded by cultural logics, in their complexity and excess: race poverty geolocation healthcare access nutritional needs etc. etc. A kaleidoscopic intersectional analysis that, to get good reliable outcomes, takes time.

A need for generosity.

So as I make my way down the list in the google doc and read that some group or some lab shows the COVID-19 intersects with air pollution and makes for worse outcomes for African Americans I'm predisposed toward belief, for many good reasons, compounded by the rush. And the data and the correlations between, say, increased mortality in areas of northern Italy where there are higher levels of airpollution is certainly believable, compelling -- for NO2 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720321215?via%3Dihub

and air pollution generally

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749120320601

That kind of crunching of large data sets seems believable -- and has been stamped as peer reviewed. So what do we do with this article in The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-covid-19-and-death-the-perils-of-bypassing-peer-review-136376

critical of a Harvard School of Public Health study available as a preprint on medrxiv --

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054502v2

-- that concludes that "an increase of only 1 μg/m3 in PM2.5 is associated with an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate (95% confidence interval [CI]: 2%, 15%)"?  The Canadian researchers in The Conversation are not convinced:

"It is almost impossible to try to adjust for the influence of all these factors, as this study tried to do, because the interactions between these variable are so complex. Accounting for these factors could only be done in studies using information from individual-level information."

"Proper peer review must not be bypassed — and the onus for respecting its role falls not just on journalists but also on scientists to communicate the correct information accurately."

I'm suspicious -- and if I had more time I would be more suspicious of my suspicions -- for two reasons: one, a lot of those studies on the google docs list are preprints.  But more importantly, the call for "individual-level information."  What does this mean? I don;t think anyone is working with "individual level information" in all of these studies, so why does this one become a target?

1. Because it's Harvard PH, of Six Cities study fame, first linking air pollution to increased mortality and the key reference point for US air pollution regulation. There's a long history of the oil industry and their scientists just trying to pick holes and cast doubt on these studies out of Harvard.

2. The criticism smacks of the most recent devious strategy of the air regulation opponents, which is to call for individiual level data in epidemiological to be released in the name of "transparency." Which can't be done.

So who are these Canadian guys and are they up to something more than "just raising questions and being good scientific skeptics"?

UPDATE 1 HOUR LATER:

So I looked them up: Mark Goldberg was a member of the Reanalysis Team of the Health Effects Institute that validated the Six Cities Study: 

https://theasthmafiles.org/content/hei-validation-six-cities-study

Unlikely, then, that he is some undustry beard...