Most of the pollution comes from inside the city, so encasing the city would be rather disastrous. And you can't really protect against the global warming, aka greenhouse effect, by building a greenhouse - because that's effecticely what encasing a city is. A very large greenhouse which gets very hot inside.
(The impact of encasements to pollution is observable e.g. at public transit: subway/metro stations have significant concentrations of small particles in the air. You know, the kind that people complain automobiles create. The fact is, also trains create them, and in closed spaces, like underground stations, the concentrations of particles grow big.)
Sorry, this makes no sense. It would be far, far cheaper to decrease pollution than to build airtight seals around every living space. Just think about how impractical and expensive that would be. Space stations and submarines are airtight, and they are extremely expensive. Now imagine making every building to similar standards, and connections between them to the same standards. Then think about how space stations and submarines must be maintained in order to remain in working condition, and how expensive that is. It would be absurdly impractical.
In fact, reality bears this out. Pollution in the U.S. is down over the past several decades, compared to its previously increasing. Pollution controls work and are economically viable.
Yes, developing (and far more corrupt) nations like China are increasingly choking themselves with air pollution. That's because of their social problems (i.e. not putting enough value on human life and quality of life). Their governments are willing to let their citizens suffer, and their citizens are powerless to effect change within their social and governmental structures.
Eventually the costs will become too great and even the corrupt governments will have to do something. (Or the rich/powerful will live in expensive, isolated structures while everyone else suffers.)
But one thing that certainly won't happen is to encase everything in airtight seals. Not unless Free Energy happens, in which case pollution would no longer be an issue anyway.
Sometimes dumb-sounding ideas actually work. Pollution is a serious problem for many cities, so it's sensible to at least consider whether this idea might actually have merit. Even if the answer is no, at least those of us who read the article and comments here have perhaps a better understanding of the problem.
Pollution comes in various forms. Right now I'm less worried about heavy metals seeping into the land in some remote area of the world than I am about greenhouse gases. I'd rather fence off a square km to pollution for a dozen cars on the road that won't heat up the atmosphere more.
Also, weirdly enough, the recent huge spikes in temperature we’ve seen worldwide has in part been due to regulations put in place to prevent some giant barges from burning the dirtiest fuel possible, preventing huge amounts of sulfur dioxide from blanketing our oceans. That gas actually causes cloud seeding and the lack of it recently has significantly increased global temperatures. Scientists are now scrambling to figure out a less toxic way of emulating exactly the effect those huge barges had to block the suns radiation. Just wanted to throw that in because these conversations are can be more complex than they seem on the surface.
I would rather have 0.1% of the Earth be made toxic enough to kill me in 600 seconds than have 100% of the Earth be made toxic enough to kill me in 600 months.
The pollution from solar cell manufacture is mostly near the mines and chemical processors, and the effects are mitigated if you don't go near there or live downstream. Pollution from coal burning affects everyone who lives downwind of any furnace, and those are located near the users to cut down on transmission losses.
Natural sources of pollution, like volcanoes, are not much of a concern, because most of the biosphere chooses not to live near them. So an artificial zone made more inhospitable than the surface of Venus, confined somehow, and situated far from civilization, is a bit less of a concern than the air quality index of Beijing.
Would it help if the raw materials were mined from asteroids, the finished product manufactured in space, and then dropped to the surface by nontoxic ablative shields and parachutes? If the answer is yes, being able to confine the pollution to specific areas on Earth is almost as good. (But the confinement is the hard part.)
I think you'd have to anticipate it to stop it. To start the pollution you'd basically just need a giant fire. It'd be really hard to put out. It'd be similar to when the oil wells were set ablaze when the US invaded Iraq.
Having grown up in an actually polluted city where we had to keep ammonia in a container in the living room to scrub CO during winter months, "destroying the environment" by breathing thing is a little overwrought.
Also, reducing the future potential of productive new individuals from joining society is not the utopia you think it is.
Make Delhi air tolerable but make climate change on Earth worse. This masks the bigger problem, fossil fuels and the changes they cause to the entire planet. Pushing smog from one place to another sounds like a terrible red herring.
We already know a lot about making megacities smog-free. That's why London and Los Angeles had absolutely dreadful air in the mid-20th century but it's much better now. As for why Delhi hasn't followed the example of richer cities in cleaning up the air, I'd say it is mostly due to lack of funds for infrastructure and enforcement.
The reason that emissions-free energy sources get discussed more than carbon dioxide reduction from the atmosphere is that reducing emissions appears to be significantly less expensive and more scaleable for dealing with the bulk of the problem. Once you bolt on the extras necessary to make coal plants low-CO2, the electricity costs more than if you'd just eliminated coal altogether, so there's no point to it. For an example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemper_Project
> As standards of living raise people find pollution is negatively affecting them and so they solve the problem locally.
This works if the problem is local and bothersome to the locals -- rusting drums leaking poison or heaps of trash. Carbon dioxide and methane are invisible and odorless and instantly become everyone's problem, so we can't expect this mechanism to induce people to solve the problem locally.
(The impact of encasements to pollution is observable e.g. at public transit: subway/metro stations have significant concentrations of small particles in the air. You know, the kind that people complain automobiles create. The fact is, also trains create them, and in closed spaces, like underground stations, the concentrations of particles grow big.)
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