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Last month, I went ballistic over New York City's plan to ban smoking in parks and public beaches. My argument was that you don't have to ban smoking on every square inch of park land to protect nonsmokers from the person next to them. You can chalk off spaces where smoking is prohibited. Just figure out how much clean breathing room people need, and draw a line.
It looks like I may get my wish—not in New York, but in Los Angeles. L.A. already forbids outdoor smoking in parks and beaches. But yesterday, the city council advanced a proposal to ban outdoor smoking at restaurants. And this time, the ban isn't comprehensive; it's spatially circumscribed. Maeve Reston of the Los Angeles Times spells out the details:
A Los Angeles City Council committee voiced support today for a ban on smoking in the city's outdoor dining areas, but ordered several changes to the ordinance before sending it to the full council for approval. ... The legislation ... would ban smoking within a 10-foot radius of outdoor dining areas. The proposed no-smoking area around mobile food trucks and food kiosks would extend for 40 feet.
Ten feet sounds about right. After I attacked the New York plan, an anti-smoking researcher challenged me to examine studies of outdoor secondhand smoke. So I did. Among other things, the studies noted that smoke exposure levels from outdoor cigarettes were "very localized." One study reported:
We observed a clear reduction in OTS [outdoor tobacco smoke] levels as the distance from a tobacco source increased. Generally, average levels within 0.5 m [meters] from a single cigarette source were quite high and comparable to indoor levels, and OTS levels at distances greater than 1 or 2 m were much lower. ... At distances larger than 2 m, levels near single cigarettes were generally close to background.
Roughly translated, this means that if you're downwind of an outdoor smoker, standing within two feet subjects you to exposure comparable to being indoors with that smoker. Move seven feet away, however, and you're breathing normal air. Accordingly, a city that prohibits indoor restaurant smoking to protect nonsmokers should extend this policy to smoking within two feet of an outdoor dining area. Beyond seven feet, the restriction loses its logic. I don't see any harm in extending the radius to 10 feet, just to play it safe.
The Los Angeles proposal is still being haggled over. For all I know, the buffer zone will end up being 15 or 20 feet. The important thing is that it'll be clear and limited. If we're lucky, it will set a precedent for regulating outdoor smoking based on science, not revulsion. And you'll be free to light up and enjoy your cigarette, as long as you keep your butt out of my face.
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If you want to argue for parkwide smoking bans based on asthma or on an analogy to noise pollution, go ahead and make that case. But let's not cloud that debate by invoking the general harm of secondhand smoke. Studies of secondhand smoke have indeed moved outdoors. Their findings support restrictions on lighting up within a few feet of other people. But they don't warrant more than that.
More here.
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Here's an idea for saving our planet: make people smaller.
Sounds crazy, right? Nobody wants to be small. Everybody wants to be big. How would you make people smaller, anyway? Genetic modification? Wouldn't it be horribly risky? Even if it worked, wouldn't it be embarrassing and dangerous to be smaller than other people? I can already hear you snickering, "You first."
You're right. It's dangerous and crazy. But it might be less dangerous and crazy than the alternatives.
Our planet is in trouble. We're overheating its atmosphere. We're exhausting its resources. Just about every analysis suggests that we have no hope of averting disaster using known technologies. Solar power, wind, carbon caps—we should do all of that. But it won't come close to being enough. And even if we invent some brilliant solution to climate change, the next environmental crisis is just around the corner. There are simply too many people using too many resources. We're overtaxing our planet.
Could we get more resources from other planets? Theoretically, sure. But right now, we can't even afford to go back to the moon.
This is where contrarian thinking comes in handy. Maybe we don't have to find more resources. Maybe we can reduce the number of people.
That's the agenda of the Optimum Population Trust, which has just released an analysis of the environmental costs of bringing new children into the world. "Contraception is almost five times cheaper than conventional green technologies as a means of combating climate change," says the trust's press release. Likewise, other environmental challenges—soil erosion, water shortage, deforestation, fish depletion, starvation—"would be easier to solve with fewer people."
The argument is totally, screamingly, urgently correct. Yet, as David Fahrenthold reported in yesterday's Washington Post, the Obama administration won't touch it, and a U.N. official calls it "an insult to developing countries." Why the resistance? Because everyone fears coercive population control. The only thing more hard-wired than our desire to procreate is our desire to fornicate.
So: If we're devouring our planet, and we can't find more resources, and we refuse to have fewer children, where does that leave us?
Hence my proposal: Shrinking our numbers isn't the only way to reduce our environmental impact. Another way is to shrink our size. Don't tell me it's impossible. Look what we've done to dogs.
If you come up with a less crazy solution, let me know.
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When tobacco fighters began to outlaw smoking in elevators, buses, restaurants, bars, and public buildings, their stated rationale was to protect nonsmokers trapped inside. Then the crusade moved on to apartment buildings, extending the same theory: You can't smoke in your apartment, because the smoke seeps under your door into hallways and other people's apartments.
Now this rationale has moved outdoors. Way outdoors.
More here.
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Why categorize and measure students by race? Aren't there better ways to organize the data? "Lower-performing 9- and 13-year-olds make gains," says one section of the NAEP report. "No significant change for 17-year-olds at any performance level," says another. "Reading scores improve for 9-year-old public and private school students over long term," says a third. "Score increases for 17-year-olds whose parents did not finish high school," says a fourth. These tables organize the data by factors that can help us target and adjust educational policy: kids with low scores, kids in public school, kids in high school, kids whose parents didn't graduate. I'd like to see tables for income and spending per pupil, too. But race? Does that category really help? And what message does it send to kids when headlines assert a persistent "racial gap"?
More here.
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Several days ago, we looked at "toilet to tap," the increasingly useful art of turning sewage into drinking water. Orange County, Calif., which is pioneering the practice, is proud to tell you how thoroughly its filtration purges the sewage: "Thousands of microfilters, hollow fibers covered in holes one-three-hundredth the width of a human hair, strain out suspended solids, bacteria and other materials."
But what if the water isn't what you want? What if you want the sewage?
Who would want these lovely "suspended solids," you ask? Why, you would. Apparently, they're a fine source of environmentally friendly fuel. Agence France Presse reports that in Oslo, Norway,
city officials soon plan to introduce buses that run on biofuels extracted from human waste. ... The biofuel, which is methane generated by fermenting sludge, will come from the Bekkelaget sewage treatment plant which handles waste from 250,000 city dwellers. "By going to the bathroom, a person produces the equivalent of eight litres (2.1 gallons) of diesel per year. That may not seem like a lot, but multiplied by 250,000 people, that is enough to operate 80 buses for 100,000 kilometres (62,000 miles) each," [one official] says.
Fecal fuel is, if you'll pardon the expression, green:
In addition to being carbon neutral, it emits 78 percent less nitrogen oxide and 98 percent fewer fine particles—two causes of respiratory illnesses—and is 92 percent less noisy. ... "If our entire fleet switched to biomethane, carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by around 30,000 tonnes per year," according to [an Oslo official].
It protects the food supply:
Contrary to first generation bio-ethanol, made from grains and plants, biomethane has the added advantage of not impacting food supplies, nor does it require fertilisation or deplete precious water resources.
In other words, instead of turning corn into fuel, which prevents you from eating the corn, we should feed you the corn first and then collect your droppings so that your sustenance becomes part of the fuel production process.
And it's cheap:
All included, the cost of producing biofuel equivalent to one litre of diesel comes to 0.72 euros (98 cents), while diesel at the pump in Norway currently costs more than 1.0 euro.
In fact, as a fuel supplier, maybe you should get a cut of the savings. Remember that pilot project in India I mentioned last year? The one where villagers get paid to use public toilets while their urine is tested for use as a fertilizer? At the time, I proposed that
we could try our own version of the Indian experiment. To do that, we'd need to devise an efficient method of converting public-toilet waste into something productive, such as fertilizer, without endangering public health. ... I bet somebody will figure out pretty soon how to monetize toilet waste. ... Restaurant grease [is] being illegally siphoned from filthy bins and barrels. Bandits are selling it for conversion to biodiesel. When bandits start siphoning public toilets, maybe governments will wake up and get in on the action. And you'll stop having to pay.
Nine months later, Oslo may have worked out the last piece of the puzzle. You go to the bathroom. We filter the excrement from the water. We recycle the water so you can drink it again. Meanwhile, we turn the excrement into fuel. All of this helps the environment, protects the food supply and saves money. And if you play it right, you get paid.
Anyone got a problem with this?
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Why do poor kids have more trouble in school? Is it due to environment or biology?
The answer, according to a new study, may be both.
We tend to think of biological explanations as an alternative to environmental explanations. The clearest example of this conflict is the debate over genetic theories of intelligence. But biology is more than genetics. It includes physical processes that are environmentally influenced. So if poverty causes cognitive impairment, biology should be able to explain part of the effect.
That's what a study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to do. Working with a sample of nearly 200 children, the authors set out to identify "underlying biological mechanisms that may account for the income-achievement gap." But instead of looking for genes, they look for a different kind of mechanism: measurable stress.
And they find it. "Childhood poverty no longer predicts young adults' working memory capacity once chronic stress exposure is partialed from the covariance between childhood poverty and adult working memory," they report. In other words, stress is the missing link. They conclude:
One, we demonstrate that the duration of childhood poverty is related prospectively to working memory performance later in life among young adults. Two, we show that allostatic load, an index of chronic stress, conveys a significant proportion of the covariation between childhood deprivation and an adult's working memory performance. The longer the period of childhood poverty, the higher the levels of allostatic load during childhood, and the greater the reductions in young adults' subsequent working memory. Furthermore, elevated childhood allostatic load predicts working memory in young adults and, in turn, largely explains the prospective relationship between childhood poverty and these working memory deficits.
In an interview with Rob Stein of the Washington Post, the study's lead author enumerates various ways in which poverty can cause stress: "You may have housing problems. You may have more conflict in the family. There's a lot more pressure in paying the bills. You'll probably end up moving more often."
This study alone doesn't settle anything. It hasn't monitored cognitive performance over time, doesn't measure performance beyond working memory, and doesn't rule out other underlying factors. But it shows how biological and environmental explanations can help each other. And that's an important lesson in a field too often polarized between the two.
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It's been a year or so since we checked in on "toilet to tap," the increasingly useful art of turning sewage into drinking water. Actually, you aren't supposed to call it "toilet to tap." That's a slur coined by political opponents of the technology. And it's highly effective, as evidenced by the fact that I've probably grossed you out already.
The technology's proponents constantly labor to explain how sanitary it is. Their latest attempt, via Reuters, focuses on Orange County's "Groundwater Replenishment System":
Anyone who has visited Disneyland recently and taken a sip from a drinking fountain there may have unknowingly sampled a taste of the future—a small quantity of water that once flowed through a sewer. ... The plant takes pre-treated sewer water that otherwise would be discharged to the ocean and runs it through a three-step cleansing process—essentially the same technology used to purify baby food and bottled water. Thousands of microfilters, hollow fibers covered in holes one-three-hundredth the width of a human hair, strain out suspended solids, bacteria and other materials. The water then passes to a reverse osmosis system, where it is forced through semi-permeable membranes that filter out smaller contaminants, including salts, viruses and pesticides. Reverse osmosis also is the main process used in desalination. Finally, the water is disinfected with a mix of ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide. The resulting product exceeds all U.S. drinking standards but gets additional filtration when it is allowed to percolate back into the ground to replenish the aquifer.
Well, that sounds pretty clean. But I bet you're still not convinced. You'd rather stick to the familiar crap-free water that already comes from your tap.
Surprise! That familiar water isn't so crap-free after all. And proponents of the new technology are happy to tell you so:
They want the public to understand that much of what comes from the tap today is recycled sewer water. The Colorado River, for example, contains large amounts of heavily treated waste discharged from cities upstream, including Las Vegas. As the L.A. County Economic Development Corp study puts it, "What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas."
Great line. And it's smart politics: If you can't sell the public on the purity of your own candidate, attack the other side's candidate. We're used to this tactic when the candidates are people like John McCain and Barack Obama. But it works just as well when the candidates are groundwater replenishment and old-fashioned tap water.
And just because this is a political attack doesn't mean it's false. For my money, it's true. We already drink toilet-to-tap water. That's the nature of water: It cycles from one form to another. Urine evaporates, rain falls, rivers flow. If you think you've never consumed water that came from excrement, you must literally be living on another planet.
So stop freaking out about where your water came from, and start focusing on the quality of its filtration. Everything is recycled, including you.
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What is it with the Catholic Church and female anatomy?
The total opposition to abortion I can understand. The men in Rome believe that personhood begins at conception.
The opposition to artificial contraception strikes me as completely wrongheaded but not necessarily a guy thing. They believe that sex must be open to life and that life must arise through sex.
The misunderstanding of morning-after pills in their latest instruction to Catholics? Well, that's a bit ignorant. But even the average woman isn't familiar with the research on LH surges, luteal dysfunction, and endometrial damage.
On all these issues, I'm willing to give the men in Rome the benefit of the doubt. But then I read this report from the Vatican newspaper, via Agence France Presse:
The contraceptive pill is polluting the environment and is in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said Saturday. The pill "has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature" through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations. ... "We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill," he said, without elaborating further.
That's right: The new cause of male infertility is female urine. Specifically, the urine of women who are committing the sin of contraception.
Scientifically, the theory looks a bit wet. AFP continues:
The article was promptly dismissed by several organisations. "Once metabolised, the hormones contained in oral contraceptives no longer have any of the characteristic effects of feminine hormones," said Gianbenedetto Melis, vice-president of a contraceptive research association, quoted by the ANSA news agency. The hormones contained in the pill such as oestrogen "are present everywhere ... in plastic, in disinfectants, in meat that we eat," added Flavia Franconi, of the Society of Italian Pharmacology.
Perhaps it's a sign of the modern age that moralists feel obliged to associate their principles with health effects. Abortion isn't just murder; it causes breast cancer and psychological damage to women. Contraception isn't just a violation of God's will; it's an environmental toxin. But none of these health claims has turned out to be valid. And in this case, the claim is so perfectly consistent with the history of misogyny—blaming men's fertility problems on women's sins and fluids—that it risks not just scientific but moral discredit.
On the other hand, if it turns out to be true, I'll be really pissed.
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Solar power is good for the environment, right? Eh, sort of. Marla Dickerson reports in the Los Angeles Times:
Rows of gigantic mirrors covering an area bigger than two football fields have sprouted alongside almond groves near California 99. This is a power plant that uses the sun's heat to produce electricity ... At least 80 large solar projects are on the drawing board in California ...
Critics fear that massive solar farms would create as many environmental problems as they purport to solve. This new-age electricity still requires old-fashioned power towers and high-voltage lines to get it to people's homes. A proposed 150-mile transmission line known as the Sunrise Powerlink that would carry renewable power from Imperial County to San Diego has run into stiff resistance from grass-roots groups and environmentalists. Solar plants require staggering amounts of land, which could threaten fragile ecosystems and mar the stark beauty of America's deserts.
No problem. We just need to put these huge arrays on the moon.
Now, about the energy cost of getting them there ...
Over to you, John Tierney.
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Last week, I looked at the economics of pay toilets and argued that the toilets should pay you. In India, a pilot project is cleaning up the environment and trying to generate fertilizer by paying people to use "eco-sanitation" toilets. Meanwhile, American cities are charging people to use expensive, high-tech, energy-consuming Automated Public Toilets (APTs). Does the American approach really make sense?
Now it turns out that in at least one city, we're not even getting nicer toilets for our money. Two days ago, Seattle dumped its APTs. Reason No. 1: They'd been taken over by druggies and hookers. Reason No. 2: They were "less cost-effective than regular public restrooms."
And how. Unlike other cities, Seattle wasn't charging APT users. But the eye-popping number is the cost of its units. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that according to the manufacturer, "A single stall automated toilet now goes for $200,000 to $220,000 plus on-site installation." And that's not even the real number, by a long shot. The total cost to the city, including maintenance, has been about $1 million per toilet.
How can toilets cost that much? Read the reviews. They have "handsfree washing and drying ability and an emergency button that automatically dials 911." They have "automated floor scrubbers" and are "cleaned by jets of water between each use." They have "metal doors that open at the press of a button and stay closed for up to 20 minutes. The units clean themselves after each use, disinfecting the seats and power-washing the floors."
Nice, huh? So how did they get taken over by junkies and prostitutes?
One reason seems to be that Seattle put them in places where that was likely to happen. Another reason could be that the toilets were free. I doubt it, since free APTs on skid row in Los Angeles haven't suffered the same fate. A third explanation is privacy: 20 minutes to yourself in a sealed chamber is perfect for taking care of your next fix or giving a blow job.
The toilets ended up so gross and scary that even homeless people wouldn't use them. One woman supplies this fantastic quote to the New York Times: "I used to smoke crack in there. But I won't even go inside that thing now. It's disgusting."
As a result, the APTs failed at the basic job of any public toilet: curbing outdoor excrement. A city spokesman ruefully tells the Seattle Times: "Even when these restrooms were running, we were still getting reports of people urinating and defecating in public." The spokesman says that at this point, Seattle "doesn't have a plan for providing public-restroom services" and is still "trying to figure it out."
Here's a wild idea: Bag the high-tech fetish. Put up plain old public toilets. That seems to be the lesson from yesterday's New York Times:
Rather than automated toilets, some cities are looking for cheaper alternatives that would be cleaned by human attendants. One prototype, to be installed next month in Portland, Ore., would cost $50,000 each, compared with some $300,000 for an automated unit. Randy Leonard, a Portland city commissioner, helped design that toilet, which in addition has open gaps at the top and bottom of the door, a feature discouraging drug abuse, prostitution and the like. But given that lesser privacy, it is unclear how popular such a toilet might be ...
Sorry, folks: Lesser privacy is the price you have to pay to keep out the druggies and hookers. And human attendants are the price of keeping toilets affordable. For the cost of one APT, you could put up six to 20 of those low-tech Portland units.
Now, if the Indians can just figure out how to monetize the waste, we can start paying users. Eco-san, anyone?