Air pollution meets the free market
Jul 5, 2017, 5:52 AM | Updated: 9:27 am
(File, AP)
(File, AP)
I know a lot of people are concerned that the environment is going to suffer under the Trump administration. They are worried the ice caps will melt, the seas will rise, hurricanes will erase Florida, and wildfires will get everything else.
RELATED: Concerns raised over Seattle’s new seawall
But maybe the free market can handle this.
In Oakland, Calif., the Google cars that collect photos of city streets have also been measuring pollution.
I just knew those little Google cars had a hidden agenda!
They spent a year driving 40,000 miles throughout Oakland precisely plotting air pollution on a digital map.
Melissa Lunden is one of the scientists on the project and says gases such as ozone and methane were sampled.
The idea dates back to 2012 when the sensing technology was first used to check cities for methane gas leaking from aging pipelines. The breakthrough was not just measuring the gas but tracking the source.
In the Oakland experiment, each road was sampled 30 times. The result is a map which makes otherwise invisible pollution clearly visible.
“You see the traffic, you see the streets, you see the air pollution.”
Even if you think the White House is unconcerned about climate change, don’t be so sure. Because according to Steve Hamburg with the Environmental Defense Fund once there’s a real-time pollution map on every smartphone, it’s going to affect real-estate prices.
“You don’t right now know what you’re buying. This will make it transparent.”
Pollution that annoys the polar bears is one thing, but when it tanks property values — that’s an emergency.
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