I am a big fan of ventilation and air quality as underrated issues! In addition to the many references you list, you might be interested in the following bits of info:
Although it’s a little hard to believe, there are many lines of compelling evidence indicating that air pollution isn’t just horrible for your long-term health, but also impairs one’s cognitive functioning on a short-term basis! See this website maintained by Patrick Collison for details. To the extent that this is true, it makes air pollution an even bigger threat to economic growth and human wellbeing.
This article summarizes an investigation by Johannes Ackva at Founders’ Fund into the effectiveness of their various climate charities. To my surprise (given how much society talks about climate change), air pollution has worse present-day impacts and is more actionable! To me, this fact really hammered home the importance and underratedness of air pollution.
Seconded that learning to do a great job of physically clearing pathogens from the air (with filters and UV light and etc) seems like a key technology to get familiar with for the purposes of GCBR mitigation, since it’s a physical block effective against a broad spectrum of threats. (For example, it would be just as easy for a physical filtering system stop a maliciously engineered nightmare virus impossible to vaccinate against, as for it to stop a common-cold rhinovirus.)
Thanks Jackson for forwarding on these interesting posts and info on this topic, I’m glad others have interest in this issue. I wonder if the topic is slightly underrated because its effects are often manifested as ‘long-lived’ insidious chronic issues, meaning that judging the cost-effectiveness of different interventions with relatively short randomly controlled trials is much more difficult compared to for instance infectious disease interventions. Perhaps that’s where your short-term cognitive effects might be a really useful diagnostic/measure of effectiveness of different interventions- so thanks for drawing my attention to that.
An effectiveness comparison between vaccination and air filtration/UV light methods as GCBR mitigation is a really good suggestion for future research. I agree that air filtration may prove to be pretty effective, especially given the time lag to develop & test vaccines too.
During the writing of this post I spoke to some engineers developing air purifiers for private sector, so if anyone has further interest in this topic in the future—I can put you in touch.
I am a big fan of ventilation and air quality as underrated issues! In addition to the many references you list, you might be interested in the following bits of info:
Although it’s a little hard to believe, there are many lines of compelling evidence indicating that air pollution isn’t just horrible for your long-term health, but also impairs one’s cognitive functioning on a short-term basis! See this website maintained by Patrick Collison for details. To the extent that this is true, it makes air pollution an even bigger threat to economic growth and human wellbeing.
As you probably have heard, OpenPhil is trying to expand their global health & development division to include charities centered on improving South Asian air quality, as this is a dire enough problem that it is probably competitive with Givewell top charities. Here is more detail on the south asian air quality issue.
This article summarizes an investigation by Johannes Ackva at Founders’ Fund into the effectiveness of their various climate charities. To my surprise (given how much society talks about climate change), air pollution has worse present-day impacts and is more actionable! To me, this fact really hammered home the importance and underratedness of air pollution.
Seconded that learning to do a great job of physically clearing pathogens from the air (with filters and UV light and etc) seems like a key technology to get familiar with for the purposes of GCBR mitigation, since it’s a physical block effective against a broad spectrum of threats. (For example, it would be just as easy for a physical filtering system stop a maliciously engineered nightmare virus impossible to vaccinate against, as for it to stop a common-cold rhinovirus.)
Thanks Jackson for forwarding on these interesting posts and info on this topic, I’m glad others have interest in this issue. I wonder if the topic is slightly underrated because its effects are often manifested as ‘long-lived’ insidious chronic issues, meaning that judging the cost-effectiveness of different interventions with relatively short randomly controlled trials is much more difficult compared to for instance infectious disease interventions. Perhaps that’s where your short-term cognitive effects might be a really useful diagnostic/measure of effectiveness of different interventions- so thanks for drawing my attention to that.
An effectiveness comparison between vaccination and air filtration/UV light methods as GCBR mitigation is a really good suggestion for future research. I agree that air filtration may prove to be pretty effective, especially given the time lag to develop & test vaccines too.
During the writing of this post I spoke to some engineers developing air purifiers for private sector, so if anyone has further interest in this topic in the future—I can put you in touch.