Things Are Good

Ditching Gas Stoves as Good as Using Drugs for Asthmatics

cooking prep

Having asthma is tough as you may too often feel short of breath, and the solution to many asthma symptoms are prescription drugs. The drugs generally help the body open airways and allow the asthmatic person to breathe normally agin.
It’s been proven that air pollutants increase the stress put on asthmatic individuals and lead to increase asthma rates in the population at large. It’s also known that gas stoves produce a ton of indoor pollution. Put those two things together and now you get a good question: if gas stoves are removed from homes with people with asthma then will their condition improve? The answer is yes!

Indeed, if you get rid of gas stoves then you could see improvements as good as, or exceeding, certain drugs used to treat asthma.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Each person was assessed for four weeks before the gas cooking replacement, and for four weeks afterwards, including scoring their asthma using an internationally recognised scale of zero to six.

The average asthma score improved from 2.6 to 1.5, on a scale where a change of 0.5 is considered to be clinically significant. This included fewer hospital visits and fewer days off school or work for asthma flare-ups. They also found less wheezing, less use of reliver inhalers and fewer people saying that their asthma had woken them during the night.

Air pollution was measured in 44 of the homes. On average, nitrogen dioxide dropped 70%.

You Want to Live in a Dense Neighbourhood

View of downtown Toronto from a drone shot above U of T

Living densely is a good thing, more specifically being surrounded by density is a good thing. Where we live can have a huge impact on our collective well being and the planetary ecosystem. Low density housing like suburbs are really bad for one’s mental health and for your communities health. When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions it’s clear that we can drastically reduce by just increasing the density of our neighbourhoods, a simple solution with wide ranging and positive consequences.

Having homes close to one another is not only good for emissions from your house, it’s good a reducing other emission sources too. Dense neighbourhoods means you don’t need to drive to get a coffee, you can walk. The network impacts of density are quiet apparent when you live in a good place.

The results show that attached homes and MURBs are 45–62 % less GHG intensive per capita than detached homes. Considering results at the neighborhood level, GHG emissions per capita decrease with higher density. We also find negative associations between GHG emissions per capita and household characteristics including household size, tenancy, and household income. The findings of this study highlight the need to integrate built forms, mobility, and transport infrastructure when assessing the potential greenhouse gas emissions of housing and neighborhoods. Besides aiming for density, the provision of walkable neighborhoods, low-emission modes of transport, and high-density housing forms (e.g., multi-unit residential buildings) can lead to low-GHG neighborhoods.

New Buildings in England Require Solar Power

Solar Panel School

In certain areas, like Ontario, homes are legally required to damage the environment by being connected to private fossil fuel companies (yes, policy like this count as subsidies to fossil fuel companies). In England that’s set to change with new building codes, no longer will people be forced to use fossil fuels to warm their houses. Moving forward new homes will require solar panels to supplement their energy usage while also including heat pumps. Hopefully this will encourage other places around the world to start incorporating renewable power directly into new buildings instead of relying on retrofits.

“The Iran war has once again shown our drive for clean power is essential for our energy security so we can escape the grip of fossil fuel markets we don’t control,” said Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
The announced changes have been welcomed by the energy industry and those working in green technology for providing certainty that heat pumps and solar panels are worth investing in.
“It’s going to give clarity to the UK market, installers, builders, manufacturers, that there’s a significant market that’s there,” said Garry Felgate, CEO of MCS Foundation, which certifies installers of low carbon heating systems.

Phytoplankton Can Save the Planet

ocean shore

When it comes to absorbing carbon you can do a lot worse than plankton. Yes, those tiny specks of flora that float around the ocean can take on a lot of carbon to thrive and grow, which means that we could use them as a reservoir of excess of carbon in the atmosphere. As we know, fossil fuels come from old plants and animals that died out millions of years ago and now we’re burning them for power, which is the biggest geoengineering project in history. A simple proposition is to reverse the process: supercharge the feeding of the phytoplankton to get them to grab the carbon and sequester it away.

To be clear the best way to deal with rising temperatures is to stop burning fossil fuels in the first place!

So we’re not talking about some wild new speculative hypothesis or an odd-ball observation from a single contested study. We’re talking about the accumulated output of hydrothermal cruises, dust-tracking satellites, floating ocean robots, sediment cores that reach back through ice ages, shipboard chemistry experiments, and decades of chlorophyll imagery. The core relationship — feed iron-starved water, and it grows more phytoplankton, in proportion to how much you feed it, and then stops when the nutrient addition stops — is about as well-established as anything in ocean science gets.

That last point deserves notice. Reversability is a key criterion for ecological safety. You want to be sure that if the intervention you’re pursuing turns out to have a negative effect, you can stop it. You wouldn’t want to risk shifting an ecosystem into a new permanent state. Here the evidence is especially clear. Phytoplankton grows as long as you keep feeding it. When you stop feeding it, it stops growing.

Feeling Overwhelmed? Hit the Floor

Simply lying down on the floor can help calm you down if you’re getting overwhelmed. It sounds too good to be true that simply lying down can work, but the science is there and there’s hundreds of years of observation too. The act of lying down is a yoga pose (probably the easiest yoga pose too) that has been proven to change your physical and mental wellbeing almost instantly.

next time the weight of the world has got you down, let it push you to the floor. Then you can get back up again!

When you’re having a bad day, “floor time is the ultimate grounding technique,” Daryl Appleton, EdD, chief wellness consultant and Fortune 500 executive coach, told Business Insider. Research shows that grounding can reduce inflammation, pain, and stress, which may improve sleep and blood flow.

Compared to when you’re sitting or standing, lying on the floor maximizes your contact with the ground. You may notice your muscles releasing tension with your back and legs supported.

“Getting on the ground outdoors is even better because it allows your nervous system to recalibrate,” Appleton said. Physically connecting with the earth can boost your mood and help you relax and regulate your emotions.