EA - First clean water, now clean air by finm

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: First clean water, now clean air, published by finm on April 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The excellent report from Rethink Priorities was my main source for this. Many of the substantial points I make are taken from it, though errors are my own. It’s worth reading! The authors are Gavriel Kleinwaks, Alastair Fraser-Urquhart, Jam Kraprayoon, and Josh Morrison.Clean waterIn the mid 19th century, London had a sewage problem. It relied on a patchwork of a few hundred sewers, of brick and wood, and hundreds of thousands of cesspits. The Thames — Londoners’ main source of drinking water — was near-opaque with waste. Here is Michael Faraday in an 1855 letter to The Times:Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface even in water of this kind [.] The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water. It was the same as that which now comes up from the gully holes in the streets. The whole river was for the time a real sewer [.] If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity; nor ought we to be surprised if, ere many years are over, a season give us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.That “sad proof” arrived more than once. London saw around three outbreaks of cholera, killing upwards of 50,000 people in each outbreak.But early efforts to address the public health crisis were guided by the wrong theory about how diseases spread. On the prevailing view, epidemics were caused by ‘miasma’ (bad air) — a kind of poisonous mist from decomposing matter. Parliament commissioned a report on the ‘Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population’, which showed a clear link between poverty and disease, and recommended a bunch of excellent and historically significant reforms. But one recommendation backfired because of this scientific misunderstanding: according to the miasma theory, it made sense to remove human waste through wastewater — but that water flowed into the Thames and contaminated it further.But in one of these outbreaks, the physician John Snow has spotted how incidence of cholera clustered around a single water pump in Soho, suggesting that unclean water was the major source of the outbreak. A few years later, the experiments of Louis Pasteur helped foster the germ theory of disease, sharpening the understanding of how and why to treat drinking water for public health. These were well-timed discoveriesBecause soon things got even worse. Heat exacerbated the smell; and the summer of 1858 was unusually hot. 1858 was the year of London’s ‘Great Stink’, and the Thames “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors” in Prime Minister Disraeli’s words. The problem had become totally unignorable.Parliament turned to Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works. Spurred by the Great Stink, he was given licence to oversee the construction of an ambitious plan to rebuild London’s sewage system, to his own design. 1,800km of street sewers would feed into 132km of main interconnecting sewers. A network of pumping stations was built, to lift sewage from streets below the high water mark. 18 years later, the result was the kind of modern sewage system we mostly take for granted: a system to collect wastewater and dump it far from where it could contaminate food and drinking water; in this case a dozen miles eastwards to the Thames estuary. "The great sewer that runs beneath Londoners”, wrote Bazalgette’s obituarist, “has added some 20 years to their chance of life”.Remarkably, most of the system remains in use. London’s sewage system has obviously been expanded, and wastewater treatment is much better. Bazalgette’s plan was built to last, and succeeded.As London built ways of expelling wastewater, it also built ways of channelling c...