stein1946 6 hours ago

> Raising awareness is the only real solution.

You'd have to raise awareness on every single person in the room and them sustain pressure to the organization in order to have proper CO2 levels in the room/organization.

And then you have to align every other person on every other organization to do this as well and hope for the best.

Or, you can do the right thing and have the state introduce regulations

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dan-robertson 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t think that’s right. If people have an easy way to measure the levels, and they can see something on their phone like ‘you spent 8 hours today above 2000ppm CO2’ then the room will care a lot more than it did before, and people will be able to quickly see whether they have improved things. At my employer, I think it took us around 1000 employees until we randomly hired someone who happened to care a lot about CO2 levels and I think they managed to cause a decent increase in the amount that the company cared / thought about levels (this was around the end of Covid though so part of this may have been due to using CO2 levels as an indication of insufficient ventilation/air filtration).

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joenot443 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depending on the state, newer buildings do have regulations on air ventilation and quality.

The rooms being discussed here are mostly ones which would have been built before this was taken more seriously. Classrooms, older office buildings, etc.

NYC is full of buildings which would never pass any code today but are still happily occupied. It’s a trade off, I think.

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Scroll_Swe 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can't you just open a window a bit?

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hosteur 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In lots of modern office buildings you can’t.

	▲	Scroll_Swe 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ah, sadly that was in my last modern one. Thankfully we can open the windows in this one :) Best solution.

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b112 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can just imagine the horrors and skin crawls that your last sentence has evoked in some people's minds. Not the state!!

But seriously, so much care needs to be taken here. OK, well "care" at least. Employers certainly would benefit from scrubbing CO2 from the air, in terms of productivity. I'm willing to bet that with central air it would be quite easy, and even with heat and AC off, lots of places still circulate the air regardless.

So the central place to scrub is already there.

But then you have other issues. Such as, will your body adapt to 8 hrs of reduced CO2, and then you become torpid and barely awake when not at work. Such a horrid thought, that is to me. And what if employers learn that the tiniest boost of O2 helps too! Now your body becomes accustomed to that, and what are the long term effects there?

I can personally envision myself being concerned. I guess the legislation could be crafted to "the same CO2 levels found just outside of downtown city core" or some such blather. Maybe even same for O2. So that you're at least pegged to something normal for the area.

Maybe that's where the state could come into play. A simple, highly accurate monitoring station which has an API to be polled.

Come to think of it, CO2 and O2 rates fluctuate during the 24 hour cycle. Trees need O2 to live, but only produce O2 during the day. And so differing amounts of light might mean up and downs in these numbers. It may be another circadian rhythm. Getting it the same as in a nearby forest, might be the healthiest thing of all.

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i_am_proteus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In practice, one would use energy recovery ventilation to exchange air with outside rather than a CO2 scrubber (not clear if you actually meant a scrubber).

The place to look is existing codes for ventilation. Exempli gratia: https://dos.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2020/09/2020-mcnys... (see PDF page 46). Regulations to enforce outside air being brought into human spaces already exist.

I have been in some office buildings in United States which had CO2 monitors in each meeting room, and the ventilation would engage to control CO2 below a set level. We would entertain ourselves by exhausting our lungs onto the sensors to trigger the ventilation system.

	▲	b112 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I should have said it more clearly, I just thought HN would take this stance regardless. If you tell an employer to ensure CO2 levels, and it shows an improvement in productivity, employers may think "Hmm. Let's improve this further!" and add O2 as well. In terms of outside air, a lot of US cities I think would not benefit from that, all that much. Especially during certain parts of the day, with a lot of smog. But regardless, all that entered my mind was "Once employers are required to add any form of scrubbing, and perhaps O2 injection, they'll over do it for optimal employee output." Regardless of whether it's helpful once the employee leaves the workplace. I'm not against this, I'm just actually saying the regulation should be locally defined.

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floam 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re talking about oxygen like it’s California Rocket Fuel or meth.

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atoav 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is not that complicated. You need to introduce CO₂ threshold levels that make sense from a medical standpoint. Then you need to enforce them in the same way other basic environmental regulations or worker rights are enforced in regions of the world where these work.

The main question is: If your workplace, city, whatever forces you to work or live in an harmful/unhealthy environment, do you have any realistic course of action to improve the situation? In the US you would call this (gasp) regulation, I would call it a basic human right.

If we talk about stairways, nobody complains about building regulations that mandate handrails. CO₂ levels are not totally different.