Breathe This!
Yeah, that's a picture of Beijing taken by Tony Law for Wired magazine. We're so quick to condemn our own cities, but this country hasn't looked this bad since the 70's.
"The air isn't always so awful: Sometimes the wind sweeps through, revealing a blue canopy overhead. But on a bad day — come August, say, when temperatures approach 100 degrees — the atmosphere around Beijing becomes a photochemical bouillabaisse of coal smog, steel-mill spume, and tailpipe crud, mingled with concrete dust and baked in the oven formed by the surrounding hills.
Just the place for the summer Olympics."
Read the full article.
China is desperately trying to change its image in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics. They're pulling out all the stops to try and green Beijing in time. And when you've got an autocratic, one party government, there's no debate. The order is given and you'd better get it done. That's not to say there isn't a bit of corruption along the way.
While there wasn't any mention of nukes in this article (I'm surprised after this one), there is mention of cleaning up coal ("They're retrofitting the city's big power plants with scrubbers — standard-issue in the US and Europe since the 1980s but still a novelty in China."), putting a limit on construction ("a ban on excavation at the city's 3,000-plus non-Olympic construction sites — the source of up to one-third of the capital's airborne dust"), and forcing drivers to leave their cars at home ("taking an estimated 800,000 cars and trucks off the road") during the games all in an effort to make sure the skies stay clear during the games.
But Beijing itself isn't the only culprit for its pollution. "70 percent of Beijing's summer particulate pollution originates outside the city." They might have to shut down everything upwind for a couple of weeks to ensure the sky is clear during the games.
"City officials referred vaguely to "hard measures" — reportedly including forced, last-minute vacations not only for factory workers but also for the capital's resident army of civil servants. Whether they can strong-arm upwind provinces — including much of China's industrial heartland — into blowing off a couple weeks' worth of GDP to clear the air over rival Beijing is an open question."
If the world sees images of athletes hacking from respiratory illnesses or sooty skies, it'll be a PR nightmare for China.
Seed magazine did some investigation of their own. They found much of the same thing.
"The litany of environmental challenges that China faces is shocking, even by the enormous proportions of all things Chinese. The International Energy Agency predicts that this year or next China will surpass the United States as the world's No. 1 producer of greenhouse gases. As 14,000 new cars take to the road every day and a new coal-fired plant opens every week, China's CO2 emissions are on course to triple by 2050; the country's newest coal plants alone will cancel out the global emissions reductions sought by the Kyoto Protocol in the next five years. The glaciers on the Tibetan plateau, the source of the three major rivers that supply much of China's water, are shrinking by 7 percent a year, causing droughts and water shortages across the western part of the country. And in cities throughout China, temperatures this winter hit record highs."
Read the full article.
And it's more than the Olympics. China's meteoric rise to economic superpower has come at a price.
"Chinese scientists have predicted that the Yangtze River will die by 2011, and with two-thirds of other rivers polluted, more than 340 million Chinese lack access to clean drinking water. An estimated 400,000 Chinese die of pollution every year. By the government's own estimates released in December 2006, climate change is occurring in China at alarming rates, with temperatures due to increase by 1.3 to 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2020. China is unveiling forward-thinking policies and pushing alternative energy because it has no other choice."
Even the normally docile citizenry are reacting.
"In the village of Huaxi, in eastern Zhejiang province, peasants took notice when, following the construction of 13 pesticide and fertilizer plants, babies were born deformed and the river started to run brown. After unsuccessfully petitioning the government, the villagers erected roadblocks in April 2005 to prevent shipments from leaving the plants. When the authorities arrived to remove the roadblocks, the villagers overturned at least a dozen police cars and stripped officers of their uniforms."
How long will it be before urban dwellers react similarly?
"In World Bank assessments, Lanzhou has at several points earned the dubious distinction of most polluted city in the world (15 other Chinese cities join it on the top-20 list)."
But while things are certainly hellish, China is throwing money at the problem. "The Chinese have purchased 35 million solar water heaters, more than the rest of the world combined." But in their haste, they're making mistakes.
"Entire wind farms have been built so quickly that the infrastructure to connect them to the grid wasn't integrated into the plan, and so they sit, huge aeolian props thumping into the constant breeze, powering nothing. In July 2005, turbines from an Inner Mongolian wind farm collapsed, killing six workers. A subsequent investigation revealed that the accident was caused by hasty deadlines and failure to observe construction standards."
When the Olympics are done, what then? Will China revert back to its sooty ways? 70% of its energy is produced by cheap coal, and it takes alot of energy to grow an economy as big and as fast as China. With any luck, the green policies will stick. Sometimes being #1 isn't all that's it cracked up to be.
\_/
DED
Labels: China, environment
posted by DED at 11:09 PM
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