China Races To Clean Up Olympic Air

Hugh Pickens writes "With the Olympics due to start in less than three weeks, Beijing is cranking up antipollution measures by yanking cars off the roads, expanding mass transit and staggering work hours in a bid to meet its pledge of a 'green' Olympics. Beijing has gone on a spending spree, relocating factories, seeding clouds, retiring old vehicles, planting millions of trees and halting building construction amid concerns that athletes and visitors could suffer breathing problems. For the next two months, owners of 3.3 million private cars can drive only on alternate days in China's capital, based on whether the last digit of their license plates is even or odd. Environmental and sports performance experts have cast doubt on the effectiveness of the measures taken so far. 'Arguably these are all short-term measures, just designed to control air quality for the time when the Olympics are on,' says Dr Andy Jones. Dr Angus Hunter warned that athletes are at risk for low performance if the air quality cannot be brought down to acceptable levels. 'Average times could be lower and the chances of records being broken become less. It's a bit like trying to exercise in a room when the gym is full of smokers.'"

Comments

Re:Chairman Mao says take the bus!

[bersl2]

Such propoganda posters are often artistic works, not photographs.

Re:Just now?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've spent a fortune relocating factories including one of the world's biggest steelworks. They are not going to spend a fortune moving them all back again. They are not going to close the new metro lines. Even some of the temporary measures may have long term effects; people using the new transport networks while their cars are banned may switch permanently. This isn't just window dressing.

That said, I returned from Beijing a week ago and the smog is terrible. I still have a very nasty cough. Though the air quality is much improved, it's still rubbish.

Re:Shutting Down PCB Factories

[RichMan]

Big chip production is done off shore in Taiwan. Not affected. And a lot more around Shanghai. Not affected.

Page 10 of document with world map of IC plants
does not show an FABs around Beijing in 2005.

IC fabrication does not have a big supply chain. Just sand and rare elements as inputs.

PCB and product manufacturing can be expected to be hit in strange ways. There are product paths, for connectors, cable assemblies, etc, that no one really understands that could be going through the affected area.

Re:License plates

[fredrikj]

I stared at your post for 10 seconds before realizing that 2j was supposed to represent an integer and that you were in fact not calling upon the quater-imaginary numeral system to prove the evenness of zero. Now that would have been overkill :-)

The license plate issue, by the way, is actually discussed in the "evenness of zero" Wikipedia article:

The nominal evenness of zero is relevant to odd-even rationing systems. Cars might be allowed to drive or to purchase gasoline on alternate days, according to the parity of the last digit in their license plates. Half of the numbers in a given range end in 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 and the other half in 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, so it makes sense to include 0 with the other even numbers. The relevant legislation sometimes stipulates that zero is even to avoid confusion.[25] In fact, an odd-even restriction on driving in 1977 Paris did lead to confusion when the rules were unclear. On an odd-only day, the police avoided fining drivers whose plates ended in 0, because they did not know whether 0 was even.[26]

Re:Just now?

[drinkypoo]

and most of that air quality has to do with the coal power plants which run with no emission controls like other countries have.

I hate to break it to you, but at least in the US the average coal plant is way over the allowable limit of emissions. We can find out-of-compliance coal plants in the US as fast as we can secure money to send people up smokestacks to check emissions. I know one person formerly in the stack-sniffing business with whom I have discussed the situation (among others) and it's very, very dirty.

and they aren't interested in spending money on economically friendly "alternative" energy sources that wouldn't supply 1% of their needs when they can again, spend next to nothing (including wages and other costs) to just use something they have.

The overall cost of burning fossil fuels is much higher than they think. Cancer rates doubled in the industrial revolution.

China isn't really known for paying its laborers fairly anyway, I'm sure they could do solar and wind quite cheaply. They are working on bringing up wind power, but not as hard as they're working on coal.

Re:Didn't they learn from Mexico??

[xtracto]

Mexico tried the whole "even or odd" license plate thing a while back (for similar reasons) and it was an epic failure.

Uuuh, as far as I know (asking to my relatives living in Mexico D.F.) the "hoy no circula" program is still going on strong in Mexico City, moreover, the program has just been extended for Saturdays (since July 5).

Saying that it didn't work is a big claim. Granted, some people bought another car, however that is not very common, given the general population does not earn enough money to buy a second car.

And moreover, the IMECA (Metropolitan Index of the Quality of Air, used to monitor the pollution in Mexico City) or AIQ (nowadays between 50 and 70) is not as high as it used to be say, 10 years ago when it usually was between 80 and 110...

You can check it from yourself, all the yearly data for Mexico City atmospheric conditions can be obtained from here.