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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.'"
That would be such a neat ad campaign. You could show Mao smiling as he holds a bus pass. I think it would work well in California too.
If only they would do this for the right reasons... They'll be cleaning up for the olympics but it will all go back to hell as soon as it's over. They should try to solve the problem permanently instead of suppressing it so others think it's livable over there.
Shouldn't that be "athletes are at risk for low performance if the air quality cannot be brought up to acceptable levels"?
China is the one of the worst, if not THE WORST environmental disasters this world has ever had. They are having one HELL of a time trying to clean up the mess they've created for themselves.
By the time the Olympics comes around, I hope that the Chineese government has enough Egg Foo Young on their face to cause them to loose face to the whole world.
Then maybe, just maybe they'll clean up their act. Naaaa, what I am thinking.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Zero's an even number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number)
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Just got an email from my PCB Fabrication house :
"For our Printed Circuit Board customers using Chinese vendors, please be aware of the following air quality policy announcement from Chinese authorities:
In preparation for the Olympics, China has announced a factory shutdown for 9 weeks to clear smog and improve air quality in a 200 kilometer radius of Beijing. The shutdown begins July 17th and will extend until September 20th. Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Shandong provinces are affected by the shutdown.
If air quality does not improve before the start of the Olympics, there may be an expansion of the shutdown. There are concerns there could also be a bottleneck at two main ports. "
Wonder how it will affect Chip prices
Yeah, 'cause real men get pollution-related lung cancer!
Ummm, no kidding? What does he mean, "arguably"? It's like how Athens temporarily incarcerated the city's thousands of stray dogs and then turned them all loose when the Games ended.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Arguably these are all short-term measures, just designed to control air quality for the time when the Olympics are on
Is it obvious to anyone else that that statement should be a sign? If you have to reduce pollution so athletes don't cripple their records, shouldn't you, I don't know, try and stop it forever? I honestly hope no records are broken, and that every athlete in an event outside performs terribly compared to history, so hopefully a few more people might open their damned eyes.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
When mom comes around saying he can go play when his room is clean, he frantically shoves the mess into the closet...
But how are they going to stop the sand storms coming from Mongolia?
50 million chinese blowing the other way.
It will be interesting how this will play out in the social/economical dynamics of China.
Will the employees be paid during the shutdown?
Have downstream manufactures in other areas made provisions to get alternate input sources?
Will there be any unexpected interruptions in the supply chain? Either domestic consumption or export goods.
If downstream factories in other areas have to shutdown there will not be government support, there will be unhappy workers.
Having unhappy idle workers while the government is telling everyone to be happy about the Olympics is not a good thing.
Also if US orders for Christmas are down because of US domestic fears then some idled factories might not find it easy to restart.
NOW I GOTTA BUILD CITY WALL TO KEEP CITY BUILDINGS CLEAN OR CITY PEOPLE GONNA COMPLAIN! GODDAMN MONGORIANS!!!
(string of text to get around caps filter, asdfbvukavfkavukabuywerbvfyabsvsdbfjkdhafbukaddfbwdfghweynetuakfukyvbuaaaf)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
athletes are at risk for low performance if the air quality cannot be brought down to acceptable levels
Uh..call me crazy, but shouldn't this have been something that should have been taken into serious consideration before choosing a place like this for the Olympics? I mean, I may not be an expert on human physiology, but it would seem to me that having clean air for the Olympic competitors to breathe would have ranked among one of the highest in the checklist for selecting a location for the Olympics.
rj
I usually hate following the Olympic because it's such a bore.
This year, all the stuff "around" the competition is WAY more interesting:
-How many people will be arrested for silly things?
-Will the athletes choke on the smog?
-Will anything be allowed to be broadcasted out of China?
-How many Chinese will try to defect?
-And of course: The badly translated sign of the day.
I don't think leaders of China will be able to stand have a spot light on them for the full 2 weeks. Imagine the fallout from regular Chinese people getting unfiltered news from the mouths of so many non-controlled people!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
well it depends on what their smoking, a bit of crack/crystal meth or pcp may actually give them a boost.
I'm all for setting up this alternative drugie Olympics, if altitude training is ok, or lifting weights then why not a crack pipe.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
With people considering a space elevator, why not consider a space vacuum cleaner? A long tube with one end in space and the other split like, say, a flying spaghetti monster, with multiple ends to suck up particulates. And little dogs.
Happens in every olympics.
During the Atlanta Olympics, many homeless people were taken for a bus ride to different part of the state.
Many of the homeless were jailed for silly offenses.
http://www.straight.com/olympic-cities-punish-poor
Any number that is even can be represneted in the terms of 2j where j is an integer any odd number can be represented in 2j-1 where J is an integer.
So...
2j=0
j=0/2
j=0
0 is an integer. So 0 is even.
Now lets check to see if 0 is odd.
2j-1=0
2j=1
j=1/2
j=0.5
0.5 is not an integer so 0 is not odd
therefore 0 is even.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...INCINERATED the city's thousands of stray dogs.
I couldn't see how that would help the air quality. I guess the word "temporarily" should have clued me in.
Its fine and fair to blame the Chinese government for not bringing up tougher industrial anto-pollution laws. We are also being narrow-minded in saying this is alll a Chinese problem.
The Western world has made China one giant production facility. All the really toxic production facilities - PCBs, paper (increasingly), steel and other metals, etc. are all being made in China. And they're making our clothes, food (which I *dont* buy), and so on. The shipping yards in China are the largest in the world for good reason.
I'm buying made in the USA or Canada - first, less pollution in transportation, saves jobs, and (should) be higher quality and safer.
China is overpopulated, yes, and thats a problem they (and we all have) to work to solve. Even if they had reduced pollution say by even 80% over the last decade, there's still too much being produced and too many people. We'd still have a problem.
I don't think for many reasons it was wise of IOC to approve China. Living in the city of the host of the next Games, development ain't all that environmentally friendly either. Sea-Sky highway being one of them.
There seems to be a lot of incredulity about Beijing's ability to clean up for the Olympics, but you are all forgetting that the government here is doesn't have the same limitations of a democracy, and can implement massive policy changes immediately. There are shutting down over 350 (!) factories down here, and have taken 60% of the cars off of the road. Most construction has stopped. I was here on Sunday, the first day this process went into effect, and we had a brilliant blue sky. Things are a little hazy again today, but they're not done shutting down everything yet. Expect a relatively pollution free Olympics. Sorry to rain on your hate parade guys. This is only a temporary solution though, which is amazing considering they spent 40 billion on infrastructure change to support the cleanup effort.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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.
Mexico tried the whole "even or odd" license plate thing a while back (for similar reasons) and it was an epic failure.
People either bought another car, usually an older, more-polluting model, or just ignored the law. The result was that Mexico's air quality got WORSE from trying to restrict vehicles on the road because most 2nd (or 3rd) cars that were being purchased were older models with almost no pollution control equipment and higher fuel consumption.
I don't know what it takes to buy a car in China, or how the government regulates license plate numbers, but if it's in any way similar to Mexico, this will fail too.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
Unfortunately this won't be as interesting as you think, because they're truly world-class at show, behind-the-scenes action and changing facts by political pressure.
-How many people will be arrested for silly things?
If there are any foreigners arrested, the authorities will claim that they were arrested for offenses not related to politics, and authentic-looking footage will be presented. Rejecting the footage as fake will be regarded as anti-Chinese agitation. Domestic arrestees will be held until the end of the Olympic, and will not be allowed to make public statements under severe penalties (assuming there will be any, which I doubt).
-Will anything be allowed to be broadcasted out of China?
Yes, you won't notice anything unusual. Instead of trying to control the news broadcasts, they will control reality.
-How many Chinese will try to defect?
Zero. There is no noticeable "resistance movement" in China. They really believe in their government, even we think it's evil.
-And of course: The badly translated sign of the day.
All the Zhonglish you see originates from factories which try to save on packaging design. There are lots of people who can speak proper English in China, and they won't be saving on translators or anything that has to do with the Olympics, because it's a matter of life and death.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
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:
Or how about chemical pollution in the US until the 1970s?
China's position on pollution is no different than what other countries went through... the difference is just one of scale.
How does China get a pass on this? They are supposed to be a modern superpower just like the U.S. They are not what I would call a "developing nation", and produce most of the advanced electronics we use today.
The failure they have is totally unrelated to to past problems the U.S. and others have seen with pollution. The effects are well known, as are means of controlling emissions. There simply is no will to impose any controls.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Like the old saying: anyone can quit smoking; it takes a real man to face cancer.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I've been reading this guy's blog off and on because he's posting pictures of the air quality. Compare this picture with this one to see what difference is being made.
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Well you should read the article; they tried to move the factories but they couldn't find them because of the smog!!
The racist overtones (Egg Foo Young?) are unnecessary.
Well, being that the common expression is "egg on their face", and "egg foo young" is a common dish at a Chinese restaurant, it seems more an attempt at humour than racism.
Not sure how many people remember or care to know about the games of 1980 held in Moscow, but similar things happened there in order to promote the image of the USSR.
All people with questionable reputation were ordered to leave the city and the communist party spent a lot of time and money to ensure that everything was top notch (well, at least by the Soviet standards). Guess what happened when the games stopped?
If people cannot see through this dog and pony show that every country is going to put up in order to look good, then yeah, China's new green image is a great success!
I know that it my sound extreme. but the reality is this:
I just received a notice from my Printed circuit Board vendor in China stating that they will be unable to provide deliveries during this time due to mandatory shutdowns. thus i will have to resort to expensive U.S manufacturing. If im doing that then i assume others are doing the same. perhaps on a different scale then what my little company uses. As a whole this has to be effecting the average worker that works as such facilities there in china. Poor guy who was bringing home that 2$ a day now brings home none. on a larger scale you will see starvation, because i know more factory's then just PCB's manufacturing will be shut down.
that 2$ a day buys grain to eat. how will he earn his grain?
people might argue how this will effect consumer goods. but don't forget there is a human factor involved.
Another related demand on oil is that China is building a strategic petroleum reserve, similar to the one in the USA. Now, in theory, that build-out is still ongoing, and the fill rate is relatively slow. However, given the extreme importance of the diesel supplies during the Olympics, I would not be surprised if the Chinese SPR is being built and filled a lot quicker than publicized.
China's SPR barely gets mentioned in the media, but it's huge, though, smaller than that of the USA. They aim to store the equivalent of several weeks of their crude imports.
Is it really enough to affect the world price? Who knows, certainly not I.
And if you go to the Olympics, you may want to avoid the "chicken"...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Why are the Chinese, who have a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor manufacturing industry and have had fusion weapons for 40 years, making the same mistakes as a country that had barely even seen a transistor, and was 5 years away from developing fusion weapons?
Please compare like with like.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863