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US Embassy Categorizes Beijing Air Quality As 'Crazy Bad'
digitaldc writes "Pollution in Beijing was so bad Friday the US embassy, which has been independently monitoring air quality, ran out of conventional adjectives to describe it, at one point saying it was 'crazy bad.' The embassy later deleted the phrase, saying it was an 'incorrect' description and it would revise the language to use when the air quality index goes above 500, its highest point and a level considered hazardous for all people by US standards. The hazardous haze has forced schools to stop outdoor exercises, and health experts asked residents, especially those with respiratory problems, the elderly and children, to stay indoors."
Desperately seeking emphatic adjective...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
When I was in Beijing a few years ago, after a while the days there started to feel kind of like the day before you're going to catch a cold.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Crazy bad, when "embarrassingly polluted" just doesn't do justice.
.. this would be an idea state: no EPA at all, and nothing to work against any company in order to make a profit.
I found it hard to believe or describe when I visited (in 2004). From one block north, the Forbidden City was obscured by smog on a cloudless day. It otherwise felt like you were smoking all the time.
www.cgstock.com
A spokes person at the embassy was also quoted as saying, "The dude who said the first statement is all retarded and is a total dick. He always causing drama. Our bad, we cool"
If you run away from smog every time it comes around the smog is going to start thinking we are weak. Then we are going to have to listen to the smog whenever it tell us to do something. We need to stand up to the smog and show it that we are not just a bunch of overly socialized western pansies. I demand that we give all our kids smog masks! The smog masks will supply a steady stream of high quality smog to school children, who will naturally become smog tolerant. The smog tolerant children will go on to create a new world free untethered from the requirements of clean air and pollution control devices. These new smog tolerant children will then be able to compete against the Chinese who are fed a steady diet of smog since birth.
-If you don't want to turn into a frog, you better eat some smog.
-Elliot Weise
Isn't the air quality "crazy bad" in Atlanta on any given day, by this same scale? One has to wonder about the accuracy of such measurements.
~ now you know
When will the youth of China decide they've had enough of conformity and respect for authority? China has raised it standard of living in recent decades but they still suffer from a severe lack of basic freedoms, corruption, and choking pollution. The civil rights movement and Vietnam triggered the events of the 60's in the USA. When will the same happen in China?
I mean really, this is proof that a truly free market benefits everyone. I mean if people can't go outside, they can't commit crimes OR hurt the children!
The bad air quality is a prime example of an externalized cost.
Many people claim the reason for offshoring is wages, but that's only part of it...
Much of the savings comes from the ability to operate a factory in China under less stringent rules - less labor protections, less safety, less pollution controls, etc.
Eventually China will crack down on polluters (they already do on an ad hoc basis, such as briefly during the 2008 Olympics) improving air quality, but also increasing production costs, which will then push many companies to offshore to the next cheaper place where such costs can again be externalized.
Ron
p.s. why is the comment entry window so narrow? More breakage - Slashdot was more usable in 1998 than it is now, but hey I guess this is progress... bah!
I lived there for several years and there were some days that were pretty bad, but those were mostly due to weather conditions - particularly the dust/sand storms, which were some times quite spectacular.
Most of the time I was wondering what all the fuss (made by USians mostly) was about. Of course, I wasn't conducting scientific analysis, but I'll bet it's not nearly as poor as the reports might make you think. I hear some cities in the US have trouble too...
Quite amusing though, but not of much interest otherwise, if you ask me.
Max.
No, you have libertarians and conservatives confused with anarchists. That's typical talk from the socialist/communist faction: "When you guys talk about enforcing the Constitution that means you guys don't want any government at all!"
Revive the Constitution.
Where does the air inside come from? I always thought it came from outside. If all the air outside is terribly polluted, then isn't the air inside just as bad? I mean, I don't think most buildings have any serious air filtering, do they?
When I visited Beijing during the summer six years ago, the Imperial Vault and the Hall of Prayers at the Temple of Heaven weren't visible from each other. According to this site, they're only about 360 meters apart. Smog limited the visibility at ground level to less than a quarter of a mile, and it has gotten worse since then.
In other news, the US Embassy called Google's decision to leave mainland China "totally messed up," claimed the widely-acclaimed film The Town "actually kind of sucks balls," and that the animated show "Family Guy" was "actually not all that funny."
Crazy Bad
Wicked Bad
Bogus
Chill
Sweet
I say close the embassy down. Why do we ask our embassy workers to continue being exposed to a health risk that we clearly wouldn't tolerate here in the US? If countries were pulling their citizens out and recommending against travel in Beijing, China would at least have more incentive to address the problem.
I would take "crazy bad" air quality for a decent job at this point.
This is what happens when pedantics meet each other.
Nothing to see here, move along:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952
It's probably an inevitable phase in development.
-- Sig down
Pollution is a problem in China and education is a problem in the USA.
The other very likely alternative is the embassy staff were politically connected so qualifications were considered irrelevant.
The greater good for whom?
If only they'd learned from the negative examples provided by Europe and the USA's journeys through the Industrial Revolution.
Money talks and bullshit walks.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
They got a pass on pollution as a "developing nation" so of course they signed Kyoto. There was no down side for China.
Note the article says GHG emissions in China have been increasing 10% per year since 1990.
China has been building two new coal power plants per week for years.
I suppose if the USA has a tradition of presidents referring to serious, highly complex, global geopolitical situations in terms of cowboy movies, "good guys", "bad guys" etc. then having a diplomatic service that refers to local meteorological conditions as "crazy bad" is merely following form....
I have far greater respect for what the Americans did (not sign up) then they many countries that sign up and not live up to their obligations.
Seriously, I think you should get a pass for saying "crazy bad" when taking up smoking would actually make the air you're breathing somewhat cleaner because at least you're sucking some of it through a filter. "Dangerous" or "Deadly" are other options. I'd be pretty pissed off if the air where I live was brown, but that's probably just because I'm used to it being pretty clean as air goes. That is largely thanks to the EPA, and when the power and other companies whine about too much regulation, it's because they want more room to make the air brown. Of course if we didn't have all these goddamn hysterical fucking hippies who squeal like stuck pigs the moment you mention building a nuclear plant, the air here in the USA would be cleaner still.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But I have a bit of asthma, and I don't think I could enjoy the city lugging around my own air supply.
On the bright side, you could invent solid pneumatic tires by filling them with Beijing air.
About a decade ago, I visited China and landed somewhere outside of Beijing. After stepping off the plane I looked almost straight up into the sky and saw the moon. It had a dark copper tint similar to how it looks during an eclipse, and I thought, "Oh wow, a lunar eclipse!" However, when it looked the same way the next night, I knew it wasn't an eclipse.
I'm from around Los Angeles, whose nickname is "Smogangeles", and I never saw a moon like that except near the horizon. When the sun or moon is near the horizon, light travels at an angle through the atmosphere, and thus travels through far more molecules of both air and smog. It has to be really smoggy to get the same effect straight up.
Table-ized A.I.
I think you've got it! And you might be the only one. After all, my snide, tongue-in-cheek comment now has a "5, insightful" moderation, and all the mods were "insightful". So none of them got it.
I did like the AC who wrote "pedantics" for "pedants", though. I wonder if that was intentional. Sorta how I always like to mispell the word "misspell" in spelling-flame discussions. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Percent of global emissions:
China: 17%
US 16%
You are wrong.
The US has been restricting emissions since then, while China has been building TWO COAL POWER PLANTS PER WEEK since then.
We "snubbed Kyoto" because we knew it wouldn't do any good if countries like China got a complete pass and Russia was baselined at its ultra-polluting communist era. All Kyoto was designed to do was siphon money from the US and EU to other countries.
USA is not the biggest polluter by any measurement and it's emissions don't even come remotely close to 1/3rd. The 50 cent party should upgrade its fact sheet.
Well, they stateted:
The hazardous haze has forced schools to stop outdoor exercises, and health experts asked residents, especially those with respiratory problems, the elderly and children, to stay indoors.
The US ambassador to Los Angeles stated, "Fuck that god-damned mother-fucking scientific equipment shit! I just needs to take one breath out of the window to knows that this shit ain't good for me!"
"Pimp my air." Sounds right.
A certain central European country that I know, pays diplomats a "tropical supplementary allowance" for working in Washington, DC. Like anyone would think of calling DC a jungle . . .
The US ambassador to Philadelphia could not be reached for comments, because he was with his advisers in his Think Tank at the Jersey Shore. His office did release a statement that the ambassador likes his cheesesteak wid provolone and onions? Youse guys?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I find it rather amusing that the responses here can be broadly classified into two groups:
- A group that idealizes China for their dedication to hard work and education. The two are very positive traits for any society. However, this group tends to ignore the rest of what is very wrong with China these days. Not only pollution, but the whole lack of basic freedoms issue.
- The group that while seeing the problems with China tend to ignore what may be good things in China and thinks that the U.S. is going the fascist way. For this group I have a few words: Do you get your fat asses out of bed on election day and vote? Or are you just too lazy for that? If you dont vote you must stop complaining. And don't give me the s***t about not voting because you don't believe in the "system".
Cheers!
Kinda reminds me of my time in South Korea with the Army.
On bad pollution days, I'd finish up a PT run and start hacking up black crap.
I don't smoke. Never have. Never will.
I shudder to even envision how bad it is in China.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Nor should it.
Gone!
You can't just throw false claims around.
You WILL be caught on it.
I'm crazy for inhaling
Air so thick it's veiling
And I'm crazy for breathing you.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
How convenient for you. You're just digging yourself in the sand, without providing a real argument, are you? Perhaps you are confusing being a patriot with defending what is wrong.
I spent a year learning Mandarin in Beijing 15 years ago. The air smelled like burnt soy sauce every day thanks to the coal-fired generators they conveniently located in the heart of the city. I stopped jogging because it was healthier to do so. Can only imagine what another 15 years of 'progress' has done for air quality there.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I'll stick with your first source that gave lie to your claim.
And your quoted source with any credibility contradicts you.
Three years ago I remember stepping off the train in Beijing after riding from Vietnam and seeing the red haze. It was disgusting.
"Shared insanity is an excellent term for the brief turn away from Conservatism (NOT Republicans) that the country underwent, and is now correcting."
Correcting indeed. With the Republicans now controlling the House, they get to appoint a new chair to the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee. The front-runners for the position are:
Joe Barton - He's the guy who apologized to BP for their cruel treatment by the US Federal Government. He also received more campaign contributions from the oil industry than any other member of the House, which makes him an expert on energy policy.
John Shimkus - He quoted the book of Genesis in House testimony as evidence that God promised He would never let bad things happen to the Earth, and He should be entrusted to protect the environment.
Nope, no insanity there.
Here's details about it, from a respected news source:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/366030/november-17-2010/chair-apparent
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
The hazardous haze has forced schools to stop outdoor exercises, and health experts asked residents, especially those with respiratory problems, the elderly and children, to stay indoors."
...had me thinking back to this summer, when alerts for nearly exactly the same thing went on for 2-3 weeks in Boston.
Used to be even worse. The major source of air pollution in Boston? The midwest coal power plants. All that lovely free cheap coal blows right out of the region, and then stalls over the east coast and causes hell for us.
I wish the midwest would stop trying to cram ethanol down our throats, and instead diversify off of corn production. Y'know, maybe some wind turbine production, for example?
Please help metamoderate.
You see, there's absolutely zero proof that pollution is unhealthy (I didn't look, but there isn't)! Besides, the planet is big, and who needs to worry about such things? Just keep dumping garbage in the oceans (it's big, so it's okay), keep using dirty, inefficient energy sources that aren't renewable (pollution is a myth), keep having children over and over (the planet is big and the only problem with overpopulation is a lack of space), and keep creating artificial scarcity so that we can maintain our capitalistic ways (after all, even though pirates aren't stealing anything or harming anyone, they're thieves, but that isn't at all a flaw in our capitalistic society). Surely nothing bad will come of any of that!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
When Tiequan "The Wolf" Zhang made the debut for the WEC (soon to be UFC) 145 division as the first Chinese citizen to fight in the top US MMA league, he had to come to the high altitude of Denver Colorado. They asked him how he was dealing with the altitude and his response was that it wasn't a problem because the air was so clean.
I am just back from China, have stayed in Beijing this Friday (the day the article speaks about). I also visited two other cities, Hefei and Wuhu. I actually thought Beijing air and water were much cleaner than air and water in the two other cities. Tap water in Hefei (central China, 2 million population) strongly smelled sewage, and pollution haze was much thicker than in Beijing.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
If you count emissions based on goods used rather than goods produced (i.e. the pollution generated within the country) then that net exporters that intentionally permit heavy pollution in order to encourage others to outsource to them (like China) would not be counted as causing pollution because they were exporting those goods to other countries.
Why would we reward them for harming the environment in order to improve global competitiveness? Are they somehow entitled to do so because they're poor?
Americans might buy lots of goods from polluting factories, but the Chinese government hardly deserves a pass on allowing the pollution to happen in their own borders.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
A year old, but I doubt things have changed: http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
He isn't claiming China is NOT corrupt but that unlike the US, it is doing things about it. Like executions.
No he isn't:
corruption has been far less than I've seen in the US
He directly is saying that corruption is less than in the US.
China has executed a lot of people, but it is not fixing the corruption.
The clear air during the olympic games. Could never have happened like that in the US.
The government shut down the entire area for 30 days. And the air still wasn't clean, it just was transparent. China has plenty of "clear air days" where the pollution is still high.
They shut down a huge section of the country. They even banned private cars from the roads (of course, many drivers bribed their way back onto the roads). And it rained and carried some of the particulates out of the air. And the air was still dirty.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/etc/090622-beijing-olympics-air-pollution-worse.html
What is there to brag about? The US doesn't need to shut down portions of the country for 30 days to get the air merely to filthy.
Don't pat yourself on the back because your system of corruption is different.
I'm not. I'm patting myself on the back because our corruption is much, much lower. And again, it isn't just Americans who say so.
Again, watch China Blue. There is no comparison to this in the US. Even the biggest factories still don't conform to safety standards, and they the ones who most need to because they actually might be investigated and pressure applied when they make international news for their transgressions. And that's nothing compared to the small factories.
And that's just the factories. It is rampant at the low levels and only tapers off at the very top. And I'm not even getting into Southern China where it's even more lawless. Want to talk about illegal coal mines?
The Chinese have a saying "The mountains are high and the Emperor is very far away". All you need is local buy-in (which bribes help with) and you can get away with nearly anything, until you garner the attention of the party. Then you may be executed, but apparently it's likely enough you'll get away with it that people don't stop trying.
I like China, it feels like freedom. You can make your own way, if you have the money to grease the wheels. But part of this is because of the high levels of corruption. You don't have to worry about the law that much, it's for others.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"the failures coming when each and every one of the industries you mentioned had heavy regulation induced and large government players involved (like Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac)"
Whoa, whoa, whoa.... Fannie and Freddie didn't cause the subprime mess. They were actually pretty late in coming into it. I was involved with that industry for three years, and I don't remember ever seeing a subprime loan bond issued by those agencies. The bonds I do remember seeing are a who's who of the banks and investment houses that closed down (with the notable exception of Goldman).
In fact, a big part of the failing in that industry is to do to the agencies that are the market's attempt at self-regulation: the rating agencies. The pain would not have been so widespread, and the flow of capital would have been much more limited, had the rating agencies correctly modelled stresses on the portfolios of these bonds. The entire industry CDO industry would have been nipped in the bud.
But they were making a mint with CDO issuance (accounting for a small part of their business but a much larger part of their fees) where they were paid by the issuer of the bonds, instead of investors! Imagine how comfortable you would feel buying medication from a company that has three different regulators to pick from and has to pay the regulator for the analysis done on their drug, and the regulators make more money the more drugs get released by these companies.
Some of the problem was caused by regulation, like the need to mark to market, but these regulations exacerbated a problem that was created entirely by the industry itself: it was a classic case of no one bothered doing the due diligence on the loans, because everyone figures someone else had done. The loan issuers figures no one would be buying the loans if they didn't want them, the securitizers were expecting some basic standards in the underwritings of the loans, and the investors were expecting the rating agencies and the issuing companies to ensure the loans were as expected by the product they were buying (the whole incentive, of course, being that the company wouldn't shoot itself in the foot by issuing securities backed by bad loans, the rating agencies were putting their reputations on the line, etc). Of course, in the end, none of these systems of internal checks worked, and companies were actually willing to risk everything they were supposed to be protecting for the money they were making for the simple reason that companies are run by people. As long as people can be irrational, measure risk incorrectly by favoring the potentially more profitable route (ask casinos why they are still in business when everyone knows they skew the odds in their own favor), markets will never be the efficient panacea some libertarians seem to think it is.
The market's role is to match demand with supply, and is best left on it's own when doing that, but "the market" isn't ephemeral, it's people. People always need to be regulated because with the market we're trying to channel their self-interest into common good (by having them provide goods and services others need/want), but that same self-interest can cause the system to break down if not managed. The government's self-interest in getting elected and always being blamed when something happens makes it the natural player in being that regulator.
to show a picture of mel brooks sniffing a can of air.
Yo dawg, I herd you like smog so we put smog in yo smog so you can suffocate while you suffocate.
Medicare hardly works, and private insurance can pay for better coverage with less money.
Now, if only people could find a way to pay for private insurance!
And in the end the improved economy that results is the best antidote to all ills - from extensive travel across the world I have seen that intent from the government matters not at all; a poor people do not and will not take care of themselves or the environment. When you focus primarily on a healthy economy everyone and everything is in fact far better off.
A good economy can paper over a lot of ills for those who share in it. It's unfortunate then that our economic policies have been producing so many comparatively poor people.
Is it bad I'd think we'd be better off with John?
There is no -1 Disagree.