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China To Begin Submitting Air Pollution Reports
smitty777 writes "China will start to publish air pollution reports, possibly in response to reports from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing which has been publishing its own data. This report is significant in that it's based on the PM2.5 standard, which measures the more harmful particles that are less than 2.5 microns. This comes on the heels of a separate report that lists China as the worst polluter worldwide. According to this report, China now produces 6,832 m tons of CO2, a 754% increase since 1971. While the U.S. is in second at 5,195 m, this represents an increase of only 21%. This article notes 'the rapid growth in emissions for China, India, and Africa. This will continue as their middle classes buy houses and vehicles. The growth in Middle East emissions is staggering, a reflection of their growing oil fortunes.' While we're on the subject of India, their pollution levels are thought to be responsible for a dense cloud of fog that is so thick it created a cold front, and is repsonsible for a number of deaths."
Half the US population will pretend that scientific consensus does not exist as they drive automobiles created with the fruits of science, the Chinese will fudge their numbers, and nothing will change.
Our CO2 output has only grown 21% since 1970. We simply MUST do better.
With just a little more effort on each persons part, we can once again be in first place.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
According to this report, China now produces 6,832 m tons of CO2, a 754% increase since 1971.
Why not going back to numbers of middle age? That should be a quite impressive increase then. For anyone who knows Chinese history, it's obvious that activity in 1971 wasn't high, so it really doesn't make sense at all. And by the way, since when CO2 is one of the worth polluting component? Judging by the short version, it doesn't at all make me want to read TFA. Then I still did, and TFA is crap. Come to Shanghai, and I'll show you that the biggest issue isn't CO2!!!
I guess it shouldn't be surprising anymore that the concept of "per capita" is once again completely omitted to make a headline rather than a point?
7000 MTon vs 5000 MTon... hmm doesn't sound impressive enough, let's try 754% vs 21%!! Oh my god!
How about 5.4 Ton/person (China) vs. 16.7 Ton/person (U.S.)?
Or better yet, how about 90+% of U.S. consumer needs being shifted to China?
Not only is China already more efficient in what it does for the CO2 it's producing compared to the U.S., it's supplying the rest of the world too. What's the complaint here?
This is a funny numbers game. CO2 is far from the worst greenhouse gas, so all these people posting their reactions about Americans and their big suv's, cars whatever, need to look more closely at which gases cause the most greenhouse effects, and where these gases come from.
You can fit me into the "greenhouse deniers" if you like, but I'm suspicious of pretty much all the data that is surrounding this issue -- there is too much money to be made on "popular" science like this for there to be any real hope of getting sound scientific data right now...
I've also yet to hear anyone make a reasonable sounding proposal to make any positive changes, its always up in the air stuff like "We all need to hold hands and plant trees and drive less" -- that's absurd. Lowering pollution is a good idea whatever the effects on temperature so I'm all for this goal, but to actually get to the point of seriously damaging the economy and lives we've all come to like living isn't going to happen and shouldn't. These are scientific issues and probably have scientific solutions.
People seem to want impossible things on this issue. Hippies are an illogical group of people who work solely in knee-jerk reactions and boogey-man scare tactics, they just complain without making much sense. Coal power bad, but nuclear is bad too! Damn, these goes our safest and best way to generate power. It all has to be hippie-power, hydro and solar. Yeah, well, if that worked then why wouldn't they use it, they can fleece us on power bills with solar or hydro just as easily as coal or nuke.
I don't see a lot of logic and reason with this entire issue.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Per person you say?
Qatar is number one at 53.5 tons per person, followed by Trinidad and Tobago at 37.3 tons oddly enough.
Going down the list you find Australia to be the number one developed polluter per person at 18.9 tons, giving it 11th place. Immediately afterwords at 12th place is the US at 17.5 tons per person. We Canadians are 15th with 16.4 tons per person, and going down you find Russia at 12.1 tons per person or 23rd.
Germany is 37th with 9.6 tons per person, Greece is 41st with 8.8 tons, The UK is 43 with 8.5 tons. And France who can forget them at 6.1 tons, they are 65th.
For the drum roll, China is number 78th at a mere 5.3 tons per person.
All per the US Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC)
Juxtaposition is not an argument.
What argument do you think was being made? The summary just grouped separate environmental reports into the one post. Do you also think that it was a problem that they mentioned more than one country when the story title just mentioned China?
Seriously how capitalist can you be?
How do you arrive at this premise? That the free market is entitled to write whatever rules it likes to beat china. That a persons worth and rights is proportional to his income, yes this does happen but there is no ethical or moral justification for it.
Wrong. When we talk about mitigating pollution, per capital numbers are meaningless. In the context of climate change, the potential harm is caused by the totality of greenhouse gas output. When government intervention is the only effective solution, we are forced to look at the problem and its solution as bounded by what each government is able to control. Since the Chinese government has power over the greatest amount of pollution, its participation in reduction treaties is essential, and its responsibility to the future the greatest.
You can bring up the role of the US in the past, and its role as the top contributor to the problem, but that would be another argument altogether, and it still would not change the responsibility to act that is borne by every country that has not had year-to-year reduction.
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This graph is more interesting - it shows Co2 emissions per capita against population (so area of rectange = absolute emissions). Being able to compare the area visually gives a better indication as to the degree of the problem in each nation. This graph shows another interesting thing - responsibility for cumulative/historical co2 emissions. Since co2 stays in the air for 50 to 100 years, the vast majority of co2 that is in the air right now was actually put there by the nations that were industrialised throughout the last century - ie. the US and Western Europe.
btw. The author of that book also addresses the issue of China:
What about China, that naughty “out of control” country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.
So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example.
Whether "it is fair to share CO2 emission rights equally across the world's population" is an ethical question, as is the question of who should pay to clean up a problem like this, but it is hard to construct a moral argument that a Westerner should be entitled to emit more co2 than a person born in another nation. Why should we have this entitlement?
And if that isn't consensus, I don't know what is.
I too wish people would stop getting this wrong, as it's blocking the conversation about what to do about climate change.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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I see where you are coming from but GDP still a terribly unfair way to do it and i would expect make it very difficult for other countries to compete (your phone factory gets a heavy tax because we patented the efficient way), so they will never sign up.
Upping your GDP by selling luxury items that consume large amounts of energy such as a 6 litre Dodge Viper should not be a good reason for extra consumption of CO2.
I do agree that someone has to make efficient technology to replace the old though but this is not measured by GDP. Some kind of manufacturing metric could be factored in to the system.
You still are equating a right to pollute to a countries income/lifestyle
Just to clear up any ambiguities. I am not saying you think this is OK either, just that your justification requires it.
People in tents can't afford a lot of technologies used to pollute and therefore do not produce a lot of CO2. They will also not benefit from the car factory producing cars which will be bought mostly by "rich" or western people. Everyone suffers from global warming yet only the rich caused it.
We are producing more CO2 that can can be sustained (discuss the valididity of global warming elsewhere) you are saying that the rich can pollute more (take the tent dwellers share) because they are generating GDP, making money. The need for most luxury items that pollute is is a lifestyle thing and are not a right or necessity.
I guess you don't say it but i think you end up implying that the west can pollute more because we produce items needed for a western lifestyle. We could be using our excess money to lower our CO2 output to be closer to theirs and give up what can't be made sufficiently low carbon.
Since you are all about efficiency: What is the per capita emissions in terms of people who actually benefit or live the life associated with it?
Here's the thing you either don't know or choose to ignore about China: It is not uniform in the way the population lives. There are two Chinas, more or less. The "city" China is the one you always hear about. Large, modern (in most ways) cities very densely packed, lots of heavy industry and so on. This is, of course, where the pollution happens. Then there's the other China, the rural China. Here the people are peasants in a very literal sense. Subsistence farming, no access to modern amenities, education, etc. The majority live like this.
The life of rural China is why people are so willing and eager to live in dense cities and work long hours for low pay. It is better than the alternative life.
Ok well the problem when you talk per capita emissions is you can't pretend as though the rural citizens are benefiting from them, or generating them. They live a lifestyle without all those modern conveniences. So saying that China is efficient because you factor in their low emissions is a lie. It is not, it simply has a lot of citizens that still live a pre-industrial lifestyle.
So is mercury, and I don't think jumping that up in concentration is a good idea.
Thesis disproven.
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