Breathing Beijing's Air Is the Equivalent of Smoking Almost 40 Cigarettes a Day

iONiUM writes: The Economist has a story about how bad the air quality is in Beijing. Due to public outcry the Chinese government has created almost 1,000 air quality monitoring stations, and the findings aren't good. They report: "Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America's highest threshold. That is even worse than the satellite data had suggested. Berkeley Earth's scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing's air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day and calculates that air pollution causes 1.6m deaths a year in China, or 17% of the total. A previous estimate, based on a study of pollution in the Huai river basin (which lies between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers), put the toll at 1.2m deaths a year—still high."

Comments

And it's not even in the top 10 worst.

[Harlequin80]

According to this report no Chinese city gets into the top 10 most polluted....
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/world...

According to this 1 Xi'an is the worst in the world. With Phoenix being the worst American city at 97th worst, LA is 107th, London 171st
http://www.numbeo.com/pollutio...

Article is a bit old, but current data is similar

[piojo]

This article is from April, and their data collection was presumably from some time before that. However, if you check the following map (updated hourly), it looks like the air is still terrible, despite China making some attempts to solve this problem:

http://aqicn.org/map/china/

Re:Beijing is not China

[Namarrgon]

Not that I expect anyone to RTFA of course, but the article is actually a report on Berkeley Earth's study on the 1500-site national air-reporting system, and most of the figures given are for all of China. The only specific Beijing reference is the "40 packs a day" metaphor.

Re:Capitalism is killing them

[DigiShaman]

Two words. Delta Smelt. That is what happens when you have rabid environmental policies run amok.

Re: not shock

[alexgieg]

Exactly when does your pollution become an aggression against me?

The idea is basically that you can make as much pollution you want within your private property, for as long as you want, provided you never, ever, dump that population into anyone else's private property, because dumping anything on another's private property without explicit permission is a violation of the other's private property's rights.

So, anytime a factory produces air pollution and it gets carried by the wind over the factory's borders into a neighbor's land, or anytime a factory produces chemical pollution and it penetrates water lines etc., that's a violation of everyone who got that pollution.

The exception is if the other property owner signed a contract with you by means of which he explicitly allows you to dump their pollution on their terrain. Other than that however, no, in a purely libertarian society you cannot dump pollutants anywhere you want.

And the mechanism to deal with this under a libertarian regime would be what exactly?

Suing the shit out of polluters for violation of property rights until they either start preventing any of their pollutants from leaving their own land and air, or until they go bankrupt, with judges of course being hard core defenders of the property rights of everyone involved, meaning those who had their properties' violated by polluters winning against polluters every single time.

Now, I don't know if any of the above is feasible, but that's the libertarian theory on pollution anyway, because the idea among libertarians is always that the hardest property rights are preserved, in every situation imaginable, the better off everyone is. Thus, the key to understanding libertarianism's solution to any problem is this: think how that situation can be (re)thought in terms of property rights, check which property is being violated, fix that violation, and the problem is solved.

PS.: Obviously, the above applies to "minimum government libertarianism" (a.k.a, minarchism), in which judges and tribunals are expected to exist and to act. The much more radical anarchocapitalist branch of libertarianism, for which no government should exist at all, also has solutions to the problems above, but they tend to involve a lot more guns than the minarchist alternative, as in, A is violating B's property rights? B has the right to shot until A stops. Most libertarians aren't anarchocapitalists though. Anarchocapitalism is loud and visible, but a minority position. Most libertarians have way more common sense than going that route.