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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."
Yet another article that assumes Beijing = China. Sigh. It's like there's only one city in China. Imagine if European journalists assumed New York City was all there was to know about the entire USA. And China is even bigger, and has four times the population! I think the problem is due to the fact that most Western journalists live in Beijing, and they are not really interested in reporting about anywhere else other than where they live. This is called closed-mindedness and provincialism if it occurs in rural people, but now it's suddenly acceptable?
If you want the real story, watch Chai Jing's documentary "Under the Dome" which tells you about all of China, not just the capital city. It was banned by the government so you know it's good. China has laws, but they're not enforced and the government regulators are either corrupt or falling down on the job. If they actually do crack down and take heavily polluting trucks off the road, they'll be accused of slaughtering the peasants with excessive regulations. Considering the history of the Communist Party in China, this accusation hurts badly and the CCP is anxious to bury this part of its Marxist past.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There's an exhibit called Bodies Revealed that showcases preserved human bodies - all of them from China - to show what our insides look like and just how big some of our organs are (they had one display that was just nerves, which was absolutely astounding). One of the exhibits shows off the lungs. I don't know if there are any pictures, but there are MASSIVE black spots on the lungs, the kind you'd expect to see in someone who smoked a lot. I remember the tour guide saying when someone asked that the black spots weren't from smoking, but from breathing in polluted air day after day. They weren't quite as bad as smoker's lungs, which get damaged over time from the heat of the cigarette smoke, but apart from that were identical in every way.
When I lived in the Bay Area, there was a fire at a recycling plant that caused some reading to go 400, or 500 or something in Redwood City. It might have been particulates, not sure.
Yeah, that's a teensy bit down from Hiller. There was some suspicion of them not being able to handle the recycling load, and "accidentally" setting the materials on fire (the plant itself was untouched). Other theories included spontaneous combustion due to thermal rise during decomposition (only it was mostly paper).
It was particulates in the 76 or so today, due to smoke from the wild fires (which are actually pretty far away). Everyone got an emergency services robocall. Most places in China are about that, according to the monitoring mapping service (aqicn.org), but there are some that are running about double. Highest I saw was a 953 on the China/Kyrgystan border (kinda insane), and a couple real hotspots around Beijing.
I found it interesting that they shut down the San Francisco station (it must have been showing numbers that were unfavorable to San Francisco tourism). Worst in the U.S. is Medford Oregon; most other hot spots are in Washington State. There's a 229 in the Czech Republic. Russia has exactly one monitoring station; I'm going to guess it reports whatever Putin wants.
If you are interested in the world map (navigable Google Maps map), it's here (I left it centered on China):
http://aqicn.org/map/californi...
Cigarettes are quite expensive, so getting 40 a day for free is not that bad.
That being said, Beijing is located is a small depression and that results in all the heavier particles in the air hovering over the city instead of dispersing over a larger area.
This effect is strongest in the winter, as I experienced it when I visited the city about a decade ago. However, there are spontaneous "clearing events" when sudden winds blow away the smoke, and then the difference in the quality of the air is quite striking.
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...
Xi'an makes one list but not the other, that just comes to show how reliable these lists are. The rule of thumb here is that when you are going to work and you find yourself wishing that you could echolocate like a bat to find the subway station because you can't see your hand in front of your face due to smog then it's time to consider moving to a cleaner place. The sad thing is that many cities in China fit that description because of the fact that for decades the Chinese Govt. has not cared one bit about environmental issues because it lowered production costs. There are free market pundits in the west who'd like us to follow the Chinese example based on the premise that environmental regulations get in the way of companies making profit. If you want to know where that leads take a look at China. However, the Chinese public is getting fed up with this and that explosion in Tianjin is just the latest drop into the cup of their dissatisfaction (It's absolutely unbelievable that those firemen were sent into a hazardous chemicals storage facility without knowing what was kept there, simply because even the facilities operators didn't know). It will be interesting to watch what happens when that cup fills up and flows over.
Under libertarianism, you cant agress against others. Pollution is not ok under libertariranism and never has been. The pollution on china is a tratdegy of the commons, the state has not allowed people the right to own air nor defended or even acknowledged any such right exists. That's what you get in communism, not libertarianism.