Slashdot Mirror
China Chokes On Smog So Bad That Planes Can't Land (usatoday.com)
Major cities across northern China choked Monday under a blanket of smog so thick that industries were ordered shut down and air and ground traffic was disrupted. From a report: At least 23 cities issued red alerts for a swath of pollution that has hovered over much of the nation since Friday, China's Xinhua news agency reported. Alerts are expected to remain in effect through Wednesday. Hospitals set emergency procedures in motion to deal with an influx of breathing-related illnesses. Large hospitals in the port city of Tianjin, less than 100 miles southeast of Beijing, saw a surge in asthma and other respiratory issues, China's People's Daily reported. The pollution forced the city to close the highways and caused delays and cancellations for dozens of flights, Xinhua said.
This is what you get with low cost manufacturing!
Trump is right china is gaming the system.
Trump is hobbling the EPA so badly that by the time he's done our smog will be so bad that we can't land airplanes either.
This is what you get with Trump / Putin's anti-environment policies.
Choke on it, fascists.
Trump is hobbling the EPA so badly that by the time he's done our smog will be so bad that we can't land airplanes either.
We'll have the best smog. The yugest smog. We're going to bring 1,000,000 smog manufacturing jobs back to this country.. Our smog will be so great that even the Chinese will be envious.
And not only that I'll build a wall to stop our smog going to Mexico! If Mexican's want our smog they'll have to pay for it!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It's not just their manufacturing. Their transport contributes massively as well.
That said, have you been there?
A billion people are moving from essentially subsistence living to a modern urban lifestyle in the course of 30 years. To achieve this there is mass construction going on everywhere. Construction of everything from roads to power stations to factories. But you are talking a society where lots and lots and lots of people have basically no disposable income, which means the cheapest possible vehicles are the only option. When you go to the absolute bottom of the transport section your efficiency is poor and your pollution is high.
The west already went through this. However they went through this when their population was a fraction of todays levels. It meant that the gross amount of pollution emitted was lower but the per capita level was much higher.
China is trying to control their pollution output, and one of the good things is that technology exists today to reduce it. However we aren't going to see a drop soon unfortunately.
Slashdot can't go more than a few days without the usual article about how backwards the U.S. is and how far advanced China's "green" energy is.
Does this mean that green energy is the cause of all this air pollution?
The two main culprits are Coal burning and auto and truck exhaust.
But you knew that...
I get it though, you were trying to be "cute" with a ridiculous and inflammatory statement about "green" energy.
If Coal burning is "green", then it is the cause of all this air pollution.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Flint proves the need for a strong, empowered EPA.
But of course when a republican governor instructs a republican he appointed to poison Flint's water supply he's going to blame the EPA..
The EPA is of course basically the only organization which can compel republicans to stop poisoning their citizens, so they are de-legitimized and have the hands tied at every step of the way.
As long as the people who care about clean water don't bother voting, republicans will continue to poison our water supply.
Hey, no problem. The air is clean here. We outsource our pollution to China and India.
Corporate CEOs love that stuff. It's what they get measured by.
We save billions of dollars importing products produced for far less than we could and we breathe clean air and drink clean water. If this is losing then I'd hate to see what winning looks like.
That's just it, there's so much smog generating so much lift that the planes physically can't land. Even if they stop the engines it just sits there hovering.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It's not just their manufacturing. Their transport contributes massively as well.
While manufacturing and transport do contribute to air pollution in China, the biggest contributor by far is the use of coal for heating during winter. This is very obvious in northern China, where regulations specify the dates on which heating for buildings start and end. There'll be blue skies and clean air right up to the date when winter heating starts and then heavy smog and air pollution immediately after. This is also why the smog problem is a lot less severe in southern China, even though most of China's manufacturing and economic development over the past two decades were concentrated in the southern regions around Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Why not build the wall out of smog, w/ all its beautiful doors, and whatever, so that they can come in legally!!!
Environmentalists are never happy, next week the smog will be so dense that planes can land on it, and they will likely complain about that too. No pleasing them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The fact that Flint is seen as a major disaster, worthy of much outrage, as opposed to the norm, shows just how good a job the EPA is doing.
In the US we take it for granted that we can go anywhere in the country and the drinking water will be safe and clean. It may taste like ass at times, but we don't have to boil it or worry about getting some kind of stomach virus. We don't have to tell people, "Don't drink the water" like if you go to Mexico or Latin America. We don't have to worry about heavy metals or radioactive materials in our drinking water.
In the US we take it for granted that we can walk outside without the need for surgical face masks or even full on gas-masks because there's a choking cloud of smog in the air. Before Nixon created the EPA, we had cities that looked a lot like China.
In the US we take it for granted that the sky looks BLUE and not ORANGE because only the longer red wavelengths of light can cut through the smog. Read some of the stories about how before the Beijing Olympics, when the government seeded the clouds to temporarily flush all the smog, people would wander outside and marvel at the blue sky.
All of these things are because of the EPA, and they don't even scratch the surface of what that agency does. So, once again, because cases like Flint are so far outside of the norm that they shock and anger us, just goes to show how good a job the EPA is actually doing.
The Republican governor appointed a Democrat 'emergency manager'. They knew Flint was basically unfixable and that they would shortly be putting the blame on the last person in charge, hence the booby prize was given to a D (but he was forced to live in a budget).
IIRC that last lead water pipe was put in the Flint ground in the 1930s. What year did they go bankrupt again? What party ran the city for the last 70+ years?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And not only that I'll build a wall to stop our smog going to Mexico!
That is the first reasonable way I've heard to get Mexico to pay for the wall. You, sir, have my respect.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Depends on your geography.
Some cities get inversions, which bottles up all of the cities pollution for weeks.
In my hometown, I've seen it so bad visibility was 10 ft/3 meters and you could taste the air.
Even in a deep red state, people can care a lot about clean air.
Especially when it prevents you from driving.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Flint (D) got its water from Detroit (D). They were building a pipeline to the lake. When the pipeline was 1 year from being complete Detroit (D) told them 'sign this 20 year contract for water or fuckoff, tomorrow.' They had little choice but get their water elsewhere. The city emergency manager (D, but appointed by R) got the water from a local river, intending to use it for a year. At the same time, a water company employee (D) took it on himself to stop using a chemical to seal lead pipes and prevent them from leaching.
Somehow this is someone else's fault. Cities run their own water companies, it was never Michigan's problem.
Birmingham is a shithole, so is Vacaville. All bankrupt due to their own incompetence.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is such a bigly idea, it's YUUUGE!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A Canadian invented a way to almost completely eliminate cow farts
Scientist discovers particular seaweed reduces methane to nearly zero in cow burps, farts
A P.E.I. farmer has helped lead to a researcher's discovery of an unlikely weapon in the battle against global warming: a seaweed that nearly eliminates the destructive methane content of cow burps and farts.
Joe Dorgan began feeding his cattle seaweed from nearby beaches more than a decade ago as a way to cut costs on his farm in Seacow Pond. He was so impressed with the improvements he saw in his herd, he decided to turn the seaweed into a product.
"There's a mixture of Irish moss, rockweed and kelp, and just going to waste," he said. "And I knew it was good because years ago, our ancestors, that's what they done their business with."
Then researcher Rob Kinley caught wind of it.
The agricultural scientist, then at Dalhousie University, helped test Dorgan's seaweed mix, and discovered it reduced the methane in the cows' burps and farts by about 20 per cent.
Kinley knew he was on to something, so he did further testing with 30 to 40 other seaweeds. That led him to a red seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis he says reduces methane in cows burps and farts to almost nothing.
"I was testing one day a series of samples when all of a sudden it looked like my instruments were having problems, and I wasn't able to see emissions from one particular sample," he said. "So I did it over and over again and lo and behold the methane emissions were eliminated.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is a bad title. Like other noted, planes can land without visibility, and TFA does not tell about landing problem.
What TFA says is that planes are grounded in an attempt to curb pollution.
You are correct on many points but I think you missed another very important point. China is doing now what Europe and America did in the late 1700s and early 1800s. They are going through an industrial revolution. When this happened in the UK they had air quality issues too, possibly much worse than this even.
This is a classic example of those not learning from history are doomed to repeat it. China is a society built by the vision of a small group of people which has been imposed on the rest of the population by force and fear. It's also quite possible these elite few do know their history, know that their policy puts the public under such misery and threatens their health but they don't care. They would much rather take a path that creates greater wealth and power for themselves even if that means the rest suffer.
China though could be a lesson for the rest of the world. I keep hearing on how we need more government to control global warming and pollution. Well, China has a society that has a near total control of every aspect of the lives of the people in their nation and they have the worst air quality in the world. A question I have for these big government types, once the government has the ability to tell the people what kind of toilets they can buy, the kind of light bulbs, cars, soft drinks, clothing, the size of their house, the number of children, and on and on then what motivation would they have to care if the people don't like the air quality that their policies produced? If it takes smart people in government to tell us what to do to make our lives better then what is there to make sure that it is smart people that remain in government? Free elections perhaps? Freedom to speak?
The people in China are constantly lied to by the government, no doubt "for their own good" in the eyes of the government. The Chinese government claims this smog is the result of a natural event. They also know better because they have shutdown factories in response.
China is a polluted hell hole because they are going through an industrial revolution. It will remain a polluted hell hole until the people are free to choose who is in government and are free to speak out against their government. We've seen this before. History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This is what you get with low cost manufacturing!
Trump is right china is gaming the system.
Don't forget the thousands of coal mine deaths to fuel the factories that produce the inexpensive shit that the oligarchs want made there in order to sell cheaply in America.
And don't forget the Chinese multi-millionaires coming to the USA in throngs to invest their dirty profits buying up real-estate, which should be illegal.
If you think China is anything close to fair or treats people fair, watch this.