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Choked By Smog, Beijing Creates A New Environmental Police Force (csmonitor.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Christian Science Monitor:
A new police force will crack down on environmental offenders in Beijing, city officials announced Saturday, marking the Chinese government's latest attempt to reduce smog... Other measures included cutting coal use by 30 percent in 2017, shutting down 500 higher-polluting factories and upgrading 2,500 others, phasing out 300,000 higher-polluting older vehicles, and supplying cleaner gas and diesel at fuel stations starting February 15. The announcement came one day after municipal authorities in Beijing announced they would install air purifiers in the city's schools and kindergartens.
Beijing's mayor said that smoke from trash burning and open-air barbecues and even dust from roads "are actually the result of lax supervision and weak law enforcement."
Beijing's mayor said that smoke from trash burning and open-air barbecues and even dust from roads "are actually the result of lax supervision and weak law enforcement."
It's your fucking coal plants. You have a ton of them and no emission regulations. Either clean their output or get rid of them.
But that's not why you created this force, is it? You'd rather use this PR stunt to blame random Chinese people grilling out in their yard.
In related news, Beijing announces the creation of a pollution enforcement squad. You'll see them driving up and down the streets in big vans, looking for violators.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah, it couldn't be all those coal burning plants they are building and bringing online faster than the rest of the world can reduce pollution. Definitely the outdoor bbqs.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The bigger story is that they are investing $360 billion on renewable energy over the next 4 years.
That's a plan that will not only pay dividends in pollution reduction, it will keep them on the cutting edge of energy technology. An industry that is obviously a growth market because India and Africa both have tons of unmet demand for energy and Chinese companies are going to own that market.
Meanwhile, the US has just voted for more coal. Maybe, if we are lucky, some more fracking too.
The future is bright! (for china)
Beijing itself is fairly clean for a developing economy capital. Most of the cars are pretty new, there are not too many two-stroke tuktuks or scooters, etc. There aren't that many factories within city limits, as most were all closed or moved for the 2008 Olympics. The pollution isn't generated in the city. That's why you see the dramatic video online of "smog sweeping in" - it arrives from elsewhere, you can see it at higher levels in the air already, it doesnt'tcome from the street level. It's actually uncanny being in Beijing when the smog is bad because you can't see any source, no "that truck is belching smoke" or "that chimney is putting out smoke". It arrives from out of sight.
The problem is the surrounding Hebei province which has many of the coal and iron ore mines of China, and much heavy industry and processing of the ores using coal. Beiing can't enforce pollution controls in Hebei and the industrialists in Hebei don't care at all while they make money. For a USA equivalent, imagine if if Connecticut, Long Island and New Jersey were covered in dirty industrial plant while New York City was trying to improve its air quality. They wouldn't succeed.
It's nice to see Beijing trying to clean up its air, but it won't improve anything until Hebei province has a similar enforcement and it is effective.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
We are not going to act effectively to curb our misuse of the environment until there is a major human die off that makes the second world war look like a school yard tussle. When you have a world wide economy that is based almost solely upon the consumption of fossil fuels and this economy would tank if we started to quickly reduce consumption, the only way we will change our ways is when we have no other choice and accept a radical reduction in our consumption. The pruning of the human race is not far off and those who can get by without burning up carbon will survive. If ocean circulation patterns change radically because of what we are doing, it is quite possible that major smog events will start to happen more frequently.
It is also possible that the shedding of the ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland will cause radical local ocean cooling and boost the speed of a radical change in ocean currents. If the ocean currents change over night then it is quite possible that the jet stream will temporarily stop as well. With the known aspects climate change science being a taboo subject in Washington and other world capitols like Moscow we will not see these events coming. I am sure we will go on to blame only Chinese backyard BBQ's and coal generation industry and ignore other important sources like the current move to smogify the US by Trump.The world wide and American coal and the petro chemical industry is just as much to blame here as are we all, when we pave and abuse the shit out of our shared environment with abandon. The outlook for the human race is bleak primarily because we ignore things that we don't like to admit are our fault in the first place. I am sure that as the current crop of Right wing nutjobs is let loose to do a Joseph Goebbels on the American public "Chinese state sponsored pollution" will become one of the most terrible "villain du jour"! Right up there with the evil "Liberal Democrats" who brought affordable health care to millions.