Slashdot Mirror
China's Anti-Pollution Initiative Produces Stellar Results (popularmechanics.com)
hackingbear writes: China has declared war on its pollution -- one of the worst on the planet -- and now appears to be winning. Popular Mechanics reports: "Over the past four years, pollution in China's major cities has decreased by an average of 32 percent, with some cities seeing an even bigger drop, according to professor Michael Greenstone of the Energy Policy Institute. This decline comes after several aggressive policies implemented by the Chinese government, including prohibiting the building of new coal plants, forcing existing plants to reduce their emissions, lowering the amount of automobile traffic, and closing down some steel mills and coal mines. Some cities, like Beijing, have achieved even greater reductions in air pollution. Beijing has seen a 35 percent drop in particulates, while the city of Shijiazhuang saw a 39 percent drop. China has prioritized pollution reduction in these cities, with the government spending over $120 billion in Beijing alone."
somewhere where there is suprt total success of everything.
Because when you are president for life, life is good, and truth is like Putin cum in Trump's stomach, never sees the light of day.
It's a shame it had to get this bad first, but it's great that they've had such success tackling it.
Though not mentioned in the summary, I have heard the government subsidies electric cars in China, making them less expensive and more attractive than gasoline-powered vehicles. This probably cuts down on the smog in the cities.
When you can show up at a factory and shut it down (and threaten to execute the owner if he does not), you get results.
As someone living here, I have to say that I do see more blue sky and less haze than I used to.
My phone displays the Air Quality Index and today it is bad - mid 200s. There used to be 400 days but they do *seem* fewer. Tomorrow is 12 and friday is 39.
Because the government is all powerful, they shut down 1000s of polluting businesses in Beijing and put in place requirements that made it hard for them to return to business unless they cleaned up their emissions. Of course there are complaints, but Chinese like Americans complain about government, but the Chinese mostly move on as recourse is limited and they know it.
I am limiting my stay here (one year) because of the pollution, but I may waver in that. That is, waver tomorrow, but not today.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If you think that China's pollution problem has eased that all of us can breath more easily, think again !
The pollution has just been shifted some. where. else.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Trends/China-s-environmental-crackdown-means-big-business-for-Japan
For example, China restricted its own factory in producing the chemical methyl methacrylate, that resulted in that chemical being produced elsewhere - in Japan, for example
Along with the production of said chemical comes the pollutants - and this time, it is Japan that gets the pollutants
Until the day we can reduce the use of those chemicals - thus reduce the production of related pollutants - the problem of pollution is not going away, and our planet will get more and more polluted
A win is a win, and of course a drastic reduction in pollution for China is a great thing.
But all the sources sounds extremely one sided, like propaganda or something.
32% decrease OF WHAT?
Because you know, there is a big difference between reducing 32% of normal pollution that's expected on any major urban center, and reducing 32% of a smog so dense and deadly that it looks like you are around a volcano that just erupted.
Yes, an improvement is still an improvement, but for those curious not about the reduction but about the current state, here's a more informative map:
http://berkeleyearth.org/air-q...
So the thing is, yes, 32% reduction is awesome, but it's still nowhere near good enough. It's not even close even to major urban centers in the rest of the world.
To get to the same level of some other countries, China would probably need something more towards 70 or 80% reduction.
And yes, I know that China's air polution problem is largely the fault of basically the entire global industrialized society - the polution is there because most major countries with the biggest economies in the world just shifted the entire industrial production, with all it's polution problems, straight to China, where we all knew regulation was lax, and welfare basically doesn't exist. So this isn't an attack against China.
But perhaps let's not celebrate too much when we still have such a long way to go...
I'm only saying this because perhaps some people don't realize how bad it really is there. It is not a joke when people say that kids, seniors and people with some health conditions could straight up die and suffocate in a normal hot day in some chinese cities without warning, while they could live pretty well in other parts of the world.
There were days when people walking around on big city streets there got home looking like they just emerged out of a coal mine - exposed skin brown or black with layers of particulate matter.
India is another country that will have to do a whole ton of work and invest a whole ton of money to get their pollution levels back to a tolerable state. And both countries needs help on this, because in the end it affects all of us.
We had rivers catching on fire and the government got serious about the pollution.
It remained serious until fairly recently. It's been backsliding in republican areas for a while.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Be fair. A number of us thought we were lefties when we were young and stupid. Dude might get a clue and eventually straighten out. Give them time.
I've read this comic already. Superman throws the waste into the Sun, right?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats want the benefits of Chinese style totalitarianism with democracy while Republicans want the Chinese style totalitarianism without the benefits.
We've already been through this, here in the US and Europe. They don't have to repeat all of our mistakes, and our multiple environmental and regulatory agencies make everything freely accessible to anyone who wants them.
So it should be no surprise when they make rapid advances in cleaning up things, once they get the word from on high.
No, what IS a surprise, is the fact that the word came down from on high.
It's almost as if the wealthy and powerful within China realized, "Oh, shit! I don't have anywhere I can run to, if this all goes to Hell in a handbasket! We better make sure that doesn't happen!"
This is a realization which the rich and powerful of the US and Europe have yet to arrive at.
[End Of Line]
While I'm not that AC, who is just trolling you overly sensitive morons, i must say i have grown more liberal as ive aged. This is from repeatedly seeming the conservatives act in the most consistently disgraceful ways, over and over, for years.
Going from effectively zero pollution controls to basically any pollution controls should show a big improvement.
If they institute some genuinely strict controls, they ought to really be able to make a major impact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The US EPA and NOAA have found that NOX and O3 pollutants come from Asia, especially China and India. https://www.npr.org/sections/t...
With the bar set so low, I suppose it may seem stellar.
You're now just as shitty as Silicon Valley, rather than just as shitty as Beijing a few years ago :)
Silicon Valley had that sort of smog in the 80s, as has LA since the 60s, improving slightly in the 70s-90s.
If you know anybody with Asthma or any fibrous/pulmonary lung issues and they don't HAVE to be there to make sufficient income to survive, tell them to get out ASAP to somewhere with clean air. It makes a world of difference and might add decades to their life.
Said as someone who went from healthy to asthmatic to healthy to asthmatic due to changes in geography, then overpolluting as the new area became as crowded as the old.
It look nice on the surface, in beijing most buses run on electricity, the number of electrical cars increase, factories move outside the cities, but the electricity still comes from coal in most cases so the pollution is still there, just not in the city any more, a little outside the cities instead.
But they try to do something at least, and that is good.
Do you think there is merit to this story? http://www.globaltimes.cn/cont...
"Two Northwest China officials were punished after their plan to reduce air pollution readings by spraying water cannons near monitoring equipment backfired and left a government building encrusted in ice."
The USA is under attack from Russia. Donald Trump, sworn to protect the USA, is deliberately ignoring that attack, and actively preventing the government from responding. Sure sounds like treason to me.
By disgusting Republican behavior, do you mean how they're letting the third world into this country outside of the rule of law, or that their party fraudulently rigged their primary process to railroad a popular candidate out of the running?
Ridiculous
"pollution in China's major cities has decreased by an average of 32 percent, with some cities seeing an even bigger drop"
And some cities seeing an even smaller drop. Because that's what you get when you talk about the average.
The reason the US is fucked in this area is because the US had large amounts of oil and coal to develop. These internal resources were key to the US becoming the global super power of the 20th century.
The companies making money from oil and coal in the US will fight, and have fought, any and all legislation to move away from those energy sources.
China didn't have as much of an entrenched carbon extraction industry like the US.