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Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, China Is Winning
- r00fus 9y agoGiven the gains are mainly in cities - I wonder if the elecrification of the vehicle fleet and electric bike startups are having a big impact. Really wish the article provided actual info on how China is beating pollution other than banning coal in certain regions.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoCoal is the big pollution problem in northern China: Chinese coal is dirty (compared to USA coal), scrubbers are often missing or turned off, much of the coal is also burned in rural personal furnaces for heat. It is obvious now most of the pollution was from coal. Banning was the only thing they found effective, since China does not have enough rule of law capabilities to just regulate it. Cars, in comparison, usually have all their emission equipment installed, and are not running on shitty gasoline (well, ever since sinopec stopped importing the low grade stuff from Saudi Arabia that no one else would go near). Cars still cause pollution, but on a different lower scale from coal. Well, there are still problem with blue trucks that lack emission equipment and use bad gas from outside the city (they are only allowed in at night and you can see the pollution spike then). Electric bikes play a bit of a role in this improvement, but mainly in suppressing the need for gasoline-based mopeds popular in the rest of Asia. China moved straight from foot power bikes to electric power bikes, so they never became much of a problem. EV cars are still new and can potentially lead to future improvements in air quality. For example, getting rid of coal has brought Beijing's winter average down from 300 to 120 or 150, but that is just going from really bad to just bad. EVs could potentially get Beijing into the good column.
- fouc 9y agoLast time I was in Shanghai a couple years ago, it seemed like a good 20% of the motorbikes on the street were actually electric bikes. A dizzying variety of electric bikes too. I've yet to seen that kind of uptake of electric bikes in Vietnam or Thailand. Would be great if most motorbikes were electric, and cars too.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoOnly 20%? I'm pretty sure E-bikes are much more common than gasoline bikes, if only because the latter requires a driver's license and very expensive plates (13K RMB!). China has very aggressively pushed for e-bikes via regulations and periodic crackdowns on illegal gasoline bikes.
- cmplxconjugate 9y agoHaving lived in China for the last year it’s pretty much 99.8% ebikes. Petrol motorbikes don’t make an appearance except in very poor areas.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoWell, sometimes illegal ones make an appearance until the next crackdown occurs, at least in Beijing. Had a laowai friend who was dumb enough to by one, once.
- fouc 9y agoSo you don't see very many Honda Waves/Dreams or other 110/125cc motorbikes anymore?
- adventured 9y agoThey're still consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined. That's going to continue indefinitely with their current policies. The amount of other energy they're going to need to substantially dent their coal consumption, is truly enormous. It's going to take decades to bring their CO2 output down by a lot. Every time China so much as blinks about cleaning up their disastrous environmental policies, the NYTimes and others write a story about how they're winning. It's absurd.
- gonvaled 9y agoPer capita? Per-capita-per-century? Per-capita-since-the-industrial-revolution? What is the aggregated CO2 emission by the USA since the 1800, divided by the total population since then?
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoChina is much more worried about their pollution problem than their CO2 problem. The latter is more abstract in that it leads to eventual global warming, the former is a much more concrete and immediate QOL problem. Hopefully, solving the former will help with the latter, but not necessarily.
- gonvaled 9y agoHow is the electricity used by the ev produced? Electricity is not clean or dirty per se, as it is only a method of energy transport (well, it is a bit dirty per se, since it has losses - which can obviously be discarded if it is used to connect clean production facilities and replace dirty energy production)
- NickM 9y agoIt doesn't matter. One big power plant is so much more efficient than a million little ICE cars that you typically end up with lower emissions and less pollution from EVs even if 100% of your electricity is from coal. That said, China - and most of the world - is on an exponential growth curve for renewables right now. It will take a long time for the world to switch over to EVs, so we're better off starting now, regardless of the current emission profiles for electricity generation.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoBeijing has a separate lottery for EVs also, so if you want a car now, you can wait for a few years for a typical ICE one, or you can get one tomorrow if you don't mind EV. Tesla S's are selling like hotcakes accordingly.
- twoodfin 9y agoOut of curiousity, how high up in the party would I have to be to get an ICE tomorrow instead of in a few years?
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoWho knows. Since almost everyone has party connections in Beijing, it has become difficult to game the system that way (it would be useless otherwise).
- abledon 9y agowhat about the manufacturing processes for EVs. Arent they a lot more polluting esp, the battery parts, compared to traditional auto manufacturing?
- mlb_hn 9y agoJust putting this into context, NYT has an article "How China Is Challenging American Dominance in Asia" on their front page. Not saying it's intentional on their part, but it may be useful to understand how the title "China is Winning" impacts the publication's larger narrative and how that can shape peoples' perspectives.
- sharpercoder 9y agoThere's a radio program in my country featuring two country-famous (war|geopolitical)-strategists. They discuss worldnews every week. Lately, China's dominance was the topic, and the phrase "USA only has two things: a nice weapons industry and Silicon Valley" stuck with me. As I thought about it the days after, I could not really find anything to beat the quote with. Only the dollar can maybe come in as a third; but even that has significant competition from the euro and increasingly the yuan.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoHollywood. The US is the world's largest exporter of TV, movies, music, and culture.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoI’m sure Bollywood is giving Hollywood a run for its money with popularity in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.
- deesun108 9y agoHow about US 1.) having the biggest economy in the world, and growing 3% per year 2.) having the biggest worldly influential movie business 3.) having the biggest worldly influential video game business 4.) having 40% of assets in the world 5.) having most of the innovations in technology 6.) having most of the biggest corporations 7.) having the most brands 8.)......etcetcetc
- astrodust 9y ago
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoIt is a bit ironic that we were told in 2010 that the government could take as long as five years to the solve the pollution problem. I think its a bit disingenuous to say they declared war on pollution in 2014, they declared war on it much earlier than that; it would be more accurate to say that they really meant it this time. Still, I was curious, so I looked at Beijing's current AQI at the time of this comment: http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ 260, in the purple zone (very unhealthy, vs. just unhealthy for the red zone), so still a long ways to go.
- marcosdumay 9y agoThey have always been at war with Eurasia. It's already great that the overall direction of what they say and what they do coincides. And cleaning one's air is always an achievement, let's not debase their work just because somebody else made it faster.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoI think you misunderstood my comment: I was living in Beijing at the time (from 2007-2016) and was suffering from the pollution. So those promises and failures were more than just a pissing contest for me personally, it was a direct problem with my quality of life (to the point that my wife and I had arguments about staying/leaving). The baby finally forced us to leave, even 260 is way too high for a newborn's lungs, I hope that is obvious! Many of my friends left similarly or were effected by the pollution in seriously adverse ways (one of my Chinese coworker's wife as particularly serverely negatively effected). Let's not debase their suffering just to play up China's achievements here. There were costs, and there will be continued costs until they can breathe fresh air reliably. Progress is great, but it came way too late for most of us!
- nneonneo 9y agoFor some useless anecdata, I visited Beijing five times in the last year - compared to my visits in years prior, the air was definitely cleaner. In years past they’ve had entire months where the particulate level never dropped below “very high” - visiting in that month was like suffocating in an airport smoking room. The authoritarian government has its pros - not having to worry about your regulations, laws and work rolled back every four years is nice. It makes it possible to have long-term plans and execute really aggressive, even economically harmful policies in pursuit of a goal. Of course, the negatives of such a government - the corruption, the abuses, the drive to maintain power - are all too often the downfalls of such a system, and I’m rather afraid that Xi has started down a bad road by trying to cling to power there.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Chaebixi 9y agoAnother anecdote: I visited a less-visited area in China a few months ago and was told a steel plant was recently moved there from Beijing. So, maybe they haven't shutdown or cleaned up many of those polluters, they just moved them to less politically sensitive areas.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThat has always been true. Most of Beijing’s heavy industry was actually moved out before the 2008 Olympics. But they are running out of places to move them, northern china, especially Hebei, has a serious pollution problem that is drastically worse than Beijing’s.
- onetimemanytime 9y ago- Comrade, you must close your factory tonight at 12.01 am. - (a millisecond later) Yes sir. It's that simple. No matter how much money you invested in it, or what contracts you have signed. Countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the likes have, let's just say, "efficient" systems. The government wants it done and so it is.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- justicezyx 9y agoI cannot get it why people think this is easy. That's a country with f*king 1.4B people in vastly different social systems. Totalitarian/authoritarian is hard, otherwise it should be the dominant nation structure on this planet.
- onetimemanytime 9y agoTotalitarian/authoritarian is hard, otherwise it should be the dominant nation structure on this planet. Widespread democracy is very new, take away the last few decades and see. So you have a few decades of some sort of democracy versus millennia of totalitarian rule.
- TheCoelacanth 9y agoWidespread totalitarianism is also relatively new. Until the last few centuries, most governments were far too decentralized to really call them totalitarian.
- Kluny 9y agoEvery government is a democracy. Monarchies, fascist dictators, republicans, all of them are democracies. They function by the consent of the people. The people may be sheep, brainwashed, terrorized or whatever, but in every case there are more of them then there are government enforcers. If you push them too hard or ask them to do the impossible, it will not work. Dictatorship is not as easy as you seem to think - it still takes effective management to get anywhere.
- FruityFarm 9y agoChina's killing it.
- Animats 9y agoIt only took the US about 10 years to beat air pollution, and the technology had to be developed. Now, all the needed technology is known; it just has to be deployed. The article writes of the US that "market-based regulations having proved the most cost-effective." No, that's not how the Clean Air Act did the first 90% of cleanup. It was done by mandating controls and fining polluters.
- fullshark 9y agoWhich lead to the actual US solution: outsourcing production to China.
- nitwit005 9y agoIndustrial capacity moved to China from all over, and even happened for not particularly polluting industries like assembling shoes. US pollution controls clearly weren't the primary cause.
- hcurtiss 9y agoCombined with cheap labor, they were.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThe USA had solved its pollution problem by the 80s, while the China outsource boom started in the mid-late 90s.
- coldtea 9y agoThe USA had also lost lots of factories to Japan and Taiwan "by the 80s".
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoI'm not sure what those two places have to do with China. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St..., you'll see the steep drop off in manufacturing jobs started around 2000-ish. There was a peak in the 80s for sure, but its not like it came crashing down that much.
- mmagin 9y agoLooking at the linked PDFs, all the data comes from "China National Environmental Monitoring Center". Should we even trust this as much as we trust the Chinese government's macroeconomic data?
- Analemma_ 9y agoThe US embassy in Beijing does their own monitoring of air quality and has a public feed for it (this was the source of the "crazy bad" description from a couple years ago). Presumably their numbers agree with these, or the author would've pointed it out.
- fenwick67 9y agoThat is a big assumption to make
- dudus 9y agoOnly if you didn't read the article since the author straight up says he checked against US embassy numbers. "Using data from almost 250 government monitors throughout the country, which closely matches monitors maintained by the United States embassy in Beijing and consulates around the country, I found major improvements."
- baybal2 9y agoChina can fix the issue overnight if they were to mandate filters on coal fired heat and powerplants, yet that never happened on my memory. CCP interest in fixing the smog issue is not than genuine. The smog, and efforts fighting it serve as a potent detractor of public opinion from real problems. I believe, CCP is happy to keep things as they are just for that.
- alottafunchata 9y agoI travel quarterly to China and the air is disgusting. To say they are "winning" is fake news.
- perlwle 9y agoYou better name the part of China you visited. Because China is too big to draw a broad conclusion. When the gov announced their war on pollution, I was very much skeptical and wasn't expecting to see a big improvement in such a short time. Lots articles circulated in wechat were talking about moving to the south and immigrating to foreign countries two years ago, the high of the air pollution. Everyone was complaining. I think the Air pollution was on the verge of becoming a bigger problem that could harm the country stability and the party ruling. Then, We see the pros of authoritarian government in play, to echo another poster. From what I have heard, lot of factories got shutdown, or gone through mandated facility upgrades to meet the standard, cities are shamed by publishing the the worst polluted list in the national news. Air pollution became one of the local official KPIs. Beijing's air quality has dramatically improved this year. There were way more blue sky days than I expected. Granted, there are bad days like the passed few days in Beijing. But If the Gov keeps at it, I am hopeful that clean air is coming soon.
- kerng 9y agoI always found it interesting that somehow the western world solved this problem by outsourcing manufacturing to countries like China. Wonder where China is this outsourcing to?
- vadimberman 9y agoOne thing I could not find anywhere in the net - maybe someone here knows. Does the Chinese government offer incentives for hybrids, EVs, and cleaner public transit? While it may not have a significant short-term effect, it should work in the long term.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoMany Chinese cities offer a tax rebate for EVs, but only Chinese-made ones; the Tesla S doesn't qualify. More importantly, they get a separate allocation in the "right to car" lottery in some cities (Beijing), or a reduced plate tax rate, or can even drive everyday instead of 2 out of 3 days. Electric (battery, not overhead trolly-style) and natural gas buses are increasingly common, though I'm not aware what the current status is here. There was one that passed in front of our apartment building in Beijing.
- revedetraces 9y agoI live in China, maybe the air quality of beijing is getting better, I dont' know, but in the city I live it's getting much worse during this year than the year before. It's like every day of the whole winter the air was heavily polluted.