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I was there last week, and still can't believe how bad it is. How can China allow this level of pollution? It is not the cars, but the coal that is doing it to

I was there last week, and still can't believe how bad it is. How can China allow this level of pollution? It is not the cars, but the coal that is doing it to the city. I hope China can find a way to create energy and produce goods without such bad pollution. Beijing, and China, would be a much better place to live it only had clean air to breath on a regular basis. Here is to clean energy!

tellarin 14y ago
It's not just Beijing. According to the polution ratings I follow, right now (it varies a lot during the day, it's 2AM here now) Beijing is ranked 16th among the ~50 cities that the government rates. The rating right now is also the same as the one posted by the US embassy here. From what I understand, much of the pollution comes also from other industrial cities and accumulates in this general area of the country (someone that knows more about it please correct me if this is wrong). The government seems to be taking some actions, but it is hard to know how hard they're tackling the problem.
- trevelyan 14y ago
  Also in Beijing. Just in case readers don't know, the Chinese ratings are produced as a daily average, based on equipment outside the city center (i.e. near the airport), while the US ratings are produced hourly from right downtown. So sometimes the figures are the same, but that usually only happens when coming down from the peak of a particularly bad day, when the average from the previous day's readings are pulling up the official Chinese numbers while the US figures have already fallen to reflect current conditions.
wallflower 14y ago
> How can China allow this level of pollution? The tradeoff between economic growth driven by energy use (for production) and pollution. "The environmental Kuznets curve is a hypothesised relationship between environmental quality and economic development: various indicators of environmental degradation tend to get worse as modern economic growth occurs until average income reaches a certain point over the course of development.[12] Although the subject of continuing debate, some evidence supports the claim that environmental health indicators, such as water and air pollution, show the inverted U-shaped curve.[1] It has been argued that this trend occurs in the level of many of the environmental pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, lead, DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, sewage, and other chemicals previously released directly into the air or water." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve

tellarin 14y ago

It's not just Beijing. According to the polution ratings I follow, right now (it varies a lot during the day, it's 2AM here now) Beijing is ranked 16th among the ~50 cities that the government rates. The rating right now is also the same as the one posted by the US embassy here. From what I understand, much of the pollution comes also from other industrial cities and accumulates in this general area of the country (someone that knows more about it please correct me if this is wrong). The government seems to be taking some actions, but it is hard to know how hard they're tackling the problem.

trevelyan 14y ago
Also in Beijing. Just in case readers don't know, the Chinese ratings are produced as a daily average, based on equipment outside the city center (i.e. near the airport), while the US ratings are produced hourly from right downtown. So sometimes the figures are the same, but that usually only happens when coming down from the peak of a particularly bad day, when the average from the previous day's readings are pulling up the official Chinese numbers while the US figures have already fallen to reflect current conditions.

wallflower 14y ago

> How can China allow this level of pollution? The tradeoff between economic growth driven by energy use (for production) and pollution. "The environmental Kuznets curve is a hypothesised relationship between environmental quality and economic development: various indicators of environmental degradation tend to get worse as modern economic growth occurs until average income reaches a certain point over the course of development.[12] Although the subject of continuing debate, some evidence supports the claim that environmental health indicators, such as water and air pollution, show the inverted U-shaped curve.[1] It has been argued that this trend occurs in the level of many of the environmental pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, lead, DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, sewage, and other chemicals previously released directly into the air or water." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve