“China’s pollution is at an unbearable stage,”

China Like Cancer-Risking Smoker as Smog 8-Fold WHO Danger Mark

“China’s pollution is at an unbearable stage,” Li Junfeng, director general of the state body that advises the government on climate-change issues, said at a conference in Beijing yesterday. “It’s like a smoker who needs to quit smoking at once otherwise he will risk getting lung cancer.”...

Seems they are getting tired of living in their new world of haze filled mornings, afternoons and evenings. I remember as a youth growing up in Southern California people there would say that simply living in the Los Angeles basin for a month was equal to smoking a cigarette. This seems to be much worse in some parts of China. The report goes on to say...

Air pollution in China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, has reached intolerable levels and the country should aggressively cut its reliance on coal, according to the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation.

I'm not sure if many here are aware of the fact the China has already surpassed the US as Saudi Arabia's largest customer of oil. Seems they want to cut Coal use and avoid increasing other fossil fuels to replace it and put a major effort into green. In the meantime they will be proposing cutting production to meet certain these goals...

The world’s second-biggest economy needs to reduce reliance on heavy industries to curb air pollution, as well as cutting coal’s share in its energy mix, Ma Jun, chief economist for greater China at Deutsche Bank AG, said at the same conference.

“China should cut heavy industries’ share in gross domestic output by 9 percentage points between 2013 and 2030 to meet its pollution-cut target,” Ma said.

Reduction Targets

Heavy industries including construction and manufacturing made up about 46 percent of the economy in 2012, according to Ma. He proposed reducing coal’s share in energy consumption to 46 percent by 2030, and increasing the use of clean energy to the same rate by that year.

I wish them luck. I think this, if they follow through, will be a major step forward not just for them but for everyone else on the planet. This isn't just a thread about China but pollution in general. Here is another story, this one about India.


India’s Air Pollution Emergency

Last month, the Yale Environmental Performance Index ranked India 174th out of 178 countries on air pollution. According to India’s Central Pollution Control Board, in 2010, particulate matter in the air of 180 Indian cities was six times higher than World Health Organization standards. More people die of asthma in India than anywhere else in the world. Indoor air pollution, mostly from cooking fires, and outdoor air pollution are the third and fifth leading causes of death in India.

Automobile sales in India have boomed, and diesel is the fuel of choice. Many industries pollute with impunity, defying existing environmental laws and regulations. Pollution monitoring in India is a haphazard affair. Industries know that even if they are caught polluting, criminal prosecution will take years to go through India’s overburdened courts.

The best hope for reining in air pollution lies with India’s Supreme Court. It has handed down a series of landmark environmental decisions, including mandating the use of compressed natural gas in public-service vehicles in Delhi in 1985. Air quality in India’s capital improved, but the gains have since evaporated. On Monday, the court asked the governments of Delhi and the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan to respond to a report from India’s Environmental Pollution Control Authority that said air pollution has reached such severe levels that it is the cause of 3,000 child deaths a year in Delhi alone. The report recommends a series of measures, including a 30 percent tax on the sale of diesel vehicles, higher automobile registration and parking fees, and getting more buses on Delhi’s roads.

The Supreme Court should use its authority to order compliance with these recommendations. And India’s national air-quality standards must be made legally binding.

How's your country doing?

I read the smog is so bad they are showing videos of of Sunrises.

That's why America quit making things.

We just didn't want the mess.

It's ok, God will fix it. Or Earth will fix it. Ummm it's good for plants! Right?
No?

Kali74
It's ok, God will fix it. Or Earth will fix it. Ummm it's good for plants! Right?
No?

I think I may get into manufacturing those cheap disposable dust masks if this keeps up.

I have family in China and they agree it is getting unbearable.. I can't help but think of the USA since we also burn coal like mad..

Coal burning everywhere in the world might end up with the atmosphere looking like one big volcano.. It might take awhile, but I'm sure people will start dying from it much sooner.

Coal generates 44% of our electricity, and is the single biggest air polluter in the U.S.

So.... All the talk from "our dear leaders" about needing the average person to pay for not doing anything about it, is a joke, is it not?

Sure our air quality is good most places, but for how long...

That there are that many polluters in the USA still churning out the "global warming gas" unchecked, says that we will be joining China sometime in the future wearing gas masks on the way to work.. The only thing the USA is doing about this is asking the populace for money to find an alternative that doesn't include shutting off production of said pollutants.

Those pics remind me of pictures of U.S. urban centers of manufacturing (Pittsburgh, Detroit et al) in the 50s and 60s...

We cleaned things up tremendously since then... hopefully China follows suit one day...

reply to post by alienreality


Great point.

I thought I'd look up a graph showing the biggest contributorsSource

Thanks for that graph, I'm a bit surprised to see how close the US is.. and by the way the media has portrayed coal burning as being from other countries like China, seems like they are purposely evading the cause of the global green house gas stuff. Coal seems to be the worst offender, unless I'm mistaken..

whyamIhere
I read the smog is so bad they are showing videos of of Sunrises.

Yeah I read that too, think it was in a thread on ATS.

How sad!

reply to post by SLAYER69


Yea there rise to economic power has come at terrible price. They are really on verge of bad collapse over there. I wonder why no one is really talking about it. Everything coming to a head for them. Let's hope they can find their way out. The pollution is bad for all of us.

I remember those days in California lol. Hate to be Chinese lol.

The Bot

reply to post by SLAYER69


Important stuff. Obviously, we all need to find new ways of doing things.


F&S

SLAYER69
reply to post by alienreality

 

Great point.

I thought I'd look up a graph showing the biggest contributors

Source

The graph you posted was for 2008 Global CO2 Emissions from Fossil Fuel Combustion and some Industrial Processes (million metric tons of CO2)...so not JUST coal plants. These data include CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion, as well as cement manufacturing and gas flaring.

AR seemed to be talking specifically about coal plants.

Kinda misleading with this graph.

That's the cost of industrialization, an inevitable stage of development. Glad to see the country whose GDP 80% constituted by
Wall street, Hollywood, Las Vegas, NBA, Lady Gaga....don't have to worry about their pollution.

How's your country doing?

Living in Canada and doing ok.

The only things I smell in the morning are trees, salty ocean air and very soon...flower blossoms.

Damn skunk ruined it the other day but I can live with it.

Peace

I'm surprised they would close highways down due to the air quality - that is seriously dangerous air. I remember a thread awhile back where a member was smelling something bad in the air in India (can't remember where he/she was), and said everyone in their office was getting sick.

India has the world’s highest death rate because of chronic respiratory diseases, and it has more deaths from asthma than any other nation, according to the World Health Organization. A recent study found that half of all visits to doctors in India are for respiratory problems, according to Sundeep Salvi, director of the Chest Research Foundation in Pune.

www.nytimes.com...

If money is more important than people's lifespan we have really screwed up with priorities.

reply to post by SLAYER69

People here are always complaining about how the government needs to stop regulating private industry. Well, now you see first hand what happens when you allow industry to run without government oversight. You cannot trust them to police themselves, they only worry about their profit. This is why American companies take their production business to China and India to begin with. Smog, poor living conditions, toxic chemicals in products, slave and child labor, etc... These are all the direct results of lack of government laws ruling over corporations. We know this because we went through the same thing here in the 1800's. Is this honestly what folks want to have happen again over here as well?

alienreality
Thanks for that graph, I'm a bit surprised to see how close the US is.. and by the way the media has portrayed coal burning as being from other countries like China, seems like they are purposely evading the cause of the global green house gas stuff. Coal seems to be the worst offender, unless I'm mistaken..

edit on 23-2-2014 by alienreality because: (no reason given)

But they are actioning on it,

www.theguardian.com...

The pie chart given above is about emissions which is a bit singular, since there are 1.4 Billion people living there, and yes when it's cold people do the switcheroos like the rest of us to keep warm. When you think of population then, China looks better than the US, or even if you go down the chain matching population to emissions the picture might still be China doing better.
The point is that smog is a problem in the industrial bases in China, and is life threatening, just as the great smogs in the industrial parts of the UK were, and they were bad...known as pea-soupers and killed many people, and there were the particular condtions of a damp climate making smog a worse affect, and probably heavier-than-air CO2 not getting very high in the atmosphere if at all. So now in the UK in most or if not all cities are smokeless zones, and you need to use smokeless fuels if you need a fire. They work well, although the reality is that you burn something it still releases the 'dreaded CO2' only less, but the UK climate is still on the damp side...is it what! so is there any reason to not believe that much or any CO2 around the UK is mostly dispatched into the ground?
So how different is Chinese smog from UK smog, or LA smog and Detroit smog? does anyone know how that is put into the equation of climate change?

alienreality
I have family in China and they agree it is getting unbearable.. I can't help but think of the USA since we also burn coal like mad..

In the US we have regulations regarding the release of pollutants in the atmosphere. We make corporations use “scrubbers” to remove most of the particulate from their exhaust. This is one of the things that companies are always complaining about having to deal with, because its expensive to install and maintain. If you go up north, to the steel mills in Ohio, Pennsylvania, west Virginia, and Michigan, you will not see this amount of pollution, because the government forces them to “scrub” their exhaust towers. If we lighten up on our regulation of companies here, that is how the US would also look.

en.wikipedia.org...

I loved the phrase I heard recently about China burning down their own house for a few dollars. It rings true that they nay be cash rich but what's the point when they have destroyed where they live.I think this could be the start of mass migration and collinisation of Africa

Here's that videotaped sunrise thread:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Oddly surreal and beautiful.

So a question arises: how much will the rest of the world be willing to pay for Chinese products from plastic pumpkins and American flags to fancy electronics if it meant that their pollution standards were tightened, toxic materials were handled in a way other than simply executing random factory executives found to be using say, melamine instead of powdered milk in baby formula, and actually giving the Chinese people something besides a slave wage to live on? Oh, and somehow changing over their power supply to something nonpolluting and renewable?

I think what's going to happen is at some point they'll be unable to breathe the air, grow on the soil or drink the water and they'll all move en masse to those ghost cities they've built in central China and, now I hear, in Africa.

Or they'll just come over here and move into the places they hold mortgages on in Ohio and Oklahoma, California and Florida... because as the joy of global mortgage backed securities' fraud have made possible, China owns the U.S. in half acre plots now.