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

reply to post by signalfire


Probably a good idea of how the third world war will finally kick off... after they have destroyed their house to supply themselves with western dollars, they will look for "Living space" ala Hitler in the late 30s... that mess didn't work out so great...

Solution: Tear down those buildings and plant a forest

whyamIhere
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.

That story was fake.

dlbott
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

I made a thread on this issue.

While people think they lost all their jobs to China, in reality, China gained a whole lot of problems. The people at the top may have taken American jobs, but took much more from China.

They were the only ones to profit off these moves, and will be the only ones walking away unscathed.

The country is going downhill and for all the money made by pimping out the people and natural resources, I don't think will come close to covering the longterm, health, economic and environmental damage. Eventually it will reach a tipping point and trying to maintain the same level of production will be impossible, and there will be an equal shrink like what happened in the US.

Then another country may get picked out of the hat for this to play itself all over again. Or perhaps someone will figure out that this kind of thing won't work long term, in the grand scheme of things.

As someone else mentioned, the industrial revolution was an previous era. A good one that brought a lot of innovation, not necessarily one we need to go back to.

China should consult the Mexicans. Mexico city has implemented aggressive reforms to curb smog levels since the 90's which have been quite successful. They have even developed smog eating buildings, and implemented large urban gardens on the roof tops of their buildings to help reduce CO2 levels.





If China wanted to it could curb it's pollution levels within 15 years, but the question is if they are willing to make the economic sacrifices necessary to do so. Ingenuity can only do so much, and at some point industry needs to be reigned in and regulated to comply with air quality standards, something I'm not so sure the Chinese government is willing to do.

Elathan
AR seemed to be talking specifically about coal plants.

Kinda misleading with this graph.

Not really

I was focused on overall output, Not just coal and as far as the date, have things drastically improved since or worsened?

2011
Linky

reply to post by SLAYER69


Thank you again Slayer, this is such an important topic.
Possibly the most important issue of all politics.
Not just China, but as you referenced charts showing there is a Global Problem.
And it's worse than Smoking a few Cigs, by a massive amount (according to the photographs it would seem!).

There are all sorts of things we could do.
For example those pointless toys in cereal boxes, they are just garbage in the end.
A kid may play with it for a little while, but will discard it soon enough.
There is actually no real point in that type of wastefulness.

Therefore I refuse to buy any cereal box with a toy in it.
They should opt for perhaps a small booklet about their iconic character to promote reading?
Or just simply crossword puzzles on the back of the box?

It doesn't matter, people don't buy 'food' for these pointless reasons anyways.
The gist of what I am saying is that one small change in our social habits would actually solve a massive 1000+ton pollution-waste issue.
Having jobs in the market is great I agree, but they need to be productive and useful rather than detrimental overall.

Defcon hit the nail on the head.

Not much else needs to be said. Corporations only cleaned their collective acts up after stricter regulations were put in place. If it wasn't for their regulatory actions, the US would still look like that today. People complain and whine about how much the US pollutes and how bad our air is today, but if they only knew how bad it was from the 30's to the 70's, they might change their tune. Also, I love hearing about "how bad" coal fired plants are from the same hypocrites who use the electricity produced by them...smh.

If you look around, the US has become drastically cleaner than before. Beside the fact that alot of major industry has shut down, waterways, air ways and roadways (save all the cigarette butts and lazy trash) have all been cleaned up in part due to gov't regulation. I guess I will admit it is a good product of tax money. But, to offset the costs of building the necessary "scrubbers" for the regulations, these same corporations increase their costs and pass the buck on to the consumers. So we get hit twice. Once from taxes and once from corporations. We the people, don't stand a chance.

Humans have learned from their past how to clean up after themselves. Alot of people disregard this thought and keep throwing things our their car windows, but not everyone has a mind to be responsible. Hopefully this mindset is changing. Too bad the largest culprits always seem to move their industries to the places that have the least amount of restrictions and controls. One would assume they are only looking for one thing, more profit at the cost of a nations health.

In a perfect world, corporations would spend more money on keeping clean than marketing...

It's catching up with them. Funny thing is, if they take this problem seriously and start regulating how business is done, the cost of doing business there will start catching up with that of western countries. If they don't, they'll end up living in a mess not any better than superfund (hazmat) sites here in the U.S. (And those take a long time to fix, we're still cleaning up messes from the 1960s and 1970s.)

Odd that if China does what's necessary for it's own people, it'll mean some of that outsourced manufacturing will start coming back home. (Once the playing field is leveled, transportation costs become a bigger factor.)

Then again, the next push might be to move manufacturing to Africa. In which case the average Chinese will feel the same pain we did here when corporations pulled out the rug from under us here in the U.S.

The best way to assist China is by enacting a Carbon Tax on all Western economies. That way we can send Al Gore enough to fill his plane with fuel to fly into the heart of Bejing and preach the virtues of his Inconvenient Truth to the Central Committee.
He will quickly be disappeared and all will be well. Unfortunately we will be stuck with a hugely unpopular levy which is simply a Wealth Transfer Tax from the West to developing countries like China that will continue to build coal fired plants
ad infinitum.. Hey, wait a minute.....

reply to post by whyamIhere

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.

Nonsense.

China is polluted due to poor environmental regulation and poor practices. Proper environmental regulation in, for example, California, has massively reduced the amount of smog. In the USA, it also has massively reduced the amount of pollution from electricity generation.

www.epa.gov...

Please don''t let your country lose even more manufacturing for stupid incorrect reasons.

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..

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.

here is the thing that i have noticed but never seems to be included when talking about pollution especially "coal use pollution". have you noticed that the countries that have this problem to such a major degree are all "poorer" countries? the reasons given are typically things like not stringent enough rules for industry polluting, companies ignoring pollution regulations due to not enough enforcers, graft, too long to get to court so they will just wait it out and make more money while doing so, diesel vehicles and poor maintenance of vehicles etc. but the ONE THING i NEVER SEE is the fact that most of these places with such bad smog have a couple things in common. the HIGH POPULATION DENSITIES in those very bad areas, normally big cities with MILLIONS of INHABITANTS. what does this have to do with anything? the second commonality. that being that a fair portion if not most of the people tend to be poor, and being poor don't tend to have things like electric or even gas stoves for cooking (not to mention that many poor peoples houses are too small to even put a stove, and can be stacked 4 or 5 houses high on top of each other). so what do they use instead? COAL OR WOOD FIRES (and in areas that get cold, add heating). now thinking about that you might ask why this would be such a problem, after all a lot of us have cooked on a charcoal BBQ, they don't put out that much smoke. but think about MILLIONS of BBQ's going at once, a fair number of them all day long. i live in one of those cities. yes vehicles pollute, especially unmaintained diesels, and when standing on a major road it does stink. BUT move away from the road and you no longer smell it, but you DO ALWAYS no mater the time of day or night,or where you are, SMELL ONE THING, SMOKE. in fact i have a "caterer" on my street and at times there is so much visible smoke you would swear the house is on fire, but no they are just cooking. i believe that those COOKING FIRES are actually more at fault than anything else for the smog and pollution.

so how can this be fixed? it wouldn't be easy to do. first off you need to get everyone to use electric or gas stoves. this in it's self would be an issue as not only can most of these people not afford the electricity or gas, forget about the stove. but then there is the issue of where they would put something like that since a stove would take up far too much room in a 10 foot by 5 foot home, and the homes built on top of other homes, that are often built of junk which would create a MAJOR fire hazard (and when there is a fire in these areas HUNDREDS of people LOOSE EVERYTHING), to complicate it even further most of these people are "informal settlers" (most would call them "squatters") and don't even own the land. it's bad enough trying to clear them out when someone who actually owns the land wants to build, (mini wars start over it). yet they ARE EVEN PROVIDING BETTER HOMES, but the people don't want to move anyway. so how to deal with that? then on top of everything else, this type of cooking is traditional, which would make for another hurdle to jump.

so while "Cracking down" on things like factory and vehicle emissions would definitely help you have to deal with the "cooking problem" if you want to have any real effect. i figure it would take YEARS with FULL MILITARY FORCE used to "try" to move these "informal settlers" which i am sure would send all the liberals in the west into a full blown freakout over the force that would be NEEDED to move these people. and as soon as they clear out one area and move on, people would just sneak right back and rebuild, as happens all the time. then if you managed to get them to stay in the "resettlement areas" (just think of how much the "Palestinians" like that), you would need to somehow provide people with a stove and figure out how most can afford the electricity and gas to run it, not only that, you would have to try to get them to leave "tradition" and then you would also have to train them to USE a modern stove. all in all it almost seems like a hopeless task, but you won't get rid of the smog and pollution until you do.