Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/06/schoolchildren-air-pollution-shanghai-eastern-china

by ck2 • 13 years ago

210 205 13 years ago

theguardian.com

ck22• 13 years ago

Unbelievable http://i.imgur.com/lef99jm.jpg

Has to take years off your life to be breathing that.

deletes2• 13 years ago

That photo just gave me a great idea for the next Bioshock game.

fdej• 13 years ago

I don't know, the color palette seems to be from Quake.

Guillaume863• 13 years ago

What's surprising is Shanghai's life expectancy being really hight (over 82). Would like to have someone with some knowledge about the subject expand a bit on the pollution/life expectancy/statictics subject (there will be consequences later? etc)

voidlogic• 13 years ago

People who are 82 now spent most of there life living in the city before it got very bad. The real question is if people born there now will see 82...

yk• 13 years ago

The sky above the port was the color of a TV, switched to a dead channel.

k2enemy• 13 years ago

It is kind of funny that future generations may interpret that opening to mean a clear blue sky.

akx• 13 years ago

http://lowlightmixes.blogspot.fi/2011/02/television-sky.html

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

There's always Beijing: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--W3r4NvkHFg/UPpFQzRcNWI/AAAAAAAACB...

biesnecker2• 13 years ago

Sad. I love -- _love_ -- that city, but I could never live there again, not breathing that.

matthewrudy5• 13 years ago

and the price of international schools for your kids, right?

davepage5• 13 years ago

If cost is a primary concern, the kids can go to local school (just like Chinese kids who come to the US). The expat continuum goes from 'bubble' to 'going native'. Bubble is most expensive. Might as well stay home, no?

biesnecker2• 13 years ago

Nah, the last job I had there would have paid for schooling. It wouldn't pay for a hermetically sealed bubble of fresh air and water (and clean food), though.

JonSkeptic• 13 years ago

I've seen sci-fi depictions of over-industrialized mega-city scapes, but I never thought I'd actually get to see a picture of one. To call that surreal is an understatement.

nabla93• 13 years ago

sci-fi? It's more like reminder from the history. Rapid industrialization and increase in living standards seems to follow familiar pattern.

Great Smog of London documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkx-2mT1-q4

aspensmonster• 13 years ago

I guess we didn't have to wait until November 2019.

But at least we have "cheap" consumer goods!

icebraining• 13 years ago

And Chinese workers have stuff like food.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China#Poverty_reduct...

javindo• 13 years ago

Such a shame; an amazing city with wonderful prospects, becoming almost entirely uninhabitable.

JonFish85• 13 years ago

What? But China ratified the Kyoto protocol and pledged to reduce their pollution. This can't be true! It's almost as if the country completely disregarded the treaty to grow their economy at any expense.

Symmetry3• 13 years ago

The Kyoto protocol has to do with CO2 emissions, which are very different from the sort of particulate and sulfur pollution described in the article. Also, I have no idea whether China is actually following that treaty, but the reason the US didn't sign was that it did actually allow China to drastically increase the amount of fossil fuels it burns.

danielweber• 13 years ago

Yes, China and India are considered "developing" countries by Kyoto and can produce all the CO2 they want under the treaty, so of course they signed it.

EDIT: and, of course, it was about CO2, not particulates. A country can make certain trade-offs about different types of pollution (particulates v. CO2 v. NOX).

morkbot• 13 years ago

It's not that they don't do anything about it.

In 2012 they emission of carbon dioxide raised by 3%, but that increase was at least lower than in previous years, where it oscillated around 10% (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24742770)

29 of 71 nuclear reactors that under currently under construction are being built in China (http://world-nuclear.org/info/Facts-and-Figures/World-Nuclea...), they also have similar numbers for hydropower (see the previous link).

dlundqvist• 13 years ago

Yeah, today was not a great day to be here. We contemplated not letting our children go outside, but eventually sent them to school.

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

I know someone over in China at the moment and they said that the pollution was so bad this morning that looking out of a window you couldn't see the building next it. Scary thought of how much damage that'd do to your lungs.

tcas• 13 years ago

The air pollution levels are similar to living an airport smoking lounge.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-30/beijing-air-akin-to...

Nav_Panel• 13 years ago

EDIT: apparently my post below was predicated on a false assumption, please disregard.

That's Beijing, not Shanghai, and I think we can assume that Beijing is at least slightly cleaner than Shanghai, if not by much.

According this article[0], Shanghai's level reached 602.5, which, when compared to the data on the graph you linked, is about 75 points higher than Beijing.

[0] http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/smog-extremely...

matthewrudy5• 13 years ago

I love China but pollution, the great firewall, and visa complications make it less attractive as somewhere to live.

thaumasiotes5• 13 years ago

Speaking as someone who lives in China...

The firewall won't bother you (assuming you wish to get around it); it's there for the masses.

Any idiot with a US citizenship can get a tourist visa, lasting a year and having only the requirement "visit Hong Kong (or any other non-China location) every three months" (I was unambitious, and got a two-month one). Someone of my acquaintance says he paid a visa-help company $1000 and got a business visa, good for a year and imposing no requirements.

I have, in the past, had a working visa; if that's what you want, it's generally done by your employer, not you.

Your "I love China" kind of leads me to believe you'd be familiar with this already... what kind of complications have you experienced?

davepage5• 13 years ago

$1000! Crazy laowai. As a data point, my current F visa is 2 years, multi-entry, 90 days and cost the nominal fee plus about $100 for the visa company to drop it off at the consulate. Apparently, the F visa has been re-purposed and there is a new M business visa. Any practical experience with that?

[of course, China habitually hassles journalists (Bloomberg) over visas]

matthewrudy5• 13 years ago

I lived in Hong Kong 2010 to 2013, but actually ended up living in Shenzhen for most of 2011. 18 pages of my passport are taken up with visas and stamps from the mainland (plus several more from HK and Taiwan)

As a Hong Kong resident I had a 6 month visa and then a 1 year China visa. Notably, though, both times it was a 30 day maximum stay, and as a UK citizen they still always just give me 30 days per entry.

I know all about the sneaky 1 year business visa I could get. (there's some guy who sits in a hotel in TST and sorts it out for you)

But I still frequently hear stories of people who've been living there for a year or so, but when it comes to renewing they turn up in HK, apply for a new visa, and end up being granted just 15 days.

Usually they fix this, and pay someone a few thousand dollars, and they get another one year visa. But this is a hassle.

The internet thing is easily overcome with a vpn, but it's just annoying, especially as latency to western services is already pretty high.

So my choice, is "go live in Taiwan", China without some of the hassle.

Notably when I say "I love China", I frequently mean "I love Greater China".

seanmcdirmid8• 13 years ago

VPNs around the firewall are getting less reliable everymonth.

The visa changes made in July are much more strict than before, getting a one year non work visa is only possible if you have Chinese family. The visa companies from before no longer exist. But I have a working visa so I don't care.

jkimmel• 13 years ago

Is there a level of public outcry regarding the pollution?

I realize that criticism may be somewhat muted given the nature of the PRC government, but I can't imagine a city as large and cosmopolitan as Shanghai merely accepting this level of environmental mismanagement. Unfortunately, articles regarding Beijing/Shanghai pollution usually fail to mention public sentiment above the level of brief individual anecdote ("It's hard to breath on the way to the office" - Chinese citizen, etc.).

Perhaps someone local could provide some insight?

dylandrop4• 13 years ago

I mean, the problem is that there's a bit of a cultural difference between Americans circa-Industrial Revolution, and the Chinese now. So saying that the Chinese will stand up and protest isn't necessarily true. I don't want to speak for all Chinese, but from what I've read -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that there is more of a culture of deference to authority in China. Compare this to Americans, who have a history and pride in rebelling against authority. Now, you might point to China's communist revolution, but realize that with this government came the need for them to propagandize and popularize a love and respect for the government in control, much more so than in the U.S. So back to my original point, protest culture isn't as much of a thing there as it is here, because there's more of a sense of working for the collective good (economic growth of China).

So I'm hoping that there will by outcry, but I think it is unfortunately less likely than it would be in the U.S. due to Chinese culture. I'd also like to here some local insight as well, and I hope I'm proved wrong because it would be awesome if there was a public outcry.

babesh2• 13 years ago

My impression is that it has to do with Tiananmen Square (been there, tried that, didn't work) and being complicit in trading off economic advancement for maintaining Communist party rule. Also many government officials directly benefit from economic advancement via bribery/corruption.

AllenKids• 13 years ago

There is constant outcry especially since last year. And protest happens daily in China. It's just that normally people stay on particular issues at hand rather than nebular banners such as "small government" etc, for cultural reasons and the protestors' own safety.

rz2k• 13 years ago

There are astonishing numbers of protests in China every year.[1][2] I also think the culture for factory workers during the industrial revolution was one of deference to authority, and that it took extreme conditions to spur them to protest their conditions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_the_Peop...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/02/rising-protests-i...

auhnadil• 13 years ago

Agree.There have been some complains and disscussions about air pollution recently. They can easily be found online, whereas you won't find people talking about it or worry about it very much. The way of how Chinese expressing their feelings is far more different than a public outcry. Hence, people are certainly waiting for the action of their government. And, what about those who are so confident and think they will not be the next victim of the air pollution? Was Shanghai one of them who have this thought?

jadoint• 13 years ago

I'm not local but I have friends there. The Chinese were accepting of the pollution at first because of the success they were experiencing on a world stage. They figured that if the politicians and the higher ups could deal with it, then the ordinary citizen can too. Then the average citizen started realizing that the elite didn't actually have to deal with it because they would buy expensive air purifiers for their homes, cars, and work places. There has been more of an outcry against the pollution that is now causing all forms of health problems as of late and despite the heavily authoritarian rule of the regime, the Chinese government is prudent enough to know that a largely dissatisfied citizenry is always a risk. So the various local and national governments are moving, albeit slowly, to try and reduce their pollution levels.

petermcd3• 13 years ago

Fair question.

My impression here in Beijing is that people are highly dissatisfied with the pollution situation. They don't want lung cancer and they don't want their kids breathing this crap.

That being said, the government is taking steps to address the issue. Specifically, due to an outcry on Weibo last year about having to get PM2.5 numbers from the US embassy's twitter feed and iPhone app (twitter is blocked, but screenshots of the iPhone app were pasted on weibo), the government here has started reporting pollution numbers in major cities around the country. So there's reporting now.

Second, they've forced the state-owned oil companies to retool to start outputting cleaner gasoline, moved big polluting industry out of the cities (steel plants, etc.), closed down barbecue pits, ended the sale of some of the more polluting coal briquettes that used to be common, and are trying to get construction sites to keep the dust down.

All of those steps are helping, but not reversing the trend (so far as I can tell or have heard). There is a push to move from coal-burning power plants to gas-powered power plants, but they need to find the gas (via fracking or other means).

Is there an outcry? There are certainly people posting about the pollution on Weibo, which is China's twitter. There are also plenty of people emigrating to the US, if they can afford it (voting with their feet, even if they can't vote here). But I think for people to do more than that, they'd need to see the government just not giving a damn. So perhaps the attitude is 'wait and see'?

Hope this helps.

By the way, one of my Beijing buddies said of the Shanghai smog: "In Beijing, we call this Tuesday."

mratzloff• 13 years ago

I think I accidentally down voted this great post, sorry! Wish I could change it like on Stack Overflow.

Havoc• 13 years ago

closed down barbecue pits

Mind explaining what those are?

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

I also think I read that more than 50% of the nuclear plants currently being built are in China. That is a big way that they will eventually combat this problem.

rayiner• 13 years ago

I realize that criticism may be somewhat muted given the nature of the PRC government

There's no shame in calling a spade a spade. You correctly perceive that the brutally authoritarian PRC government both suppresses criticism and whitewashes press coverage of environmental problems in the country.

As an aside, discussions with other westerners about China feels to me like having brunch with a couple where everyone knows the husband is cheating on the wife. The natural inclination is to engage in heroic effort to make things seem normal--to map the dysfunctional couple's relationship dynamics to that of a normal couple, all in order to preserve the all-important pretense.

tonyplee• 13 years ago

80% of my classmates are in China. There are constant messages about PM level in Shanghai, Beijing in all my classmates' social networks in wechat, renren.

Not yet an outcry, definitively discussions, humors, etc.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I remember visiting Shanghai about 10 years ago. It was very vibrant and exciting, and there were cranes everywhere. I thought, "This is like being on the ground floor of a great new metropolis. Wouldn't it be awesome to work here?" I'm glad that things didn't work out that way. There are health consequences for such massive pollution.

rahimnathwani• 13 years ago

I feel thankful to be in Beijing. The AQI (air quality index) is only 202 (very unhealthy) here right now.

Sharlin• 13 years ago

I wonder how this compares to the worst smogs experienced in London and elsewhere before the West got its act together with regard to particulate pollution. Apparently the Great Smog of 1952 killed on the order of 10000 people in just a few days. I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952

deletes2• 13 years ago

Well for one, that smog in London lasted a week, compared to Shanghai where it is persistent and getting worse.

nabla93• 13 years ago

London suffered from bad smogs almost century before they did anything to them. Great Smog was just one incident.

Lagged2Death4• 13 years ago

I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.

This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.

I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/documerica111611/s...

From here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...

It didn't compare to the Great Smog, of course, but for Americans, it's closer to home and of course also closer to the present.

SiVal2• 13 years ago

That isn't brown air; it's a brown print. That's a sepia print of a black and white photo of white steam coming out of chimneys artificially crowded together by a long telephoto lens, taken at sunset, and excluding the sky as much as possible. Imagine another photo taken from the same spot, with a wide-angle lens that shows mostly sky and a bridge going off for miles, even the distant cars clearly visible through clear air shining in the mid-day sun as if on their way to the beach, printed blue-and-white instead of brown-and-white. Dramatically different emotional impact from the same scene. It's almost as if The Atlantic had some sort of agenda.

Those images of Shanghai (and London 1952, and Beijing and Hong Kong and, occasionally, Singapore) are the real thing, looking like scenes from a forest fire but downtown in a major city.

poutine• 13 years ago

The difference with China is that much of the entire country is covered by a blanket of smog & dust. Not just the cities, but much of the countryside as well for hundreds of km. China does things big in a way that's hard to grasp without visiting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2478300/Pictu...

polarix• 13 years ago

I wonder what similar satellite imagery would have shown in early/mid 20th century europe.

jliechti1• 13 years ago

Has there been any long-term research done on the health effects of particulate pollution?

I was in Beijing last winter when the air pollution was nearing record highs, and every time I blew my nose after returning from being outside, it would be full of black mucus. That has to be a wakeup call.

In addition, when I returned to the states (Chicago), even the air around O'Hare Airport - probably one of the more polluted areas in the city - felt so clean to me!

ddeck2• 13 years ago

Has there been any long-term research done on the health effects of particulate pollution?

Yes. The 2013 WHO report "Health Effects of Particulate Matter" [1] provides a reasonable summary.

Primary long term impacts are increased mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and from lung cancer.

Recent findings indicate no real safe level, with increased mortality observed at even very low levels (as seen in "clean" developed cities).

[1] http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/189051/H...

iaskwhy2• 13 years ago

I usually get my fair bit of black mucus in Central London. Not sure what that means but some places don't smell that good. For example, Queen's Gate road in Kensington has a very strong smell of gas.

chockablock2• 13 years ago

Great smog of 1952 estimated at 3000 ug/m^3 of PM10

Source: Open access journal article linked from the wikipedia page you cited ;) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241116/pdf/ehp0...

chockablock2• 13 years ago

Found some estimates that appear to be better.

Great smog of 1952 had a measured peak daily average of 1620 ug/m^3 of total suspended matter (TSM) [1].

Reported levels in Shanghai of up to 602.5 ug/m^3 PM2.5 (suspended particles < 2.5 microns).

We can convert from TSM to PM2.5 using ballpark conversion given by: PM10 = 0.6TSM [1; notes to table 3] PM2.5 = 0.75PM10 [2].

So according to these rough calculations the great smog of 1952 probably had a PM2.5 of about 700 ug/m^3, quite similar to the current Shanghai smog, and lower than levels regularly reported in other Chinese cities.

Open access sources: [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240556/pdf/ehp1... (Table 3 reports total particulate during the great fog of 1620ug/m^3, and estimates PM10 as 60% of that number = 972)

[2] http://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/air/guide_...

saalweachter4• 13 years ago

It really irks me whenever there's a talk about nuclear energy. Nuclear power may have its own set of challenges, but coming from the baseline of coal it's hard to do worse.

ddeck2• 13 years ago

Agreed. A recent Stuttgart University report (commissioned by Greenpeace) estimated 22,000 premature deaths per year in the EU alone from coal-fired power stations. [1]

I've seen estimates in the US of 10-20,000 annually depending on the source. e.g. [2], [3].

As someone who lives in a city state so small that the coal-fired power stations are literally next door to housing, I too wish there was more attention given to this.

[1] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international...

[2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/coal-p...

[3] http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/

sliverstorm10• 13 years ago

It's especially dour when people celebrate getting nuclear plants shut down or blocked, and you know the unspoken result will be more coal plants. How is that a victory?

ck22• 13 years ago

I wonder if Japan right now would prefer smog.

dreamfactory9• 13 years ago

As far as I know, no coal plants have ever resulted in a Chernobyl-scale effect.

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

Better or worse, it is difficult to get public support for moving from with terrible results that trickle out nearly invisibly over time to a system that still has disasters but whose disasters appear as a few big booms.

Clearly, the public is more motivated by a move to solar, which actually appears safe whatever its real overall costs would be.

The problem is that while nuclear power may be potentially have the best cost-benefit of any power source, economics and human psychology seem to imply that nuclear power as it will appear is going to be visibly dangerous something human psychology finds less desirable than the poisonous and costly status quo (see evolutionary game theory etc).

Engineers ... love to solve logistical problems and push their solutions on humans, whether these solve the human's problems or not.

brianbreslin• 13 years ago

Do you guys think this will spur china to jump ahead in greening/pollution reduction? It would be incredibly costly to do so ($$$), but incredibly costly not to (people).

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

So why do people use those flimsy face masks instead of proper gas masks / carbon filters?

prawks• 13 years ago

Cost is a likely factor.

autodidakto• 13 years ago

Self-administered placebo

jread• 13 years ago

I lived in Utah which can get very smoggy due to winter inversions. PM2.5 levels sometimes hit 80 mcg in the winter, often the highest in the country and utterly depressing to live in.

seanmcdirmid8• 13 years ago

Its a scandal when SLC hits 70 2.5PM, its just a bad day when Beijing hits 700 2.5PM. There is just no comparison.

johnzim3• 13 years ago

I grew up in Hong Kong. It didn't have the cleanest air in the world but I lived in relative good health. After I left for university I heard things were getting worse and worse although I remained sceptical.

When I returned for work, the air was nowhere near as bad as it is on the mainland now but I simply couldn't survive it. Every day my lungs constricted within minutes (I have asthma.) I realised I could never return to live in my home city as I had intended to.

I was not angered by the existence of the pollution. Things change and China grows on the mainland. What I was angered by was the fact that after the handover, the government was so cowed by their new CCP masters that they wouldn't even tell the truth about the air pollution. You will never hear an HK official admit that the pollution comes from China, yet every single adult citizen who grew up in the city remembers what life was like 15-20 years ago.

China ostensibly has anti-pollution laws. The CCP's colossal corruption keeps them from ever being enforced and entire cities, my hometown amongst them, are now literally poisonous to live in.

wang01092• 13 years ago

There's a big "movement" by CCP to control this thing. It's mentioned in major party conferences. I heard there's going to be 10 Billion RMB poured into this, and pollution would be considered as evaluation parameter for "party leaders".

However I seriously doubt most of the money will end up in vein or simply stolen.

So "enforcement" is to happen but I have little trust in them.

da024• 13 years ago

Was it possible for you to breathe the air in the surrounding areas? (Lantau, Macau, etc)

johnzim3• 13 years ago

Last time I was back in April of this year, Lantau was a little better but realistically still not good enough to consider living there, much less bringing up kids. I ended up feeling out of breath crossing the road.

I haven't been back to Macau since I was a kid though, so it looks very different now (Thanks to Mr Ho.)

My grandfather grew up in HK too. He passed away last summer, struck down by a rather horrible respiratory based cancer. However, I'm wary of too much confirmation bias in attributing that to the pollution too. It'll be interesting to see what the respiratory disease numbers are like in the coming decades.

veidr2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I live in Japan, roughly 3000km from China, but we also have to deal with China's pollution.

Although not that common, we sometimes get an alert with the weather report that the levels of PM 2.5 particulate matter (overwhelmingly blown over from China) are exceeding government safety standards, and that we may want to consider keeping kids indoors.

I remember we had similar 'smog alerts' a few days a year when I was a little kid in Los Angeles in wthe 1980s, and we couldn't go out to recess. But I think that's like what we are getting here in Japan, at a great distance separated by ocean -- nothing compared to what the Chinese people in Shanghai and Beijing are suffering.

haosdent• 13 years ago

I am Chinese. The whole China are suffer from air pollution, not noly Shanghai.

wang01092• 13 years ago

Pollution is now the No.1 reason rich people migrate out of China, second to Education of their kids. I claim this from experience.

dylandrop4• 13 years ago

Kind of unfortunate too -- move away, and leave the problem behind. Of course there's no problem with getting out of the polluted area, but there's a problem with just giving up and moving elsewhere, forgetting the pollution exists and not trying to solve it from abroad.

knappe• 13 years ago

Having just come back, this week, from a three weeklong trip visiting a large portion of the country (Beijing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Guilin, Shanghai, Nanjing and Shijiazjuang [along with a number of minor cities]) the pollution was by far the worse in Shijiazjuang, though not on the level seen in Shanghai this week. Shanghai was polluted, but the wind was generally blowing most of the pollution away from the city.

My impression was that most people have a rather nonchalant attitude towards the pollution. They know it is bad, but don't really know what to do about it. This includes my American brother who has been living in Shijiazjuang for the last year. Whenever the topic of pollution came up, he didn't really seem to have any strong feelings about the pollution, either way and explained that seems to be most people's attitude too.

3am• 13 years ago

I appreciate how this is currently sharing the frontpage with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860839

coldcode• 13 years ago

Air pollution is one thing the leadership suffers as well. Everyone has to breathe. If the people are poor or suffering in some other way but the leadership is living large then they can ignore the issues. But everyone needs air. At some point they have to deal with it.

jajathehut1• 13 years ago

+1. Also applies to western countries riding their moral highhorse - pollution knows no borders. 1/3rd of pollution in LA comes from China.

wil4212• 13 years ago

What did the cities look like in the US and Europe during parts of the Industrial Revolution?

I cant imagine it was as persistent and thick as some parts of China.

DanBC• 13 years ago

As already mentioned in the thread the London "pea soupers" were as bad, or worse, than the pictures we see here.

Google image search for ["pea souper"] for images from 1950s London.

wil4212• 13 years ago

Here is a good link in case anyone is interested.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2243732/Pea-souper-k...

nabla93• 13 years ago

Investment idea: Companies that manufacture sulfur dioxide scrubbers for coal plants.

kvnwng• 13 years ago

There's also a lack of understanding on the effects of this pollution, especially as it becomes more regular. I worked and lived in China for 7 years and just getting parents to close the windows of an obstetric hospital with newborns was difficult enough. There is a belief that "fresh air" is always better than what is in the room. When I asked nurses about the public health impact of this pollution on children, they often stared blankly back.

ashray2• 13 years ago

Had the exact same problem with my parents in New Delhi. Father was suffering from lung disease. Wanted to sit outside on the balcony - fresh air, apparently. I tried to explain to him that the air is laden with dangerous levels of particulate pollutants. He didn't care. He died earlier this year.

PM10/2.5 levels continue to be disastrous (1900+/700+ on some days especially around Diwali). Mother still likes to open balcony doors and room windows to let 'fresh air' flow through the house.

Neither are/were uneducated. Post grads in SCIENCE FFS!

Cannot. Explain. It.

jpatokal• 13 years ago

But does closing windows really help? I mean sure, short term it slows down the exchange of air between the inside and outside, so it'll be helpful if there's a sudden spike that goes away. But if the pollution is a chronic problem, and it certainly is in Shanghai and New Delhi, then eventually the equilibrium will equalize and the air inside will be just as bad.

kibwen• 13 years ago

For historical reference, here are some breathtaking photos of mid-century Pittsburgh:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2155742/Hell-lid-tak...

I wonder if anyone can cite a source for one of the claims made in the article:

"Also lots of people thought that high smoke output was a sign of high productivity and that coal smoke was good for the lungs and helped crops grow."

huxley• 13 years ago

If you've lived near farms, pulp-n-paper mills or fish processing plants, you will often be told that the stink is the smell of money and you should stop complaining. I expect it was something similar.

mikestew• 13 years ago

As I would tell my father as we passed a pig farm, "yeah, but it's not the smell of my money."

fnsa• 13 years ago

this looks like a good sign for the world economy. S&P 2000!

seanmcdirmid8• 13 years ago

344 2.5 AQI right now in Beijing. I just bought a $1k air purifier to cope last week to cope with what is going to be a very bad winter.

simplemath2• 13 years ago

What model?

seanmcdirmid8• 13 years ago

Blue air. Second largest one.

ChuckMcM5• 13 years ago

I see this as a difficult to fake signal that China's economic growth is more real than some folks in the West would like to believe. It is similar to the challenges faced by industrial cities in the West as they exploited the massive production capacities created during WW II. Generally the reasoning goes, high pollution from lots of power plants / factories is a function of production of those power plants / factories.

You can fake GDP numbers but its not as straight forward to fake this sort of environment.

That said, it would be unfortunate if China doesn't get their act in gear soon and start putting scrubbers on plants and cleaning up their act here.

riquito• 13 years ago

That's true, but you also earn _a lot_ of money ignoring safety measures. They're paying with their lives part of this productivity

beachstartup• 13 years ago

China's economic growth is more real than some folks in the West would like to believe

i know that people in general are racist against the chinese for all sorts of reasons, but this is the first time i've heard this one.

does anyone actually doubt china's economic growth? i mean all you have to do is go there and see it. (granted, very, very few 'experts' on china have ever actually been there)

ChuckMcM5• 13 years ago

It isn't racism. This link provides a useful summary of the question : http://ineteconomics.org/china-economics-seminar-0/short-his...

The global interest in China's actual GDP on a comparative scale is to help estimate things like their future consumption of natural resources, their threat to global stability, and to evaluate global recessions/growth more accurately.

The problem with "seeing it" is differentiating what you are seeing with what is. So for example a city in the US that has a lot of large buildings being built is a clear sign of economic growth because the market dynamics are structured so that people don't build buildings unless they believe they can rent them out profitably, so they 'lead' in the sense there is demand for that space, they go up, it gets rented, and now there are a bunch of new jobs in the city which brings in workers with wages etc etc etc.

But in China there are buildings that were built simply because the government said "Build a building." There are buildings that are totally empty (see this link http://io9.com/chinas-brand-new-abandoned-cities-could-be-dy... which has some fascinating pictures).

So people don't trust the economic statistics the government produces and seek out other ways of either confirming or denying what is said. Energy consumption is one such indicator which, when combined with a technology sophistication index, can provide another data point on China's economic strength.

drcode• 13 years ago

No, it's just a sign that they rely heavily on unrefined coal for power.

aryastark• 13 years ago

China's growth is being sustained by a development bubble, where they are accumulating the infamous ghost towns. But I've never heard anyone deny the fact that they are doing these things. And, of course, everyone in the US already knows that China makes everything. So I don't know who you are referring to here.

Symmetry3• 13 years ago

China has a lot of ghost towns, but remember that the ghost towns from 2008 are full of people now, so I'm guessing that the current ghost towns will up sooner or later. China has way less square footage of housing per capita than Europe, much less the US so building lots of housing is a pretty reasonable investment even if it doesn't pay off instantly.

revelation• 13 years ago

But is it sustainable? Heavy thick smog (indicating the prominent use of coal to generate power) are certainly a negative signal when we have much better power sources.

ChuckMcM5• 13 years ago

Of course it is, (sustainable that is), it is just more expensive. I don't believe there is anything currently cheaper than a pouring fresh out of the mine coal, down a chute into a burner, which is making steam to drive a turbine. And there are a number of plants in China that seem to be just that.

You can pre-process the coal (remove impurities, create more uniform pellets, etc) to reduce random by products, and you can post process the exhaust plume through particulate and catalyzing filters to remove pollution by products. Much like a modern automobile a modern coal plant does all of that and more.

The down side is that it is more expensive to build, and to operate, and to fuel. Which is why generally government regulations are used to enforce it.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Curious... from a cancer-risk standpoint, this is the equivalent of smoking how many cigarettes that day?

One? Ten? A pack? Two packs? Fifty packs?

Or do we not have enough data to even guess?

calgaryeng• 13 years ago

And yet your President is still prioritizing coal over Canadian oilsands....

nostromo• 13 years ago

It's amazing how much of this is getting to the West Coast of the US.

By one measure 29% of SF's air pollution originates in Asia.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/88/i46/8846news3.html?T+Online+...

_pmf_• 13 years ago

Damn these Chinese! Can't they cheaply produce our goods with slave labor without polluting our precious planet?

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

This could amuse me, but it saddens me, of course. The reason this could almost amuse me is that I remember a conversation in 1982 in Taipei, soon after my first visit to China, with a student from France. He too had just been to China, and he thought China was a wonderful place, "Because it has no air pollution." (Compared to 1982 Taiwan, yeah, the P.R.C. had very little pollution because it had very little industrial production. I have never been to France, so I don't know if he was also making a comparison to 1982 France by that comment.) I wish that China (and, for that matter, India) had made it a national development goal to grow in an environmentally friendly way. Once, we didn't know technologies for producing industrial output and raising prosperity without producing quite a bit of pollution along the way, but China (and, again, India) could have learned from the mistakes of other countries and the new technologies they developed to build up output without adding so much to pollution.

Today, Taipei is remarkably clean. I was stunned in 2001, when I last lived there as a permanent resident, by a visitor from Ukraine who arrived in Taiwan after visiting Hong Kong. He commented that he liked Taiwan better than Hong Kong because it was cleaner. I was stunned by that comment because the last time I visited Hong Kong (before retrocession to China), no one would have said so. Hong Kong is downwind of China, and maybe is not as cleaned up anymore now that it is under Chinese rule. Taiwan under democratization has become very clean indeed (although it too is downwind of China). Politicial pluralization through a free press and free elections (an advantage India already has) and effective rule by law (an advantage India is developing) seem all over the world to help countries prosper in a more environmentally sustainable manner. I wish China well in developing democracy and rule by law, and in any event to enjoy clean air sooner rather than later.

tanzam752• 13 years ago

India's cities are better -- but not that much better. In January 2013, Beijing made headlines for a record-high PM2.5 of 755 mg/m^3. Nobody paid any attention to New Delhi, whose PM2.5 topped out at 565 mg/m^3 the next day.

India's GDP is currently 1/4 that of China. Imagine how bad things will get in another 10 years, when India's GDP reaches China's current GDP.

Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-01-15/pollu...

teyc• 13 years ago

For the engineers this is an interesting read: http://cornerstonemag.net/pollution-control-of-coal-fired-po...

According to this article, coal fired stations are no longer the primary source of PM2.5. Road vehicles emit an order of magnitude more particulate matter.

I recall about 20 years ago, Santiago had to implement a system where odd-numbered vehicles were allowed to drive on one day, and even-numbered the next, to cut down on the haze problem.

Perhaps electric vehicles are the way to go.

squozzer• 13 years ago

I'd engage in some schadenfreude, but a good bit of that stuff will be lurking over LA none too soon.

Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

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