We’ve made so much progress in the USA. 75 years ago, we may have witnessed some scenes like this in today’s China. Unfortunately, the de-industrialization of the west just moved the western problems of the past to a country that doesn’t seem to care much about pollution control.
At the junction of Ningxia province and Inner Mongolia province, I saw a tall chimney puffing out golden smoke covering the blue sky, large tracts of the grassland have become industrial waste dumps; unbearable foul smell made people want to cough; Surging industrial sewage flowed into the Yellow River…”
– Lu Guang
Or how about his one?
In Inner Mongolia there were 2 “black dragons” from the Lasengmiao Power Plant (内蒙古拉僧庙发电厂) covering the nearby villages. July 26, 2005
See the complete photo essay on pollution in China here.
Be thankful for what you have, and show this to your favorite environmentalist the next time he/she complains about the pollution sins of western civilization.
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As a Chinese I am saddened by these pictures. China’s environmental problems are REAL, SERIOUS, and IMMINENT. Global warming is the least of their concern. I am all for any air pollution control technologies that can solve any part of the problem, regardless of how much CO2 they will create. AGW, even if it truly exists, is the least of Chinese’s concern.
When you cross the border from Hong Kong into “Chanzen”, you cross over a small enclosed brigde over a small stream. The air is heavy with a smell that I can only decribe as an “engineering/garage/car body and paint workshop”. The water looked stagnent and polluted.
Some of those pictures look enhanced.
If it was really about saving the planet from AGW the entire AGW movement would be aimed at China instead of the assinine litany of left wing policies riding the AGW train.
Last I heard, the Chinese were getting rid of the really toxic chemical waste from the manufacture of Sacred Green Solar Cells by trucking it out to farmland and school grounds and dumping it. I guess it will take take several Donora PAs and Bhopals to rein such practices in.
Yet all the environmentalists are in the USA trying to shut us down.
Oh g…….words can’t describe this mess. How do the people in these areas actually survive (and I’m aware there’s cleaner areas of China as well)?
On another pollution related story, I read aging sewage plants in Iowa are dumping sewage into many streams which millions use as drinking water, but the pictures here show a most severe sewage problem in China.
It could take decades to clean up this mess considering the severity.
In the U.S. the CO2 is white but in China it’s yellow and black. Does that mean it can take on different colors in different places?
I know. I know. I shouldn’t have asked that question because some wacko is now going to come along and say that CO2 is invisible.
If there ever was a posterboy for getting off this thing about CO2 and getting on with solving real pollution, those pictures have to be it. Those people over there more than likely wished they HAD some CO2 to breath out.
It will cost a fraction of the budged planned to spend on C&T and climate change (3 trillion dollar) to clean up the the air, land and water in China.
We have the technology, the man power, why not apply?
Well, our entire political establishment has gone bunkers.
The UN has pointed it’s finger to the free world and the free world must be eradicated. All the collaborators that have infiltrated our societies are in place, from the Presidency to the prep schools.
These people have other priorities and these priorities are not in the interests of the people, no matter where they live, it’s not in the interest of our environment.
It’s about a scrupulous elite with an unsatisfiable hunger for individual wealth and power.
The U. S. of A. went through a high pollution phase and some think not enough has been done. Consider the coke, iron, and steel Pittsburgh region of the 1940s, or the smelters in Northern Idaho, or the early potato processing in Southern Idaho. Such things are mostly gone – cleaned up or unfortunately simply moved to such places as China. These things take strong political leadership, money, and time. All of which the U. S. of A. is now intent on squandering on the global warming issue when there are real serious problems that should be addressed.
Consider just one:
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/294264,unicef-malnutrition-stunts-growth-in-200-million-children.html
Yeah, the wackos amaze me in that they want greater and greater restrictions on the US while China seems to be exempt from just about every international pollution accord there is.
They have reached the point of diminishing returns in the US. Continued scrubbing of Earth’s clean spot isn’t going to make the rest of the planet any cleaner. Our dirtiest cities are like national parks compared to places in China, India, and Brazil.
But it is part of this odd environmental narcissism that pervades the “environmental” movement where they seem to have a belief that the country with the greatest economic output “must” be a major polluter or something. They rationalize it with the logic that “every little bit makes a difference”, but it doesn’t. Increasing environmental regulations in the US would make a difference that could not even be measured because of the rate of increase in other places will swamp it.
Oregon is a great example. They have put all these regulations in place to reduce CO2 emissions. It will not make an iota of difference. Oregon has a goal to reduce CO2 emissions by 300,000 metric tons per year. China is increasing emissions at the rate of 300,000,000 metric tons per year. If Oregon reached its goal, it will have been surpassed 1000 times by China. In the overall scheme of things, Oregon amounts to a raindrop in the ocean, it can not even be measured. If it takes Oregon 5 years to do that, China will have increased her emissions by 1,500,000,000 tons at the current rate of increase. These people have absolutely no concept of the scale of what they are talking about.
They delude themselves into believing that a project that costs billions of dollars makes any difference when it doesn’t amount to anything at all except extracting money from people’s pockets and possibly making some FEEL better. It doesn’t actually accomplish anything at all.
If they want to do something, why don’t they protest pollution in China? Good luck trying.
Adam from Kansas (21:09:27) : Iowa, sewage, population
Iowa only has about 3 M people so I think for your statement to be true we will have to assume that the Iowa rivers drain into the Mississippi River and the folks on its banks drink Iowa sewage.
Early in the 1900s my grandparent’s “farm” had an outhouse over an intermittent stream. When the stream was not flowing the waste piled up under the hole and then in the spring it was flushed down the creek with the early snow melt. That was in NW Pennsylvania and the water eventually went to the Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers.
Ron, you meant “bonkers”, right?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bonkers
Another example,
You could render the UK completely carbon neutral. Shoot every single person and domestic animal in the country, turn off every power plant, turn the entire British Isles into a nature reserve and China will make up the difference in CO2 emissions in 18 months. Every 18 months China adds as much as the entire UK emits.
Until they get serious about China, India, and Brazil we are just fooling around and fooling ourselves. Trouble is that 50% of the population of the planet lives in China and India. The other 50% is scattered over all the rest of Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, Australia, and North America. The US has only 2.5% to 3% of the world’s population. It is NOT sustainable to try to make 3% of the population offset the output of 97% of the population.
Cancer villages? This must be propaganda. The Chinese are a benevolent people. Their leaders would never allow such horrors to be allowed.
I think we need to keep our perspective. Right now, poverty kills a heck of a lot more in China than does pollution. In a decade or two, that equation will have reversed, at which point China will deal with their air pollution on their own and without outside help or international agreement.
Until then, they will not. It’s as simple as that. When the Chinese rich up they will clean up, just as every first-world country has done.
I agree with that to a great extent. But in the meantime, lets not pretend that setting carbon quotas on individuals in the Western world is going to make any difference.
gt (20:42:52) “As a Chinese I am saddened by these pictures. China’s environmental problems are REAL, SERIOUS, and IMMINENT. Global warming is the least of their concern. I am all for any air pollution control technologies that can solve any part of the problem, regardless of how much CO2 they will create. AGW, even if it truly exists, is the least of Chinese’s concern.”
Western politicians of all political stripes have miscalculated the gravity of this reality.
evanmjones (21:53:21) : “…When the Chinese rich up they will clean up…”
That is worthy of Quote of the Year, Evan.
It encapsulates a great number of truths with brilliant simplicity.
Much of this thread to date has impressed me… even inspired… so thanks to you all.
And, Anthony, make a mental note of Evan’s line for consideration?
Well, that’s what all the industrialized world looked like in 1850 to 1950. Many thousands probably died every year but civilization continued and brought us everything we have today. We in the West moved our pollution elsewhere starting in the 1960s. We got clean air, the goods we wanted but at the expense of a growing trade deficit. Helpful was there was always another country with intelligent, skilled but poor citizens. They would breathe the the orange smoke from the smokestacks in exchange for the money they earned.
The money earned raised the living standard of the people. Orange smoke became unacceptable and costs were incurred to stop the pollution. These same costs made the products manufactured for export too expensive. People in the West moved on to another, poorer country and the process repeated.
Were these people exploited by this Western capitalism? It depends on your interpretation. Many thousands died but millions benefited from the rise in the standard of living. It started with Germany and Japan in the 1950s. Neither has orange colored smokestacks today and both have a standard of living equal to their original exploiters.
This leapfrogging of country to country exploitation continued from the 1950s until today. Today it’s China that has an intelligent, hard working work-force willing to put up with toxic smoke from smokestacks. Your standard of living is rising and at some point you will not put up with the pollution. When and how is up to you. Remember, the first orange smokestacks were in Britain and the US a hundred years ago.
What’s interesting to me is what happens afterward. China is the last country to “benefit” from this over half-century paradigm. The earth is finite and there is no other country left of any significance to leapfrog to. It ends here.
Economically it means the West will no longer be able to pass on the cost of its needs to third-world countries, meaning the West will very soon have to carry the full burden of the costs the goods they require. This will be a huge jolt and a dislocation to the expected manner of doing things. The last 60 years of seeming prosperity has been based on a derivative function.
Long and short, there is nothing after China. Things will change in a big way after that.
Mariss
Strong central government bureaucracy always destroys the civilization it guides, always! Poor people always destroy their environment, always. Free people that can create wealth and control it’s use, always clean up and improve their environment, always.
The Chinese have had nearly 4,000 years to perfect the art of bureaucrats in strangling advancement and I have great faith in their ability to end the present great leap forward fairly soon. As the Soviet Union collapsed in great environmental damage, so will the Chinese. They are at the top of this advancement right now.
The only way that I have seen that works on bureaucracies is to starve them of funding and ignore their ravenous demands for more power.
Gary Indiana? (The second photo)
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Pamela Gray (21:26:11) :
If there ever was a posterboy for getting off this thing about CO2 and getting on with solving real pollution, those pictures have to be it. Those people over there more than likely wished they HAD some CO2 to breath out.
YES. Two separate arguments here: pollution and “pollution”-forced warming.
Are homo sapiens polluting the planet? Yes. AGP Anthropogenic Global Pollution (think the Texas-sized Pacific Trash Gyre).
If the AGW people would focus on *solvable* problems, then I might be *somewhat* on board.
But they don’t stop with the solvable problem.
Then then make the illogical jump FIRST: Ignoring the pollution….they focus on CO2 (which is not a pollutant)…
…and then SECOND: they jump the next chasm by making CO2 the main cause of “global warming”.
Is it not so plain to see to any reasonable mind, as to why this argument is so ****ed up????
Two crazy, CRAZY jumps in logic (and without statistically significant scientific evidence in both, I might add).
And then the REAL pollution problems, in the smokescreen of the bull***t, are thrown under the bus!!!
I have one thing to say:
Coal dust IS. CO2 is not!
And I am sure the folks in the PAC NW who are taking in the hydrologic cycle forcing of excess mercury, lead, and other poisons through the salmon and the water supply, thanks to China, know this all too well.
Why is this so hard to understand???
Where is Al Gore and all of these other talking heads on these issues???
Where are they???
It is truly a life safety issue, and they are ignoring the real problems, because they are too stupid to see the forest through the trees!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Life magazine back in the 1960s had some amazing photos of American pollution. I did a bit of a search, and there are some sites that describe the contents but not to the detail to let identify which issues have the photos I remember best:
Sheets or white shirts on a clothes line, I think in Chicago, that had been abandoned and picked up enough soot to be dark gray. (While there were complaints about what we’d call “Cherry picking”, businessmen in Pittsburgh PA in the 1940s would bring in a new shirt to put on after lunch.)
Mounds of suds floating down a Ohio(?) river from washing machine gray water that wasn’t treated much or at all.
And of course, the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland after it caught fire. (While an iconic event, some people downplay it as only caught fire twice. However, it did provide a lot of impetus to get serious about cleaning things up. It may also have led to Cleveland being a dumping ground for stand up comics.)
By the time I got to Pittsburgh for college in 1968 they had cleaned up the particulate pollution quite a bit, but SO2 and NOx was still pretty bad. After bicycling home late at night my shirt would smell like a wood fire.
A frequent nighttime occurrence was the air inversion that let crud from the steel mills flow up Panther Hollow and then engulf the CMU campus. We always looked forward to steelworker strikes and the cleaner air they brought.
I haven’t been back frequently, but the last time I was there several of the the buildings had been cleaned a look a lot more attractive with the layer of black grime removed. A building on campus was cleaned before I left, I hand never taken note of the ceramic tile thistles that lined the top of the exterior walls.
Still, nothing quite equals some of those China shots.