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.
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.
Surely this is first Bush’s fault, then that of white Americans.
Crosspatch: “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.”
Great points. And the vast, beautiful state of Oregon, ironically, is inheriting some of China’s worst airborne pollutants, thanks to the Westerlies.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
That picture reminds me of story, I once read in Readers Digest, growing up as a child. A small town, nestled in a Pa. valley, had a coal plant. On a cold and foggy night, a low pressure system trapped the blackened soot from the plant, and killed several dozen people in the process.
Events such as that and others like it, helped create the EPA and impose regulations to reduce harmful particulates. The reduction of harmful emissions has greatly increased the air quality we now enjoy.
Thirty years ago, when I lived in Pasadena, air quality was very poor. The chemical plants along the bayou, had givin the city a dirty nickname, Stinkadena.
If one was to drive toward Houston, from any direction, a visible brownish-grey haze, smog, incapsulated the city. I’m sure many cities looked that way.
I moved from that awful stench of a city and moved to Alaska, back in ’83, and only now had recently moved back to Houston.
One of the first things I immediately noticed was the quality of air surrounding the city. The smog was gone. The air, traveling from the plants, over to my mothers house, no longer carried the stench of industry.
The EPA had done its job. And now I’m afraid that same agency, which did much to improve the quality of life we now enjoy, is embarking on a journey to insanity.
It wasn’t enough to help regulate emissions, and now with their extraordinary powers, wish to control a substance, that the oceans of the world, emit naturally.
If the EPA and the U.S. Gov’t is truly concerned about OUR quality of life, reductions by other countries should reflect our own current policies.
Before we engage in any global discussions regarding emission reductions, nations like China, must achieve reductions in emissions, that we now currently impose upon ourselves.
Any further capturing of CO2 seems almost ludicrous on our part, while other nations, without our current level of restrictions, would only admit to some regulation, but not on par with our own.
It is a fools journey.
I understand Maurice Strong lives there. He has tons o’ cash, why isn’t he doing something about it? World’s greatest environmentalist my foot. It is because he knows that once the North American countries have committed fiduciary suicide, China will be where it’s at. Creature comforts and all.
The pictures look exaclty like what was found in the Eastern Bloc countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And to think it all started with Most Favored Nation status.
How’s that working out?
We have 2 Free Trade Agreements in Asia, they have 139 in the US.
I thought so.
So, what is AGW’s ultimate goal? Pay reparations, turn the countryside into fuedal states and “I wanna be like Hu Jintao, What you worried about?”.
The pictures above may be a glimpse of what the US will look like in 20 years after the Agenda has seized power.
Does anyone really believe they care about pollution after they made C02 into thier pet scapegoat?
All I can say is brilliant minds think alike.
Most of us all had similar reactions from a single picture.
Quite serendipitous.
I was in a taxi in Beijing in the summertime. I took a deep breath and it felt just like the old days in L.A. Beijing air in the summertime is worse than L.A. air in the 60s.
Flying from Beijing up north to Shenzhen down by Hong Kong all you see when you look down is brown air.
“Life magazine back in the 1960s had some amazing photos of American pollution. ”
Back in about 1968 or maybe 1969, my Dad drove us to see or grandparents in the midwest. We were driving across Pennsylvania and I remember asking my Dad what that horrible smell was. My eyes were burning and it smelled awful. He said “Pittsburgh”. We still had 50 miles to go before we got there. When we got there, all I can remember is a very hazy, foggy, and horribly stinky gray place with soot all over everything. Couldn’t see very far because of all the haze. The sun was a bluish spot in the sky.
Eastern Europe was the same way until the 1990’s. Germany spent billions on the industrial infrastructure of East Germany. When I lived in Berlin in the early 1980’s the tree leaves would be covered with soot and the smell of coal smoke was thick in the air, particularly on foggy mornings.
But I don’t believe I have seen anything like what is going on in China.
For example this image of Sakurajima volcano in Japan shows a plume of ash drifting to the Southwest from the volcano but the majority of that wispy haze to the North of the plume is pollution from China.
If you think the US is getting a dose of Chinese pollution, it is nothing compared to what Japan is getting.
We in the West are responsible for what’s happenig in China and India.
It is Western big businesses that profiteered by moving production to these countries to get lower production costs – cheap labour & low cost factories which didn’t have to conform to Western safety and pollution regulations.
In the end it is us, the consumers who buy these cheap goods, which still bear historic and familiar brand names, who are responsible. Without our money, this would never have happened.
So the solution to the problem is easy. Support your own local manufacturing base and only buy goods made in your own country. We can all do our small bit to solve this problem.
I toured eastern Europe just after the Iron Curtain fell, and the sight that most struck me was the horrible degree of environmental destruction everywhere, both rural and urban. Many streams and broad areas of open land were so contaminated as to be beyond safe use. Cities and towns looked grimy and smelled like paint shacks.
I was told that communist policy was “sweep it under the rug.” Government mandated production quotas had to be met, the bureaucrats simply didn’t care, and the people complained at their peril. I returned 10 years after liberation and was amazed at how much the place had been cleaned up.
History is repeating itself in China. Political repression and socialist state planning result in ecological calamity that makes third-world kleptocracies look pristine by comparison.
evanmjones (21:53:21) :
I think we need to keep our perspective. Right now, poverty kills a heck of a lot more in China than does pollution.
Work accidents do too.
Garacka (21:21:30) :
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.
I am that wacko—co2 is invisible!! 😉
I think that these chimneys and other sources create aerosols which help to cool the atmosphere, so the industrial and political leaders of China could be awarded by the warriors against global warming – they could even get the Lenin award if not the Stalin award.
“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.”
Or cares about pollution control about as much as the industrialized west did.
“show this to your favorite environmentalist the next time he/she complains about the pollution sins of western civilization.”
The complaints of grassroots environmental movements are the reason why the contrast is so stark. Complaints don’t get listened to in totalitarian regimes, which is why the western industrialists moved their production there.
I can imagine that the Chinese long term plan is to move their industrial production back to the west once they have bought out our bankrupted countries.
The wheel turns.
The West has moved its pollution to China, which now produces toys for the West. But we are not responsible. We are not responsible for anything. It’s Them that are responsible.
The UN has pointed it’s finger to the free world and the free world must be eradicated.
?? I thought that these ideas about AGW and fighting CO2 originated in the free world who is doing all of it to itself. Countries like China, India and Brazil are rather reluctant to jump on that bandwagon.
This is what I love about the Greens, they just bury their heads in the sand and shout “la, la, la, la, la, la, I cannot hear you”, to insulate themselves from the rigours of the real wold.
They were so pleased with themselves, for shutting down the dirty industries in Britain. But now look what they have created: unemployment in Britain and ten-times as much pollution in the East. Never mind, its NIMBY.
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There have been a number of proposals in the media recently, to do with pumping sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere to cool the planet. Based on that logic, then these photographs of factories belching yellow sulphur clouds must be joy to the eyes of these warmists.
CO2= bad, Sulphur fumes = good.
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And this does not show the 3,000 deaths a year in the coal mining industry. And this was a ‘good’ year – I have seen previous reports as high as 6,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/world/asia/11coal.html
While all industrial deaths in China stand at about 100,000 a year.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-01/17/content_7405924.htm
You know that bright red colour that the Chinese like to use on the boxes of their products. It is not dye, it is the blood of Chinese workers.
Have a nice shopping day, with all those Chinese goods….
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Those steps that the environmentalists are taking us up are not the stairway to heaven, rather they are the steps up the gallows.
Unfortunately, us Europeans and Americans are not going to realise this until we’re dangling from the end of a rope, gasping for air.
Talk about a lot of people being duped. I don’t see them waking up from their trance early enough.
Garacka (21:21:30) :
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.
[snip] Having said that even you deserve some guidance. CO2 is a colourless gas.
What you are describing is the smoke emitted after combustion and one of it’s components is CO2 but that is not what is visible to you. The visible part of the emission is a whole lot different things depending on how the fuel is treated before burning, how it’s burned and the treatment of the emissions before being released.
The difference in appearance between USA and Chinese exhausts are probably due to all the above being carefully controlled in the US and not in China.
So why is one white and the other a yellowish black? The black is usually what’s know as volatile carbon compounds or unburned fuel due to low temperature and lack of oxygen at the furnace face. It’s somewhat the same for the yellow although this also indicates sulphur, ash and a whole lot of other crap you don’t want floating about. It indicates the the last part (treatment of the emissions before being released) and the first part (how the fuel is treated before burning) is deficient.
Here I have made generalizations as the processes are complex. For further reading.
http://www.coalonline.org/site/coalonline/content/Viewer/81591/6247/6247_1.html/Fundamentals-of-coal-combustion
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evanmjones (21:53:21):
“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.”
I agree. Much of the industrial production from the USA and Europe has simply moved to China for reasons of cost / environmental restrictions and as a result the pollution has to a certain extent moved as well. If people in the west demand China to be ‘greener’ then they must be prepared to pay more for the goods they import from China. When they get richer then their own people will, as the West did, increasingly demand cleaner air. London smog comes to mind as well a endless other examples.
Jimbo
This is one of the results of the eco-fascists in the West imposing more and more unnecessary environMental regulation, loss of jobs which are exported to third world countries where this kind of thing is rampant.
If the environMentalists were more concerned to prevent genuine pollution problems around the world and spent less time worrying about harmless trace gas plant food, perhaps the sum of human happiness would increase.
And this isn’t just a polution problem.
I have been told by government coal mining safety inspectors that whilst the Chinese government is trying to reduce fatalities in Chinese coal mines to 3,500 per year, the true figure is believed to be ten times as many.
But no doubt the eco-fascists would think this was a GOOD thing.
Oh, and you shold also have added that CO2 is definitely *not* what you see in the pictures. CO2 is invisible, and whatever is golden or black is a mix of something else most certainly toxic. But you should remind people it is not the CO2 there that is the problem! Because people usually associate black smoke with pure CO2…
Martin Brumby (04:04:32) :
“This is one of the results of the eco-fascists in the West imposing more and more unnecessary environMental regulation, loss of jobs which are exported to third world countries where this kind of thing is rampant…”
I don’t agree with you. You and the rest of us in the Western world are to blame for buying cheap Chinese made goods.
The regulations have resulted in massive improvements to health, life-span, and a better quality of life from having a nice environment to live in.
If you want to do you’re bit to help the third world, start buying goods made in your own country. I know this can work as many big businesses in UK who out-source customer care-lines to the East are now bringing them back into the country as customers went for company’s providing local support.
So do your bit and start supporting your local industry. It will cost you a bit more, but the long-term benefits are vast. As individuals we are powerless, but if we choose to work together nothing can stop us.
Remember that 100+ years ago in rich Western industrial cities, people were still dying young of childbirth, tuberculosis, rickets, malaria, smallpox, measles, polio, diptheria, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, etc., not to mention WWI . They usually didn’t have time to get sick and die from smokestacks. Born in 1850, white folks in the US could hope to live to age 39.
China’s problem now is its old people and lack of females to build the next generation and/or care for the elderly. It’s gonna be ugly!
The “Asian Brown Cloud” was named before China/India’s development as manufacturing centers for the world. Perhaps now they have some electricity in homes, before each home burned their own coal/wood/dung/wax/oil. Heating aside, people cook.
what these pcitures suggest most prominently is that a country which produces this kind of pollution is one that is highly unlikey to embrace such anexpensive technology transfer to non carbon producing environmental energy to get rid off a substance from the sir that currently kills no-one according to many scientists.
i think there is a link beteen carbon and coal and injuries, ie if they were to produce less carbon dioxide the people living near factories would not suffer the adverse effects again. however the flip side is undoubtedy thata lot more people are better off because of these advancements. I would imagine average longevity has increased in china and gdp certainly has.
Though i’m sure future design of power stations could be built further from population or have higher smoke stacks. They obviously have not even the simpler controls that we have.
again thoug much of this polltutio is not just about carbon dioxide it about chemiacls and dead rivers and other forms of pollutants that would exist regradless.
however i would agree that they could somethinig about it iremeber from some rsearcj that they have a ridicously smale environmental agency for the scale of the jobs they undertake.
Environmentalism is like black pepper, a little is good on almost anything, but it is pretty easy to get carried away and ruin dinner.
It is all about balance. It is great that we are not creating new Love Canals, rivers on fire, and that our air is cleaner. If we go too far with it, it ends up being the same place that we started from. Not only will the third world pollute madly on their road to prosperity, our prosperity will wane. Once our prosperity wanes, we will no longer be able to afford non-essentials like environmentalism, and the wheel will have spun the 360º.
The enviro movement has hit a wall much like the MADD mommies have. Both have significantly cleaned up the problem, but are addicted to the money and power. Mission creep be damned, they will find something else to worry about as long as they stay funded/empowered. We don’t need a new OWI law or a new environmental law every 6 weeks, or you WILL ruin dinner. Oh crap, too late..
If the American environmental movement were serious about the environment, they would look a lot different than they do today. They would be pushing pictures like this with a buy American campaign. They would be looking at common propulsion on highways, and looking at market based and efficiency based products instead of the always punitive approach. They would start a renewable power company and show us how it is done.
For example, if you told me that there was a gadget that would make my old 4×4 truck double in gas mileage, I would beat a path to your door and give you a grand for it. The path now is not spending money on developing that gadget, but rather mandating it, even though it doesn’t exist, and if it did, they would screw with it until it didn’t work, by law.
Easy on the pepper please..
Money makes the world go round;
counterfeit money
make the world unsound.
Bankers print;
Americans buy;
Chinese work
under polluted skies.
You don’t like the world
it seems unreal?
What would you expect
when we are clearly warned
“Thou shall not steal?”
Well what do we expect from people who are highly educated to hate this country, and bow down to foreign rulers, while apologizing for our wickedness?
“Crosspatch:
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.”
Of course they don’t, and could care less. There are really two groups of individuals that I encounter on the other side. The first are the naive pawns/footsoldiers, and their mantra can be summed up as “Any pollution/C02 is bad, period, and that someone else is doing worse is no excuse. We must do our best to stop all of this evil polution from taking place here, because we can control what we do HERE.” The second are the people that know better, and understand full well what you’ve outlined, but it’s of no interest to them at all, because they’re the money-handlers. They WANT that tax, they NEED that tax to pass so that they can fund their agenda. They want to forment fear, dissent, and exercise control.
This is why I’ve said so many times here that this is not about winning a logical, rational, debate. That has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
Follow the money.
Americans did NOT support the first bank bailout by an overwhelming margin…it happened anyway.
Americans did NOT support the stimulus packages by an overwhelming majority, they happened anyway. Half of what the politicians and media do is designed primarily to keep everyone’s eye off the REAL ball…keep us focused on things that are of no import whatsoever. Greatest game of 3-card Monty ever.
We, as a society, have not yet figured out how control this system/process called “politics”, and so by default, it continues to control us. There are little glimmers of sunshine here and there…it will be interesting to see if one or more of them become serious breaks in the clouds. I have real hope that technology will play a major role in this.
Follow the money.
JimB
This doesn’t only affect China and Japan. One-third of the airborne pollution on the west coast of the U.S. comes from mainland China.
wakeupmaggy says: “China’s problem now is its old people and lack of females to build the next generation and/or care for the elderly. It’s gonna be ugly!”
That’s another problem brewing. The routine aborting of millions of females in China is producing a huge excess of boys. The government will naturally funnel those excess boys into its growing military; they can’t have them roaming the country and causing internal dissension.
The Chinese military will grow significantly, fed by millions of boys who can’t settle down because they have little hope of finding available women. The military will wield greater foreign policy influence. And when you have a hammer in your hand, you notice nails everywhere. It really will get ugly.
Both of my parents grew up in a northern industrial city, and my mother remembers quite clearly that she and her sisters were never allowed to hang white laundry outside to dry, because it would be ruined from the factory soot.
Modern (young) environmental activists have no idea how much the US has cleaned up over the last 50 years. The change is astounding, and has occurred in almost all areas. For example, it is still common to complain about “deforestation” of the US by commercialization; except that total forest covered areas in the US have been *rising* every year for 80 years now. That is explained away by claims that only “primary” forests count, which has the neat trick of meaning that once a primary forest has been cut (as most in the US were by the 1920’s) then nothing anyone ever does can make that up, even if all the land is left alone and allowed to regrow naturally for 75 years.
If you define a problem so that nothing anyone can ever do can fix it, then you’ve set up a good eternal grievance that you can milk for all you can get. Which of course is the real motive here.
David Alan (22:45:35) :
That was a five day fog in late October 1948 in Donora PA thanks to the Zinc Works and possibly related to Fluoride chemicals used in the smelting process. Various links:
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_594338.html says
“To Pitt doctor, pollution in China smelled like her childhood in Donora”
Officially, the U.S. government, through the Public Health Service, determined that the deaths and the illnesses of about 6,000 people in Donora and Webster were the result of a temperature inversion that kept a layer of fog blanketing Donora for five days.
But people pointed the finger at the zinc works immediately, and Davis said recently uncovered autopsy reports point to highly reactive fluoride gas as the culprit.
http://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=532
This has some small photos and a summary of the event.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/phenom_nov99.html
“It was so bad,” Jerry Campa, a Donora, Pennsylvania, restaurateur recalls, “that I’d accidentally step off the curb and turn my ankle because I couldn’t see my feet.” The acrid, yellowish gray blanket that began to smother the Monongahela River mill town in late October 1948 was more suffocating than anything any Donoran had ever seen – or inhaled – in the past. Before a rainstorm washed the ugly soup away five days later, 20 people had died or would soon succumb and nearly 6,000 of the 14,000 population had been sickened.
http://www.depweb.state.pa.us/heritage/cwp/view.asp?A=3&Q=533403#died
This has several accounts above and below this one:
20 died. The government took heed.
In 1948, a killer fog spurred air cleanup
He and another man grabbed two cylinders, tied handkerchiefs across their faces, and stepped outside into the cloud, trying to feel their way across town. It took 45 minutes to go five blocks. The firefighters didn’t have enough oxygen for everyone, so they gave the injured three or four breaths and then moved on to the next house.
“They . . . resented that, because once we left, the person would go right back into that condition,” Schempp said. “But there wasn’t anything we could do about it. We had to help those other people.”
Thousands were falling sick with crushing headaches, stomach cramps and vomiting. Some coughed up blood. Meanwhile, the zinc works churned along — the plant wasn’t ordered shut until Sunday. That night, a drizzly rain began to fall, slowly dispersing the fog.
We, Australians are running our economy on the blood money and the slave labor of these Chinese people….. I told y’all it wasn’t a good idea to deal with China…. or to let our corruptible social elites and politicians rub shoulders with tyrants.
This is all only ever gonna end in tears.
There was serios pollution in the industrial cities like Pittsburgh in the 1940’s and early ’50’s. That’s because everything had taken a back seat to the war effort, and following the war, the reconstruction of Europe and Japan.
But the basic reason for China’s horrible pollution is different. In the U.S. and the West, a clean environment and the health and welfare of the citizens takes precedence over money. But in China, nothing is more important than money. Pollution abatement costs money, and detracts from profits. The results are in the pictures.
There are some fundamentals here we are missing. First, Eastern/Central Europe’s devastating pollution came from the Soviet Union stealing factories after WWII and then stealing natural resources/human resources via industrialization that only served the Soviet masters. Vampirization we might call it.
In the US that industrial pollution was used for expanding “democracy” and affluence. As the latter was gained, “people” demanded cleaner industry. Other commenters here have discussed the problems with lack of reasonable (olive green) environmentalism; perhaps we do not desire the fruits of our industry and our smarts to clean it up at the same time. (We did not just ship it out; global corporations found the cheapest way to produce; capitalism to succeed needs discipline, not simply avarice and free market thuggery. Financial institutions making money only for the bankers/financiers by destroying equity and to hell with the rest might even be worse than the totalitarians. Only time will tell.)
Yes, China’s GDP is increasing, but to whom and for what purposes is most of that productivity going? For a long time, not just today, China’s pollution has been/is worse than ever was the U.S.’s and it kills/sickens many without much recourse. Which country’s leader(s) murdered millions in the 20th Century?
Keep your eyes not only on the money, but on the elites of whatever social/political organization — islamic, marxist, fascist totalitarianism are and have always been the most dangerous. But unregulated, unbridled, undisciplined free market thuggery can produce some of the same effects. (Aside, try George Soros as one of many capitalist elites today.)
“Smokey (06:04:31) :
That’s another problem brewing. The routine aborting of millions of females in China is producing a huge excess of boys. The government will naturally funnel those excess boys into its growing military; they can’t have them roaming the country and causing internal dissension.”
Include India in that demographic nightmare. Both nuclear powers with millions of male workers, miners, and especially soldiers. Mark Steyn and David P Goldman, Associate Editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com) comment frequently on world demographics.
How is it that the two most heavily populated countries on earth have both decided to forego the natural gender balance? Imagine the unforeseen consequences! Russia and much of Europe are depopulating altogether, how can annexation of these lands by India and China be avoided? The UN certainly isn’t going to stop them.
A little climactic warming or cooling is going to be the least of our childrens worries.
Garacka (21:21:30) :
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?
Except that, in places like the U.S. where the “C02” is white, the trick is to have the light source in back of the smokestack. Voila, instant, black evil “carbon” spewing forth. And of course people know that carbon is black, which is why they always use the term “carbon” instead of carbon dioxide, which of course is invisible.
I had one AGW moron argue once, after I pointed that out, that “so is Carbon Monoxide”.
Of course, the US is the baddie. There is no hope at all of the Chinese writing checks to pay their “carbon debt”. A lot of countries still hope that the US will do that, and perhaps lead the West to do that, even better.
@ Smokey (06:34:31) :
In the U.S. and the West, a clean environment and the health and welfare of the citizens takes precedence over money.
This environmental degradation was typical of the West in the 19th century, but the economy was less powerful, population was less, cities smaller, and some wonderful toxins had yet to be inveted. Communist regimes of the 20th century managed to combine a lot of the worst of modern industry with the worst of 19th century capitalism in its quest to “catch up” economically.
The statement by Smokey (what’s in a name?) is an optimistic one. The one truth it contains is that we do have a functioning democracy which tends to moderate the forces of industry, although not in West Virginia and other sad places. There’s no reason to think it can’t change for the better in China, as it did here.
There are major societies that implode. They don’t make it. It happened throughout history. It will happen again. China, and the wall that defines its borders, is one of those societies that I believe will implode, not get better when they rich up. It will die a slow agonizing death and will be attacked and torn apart much like a lion killed zebra. Why China and not us? Because the poor in the US are willing to fight tooth and toenail for their individual rights. I believe that we have a genetic trait brought about by our generational migration pattern. Malcontents left the old country and hung onto a slim spit of American land. They had kids. Then malcontents from there inched their way inland. They had kids. And the migration continued generation after generation. We self-evolved into malcontents. With the chops to back it up. China citizens not so much, be they rich or poor.
Most commenters here make the leap between industrial pollution and GHG emissions. While somewhat related, it’s worth pointing out that they are nonetheless completely different animals. A good illustration of this is our cars, whose engines today can be so clean-burning that in some cities they actually emit a cleaner air than they take in. That is, of course, if we disregard CO2 as a pollutant. Personally, I don’t care how one calls it. What I know is that somehow we must get rid of fossil fuels and find other ways to produce energy. I also know that it is possible. Those who say it’ll wreck the economy are playing the “alarmist” card themselves. I am sure that they wouldn’t say that if, for example, we were running out of oil, gas and coal. Those same people would invoke the genius of capitalism and free market to determine the best solutions to the problem. And I would in fact agree with them.
China seems to make the calculation that wrecking their environment for the time being is worth it. They are trying to lift millions of people out of poverty, and we all know that when that is the case, the environment is an afterthought. As they gain wealth, they will also want prestige and respect, and I think that will change. In fact, there does seem to be a turnaround in their thinking, as illustrated by their efforts to be more energy efficient in the future. They are not yet in a position to cut their emissions (after all, their emissions per capita are still far below those in the US), but they acknowledge the problem. In doing so, they are showing that they are smart. They know that there is only so much they can get from selling cheap plastic toys to the West. They see the future is in high-tech AND green industry, something that sadly not all of us do, apparently.
Perhaps this is the real reason for the recent global cooling.
They go after the USA because they know the USA is weak and will fold to their demands. A government like China wont bow down easily. Hence they go after the easiest targets first reguardless of how much damage they actually do.
Its not about the earth silly, its about the power.
“Chinese officials waste half their environmental budget”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6574125/Chinese-officials-waste-half-their-environmental-budget.html
“Wang Jinnan, the deputy director of the Academy For Environmental Planning, said that “more than 40 per cent” of the money will end up being wasted by Communist party cadres on extravagant follies to boost their personal prestige.”
“What I know is that somehow we must get rid of fossil fuels and find other ways to produce energy.” chmd
Porque? If CO2 is not a problem (and it is not, it is a blessing) then what is the objection? Let proper economics decide the issue.
An increasing population needs more food equals more need for CO2.
They see the future is in high-tech AND green industry, something that sadly not all of us do, apparently. chmd
Feel sorry for yourself since you apparently don’t understand economics that well.
When, if and where “green” makes economic sense then it will be adapted.
Let’s have true liberty and then we won’t have a few opinionated ninnies trying to dictate to the rest of US.
*********************
John F. Hultquist (21:28:06) :
**********************
One part of the solution for third world hunger has to be the high-tech remedy of birth control. We in the US really need to push that solution IMO.
In his post-9/11 essay “Can There Be a Decent Left?” about the “[t]he radical failure of the left’s response to the events” on 9/11, Michael Walzer tried to explain why people on the political left are so reluctant to condemn terrorism and at least two of his reasons are probably relevant here, too:
“(3) The moral purism of blaming America first: many leftists seem to believe that this is like blaming oneself, taking responsibility for the crimes of the imperial state. In fact, when we blame America, we also lift ourselves above the blameworthy (other) Americans. […]”
“(4) The sense of not being entitled to criticize anyone else: how can we live in the United States, the richest, most powerful, and most privileged country in the world-and say anything critical about people who are poorer and weaker than we are? This was a major issue in the 1960s, when the New Left seemed to have discovered ‘oppression’ for the first time, and we all enlisted on the side of oppressed men and women and failed, again and again, to criticize the authoritarianism and brutality that often scar their politics. There is no deeper impulse in left politics than this enlistment; solidarity with people in trouble seems to me the most profound commitment that leftists make. But this solidarity includes, or should include, a readiness to tell these people when we think they are acting wrongly, violating the values we share. […]”
A choice between starvation and pollution.I know which one I’d choose,and I believe China is rich enough now to clean a lot up.The Chinese government has been given free rein by people who proclaim that the west is responsible.China could be shamed into action,but they won’t be,not while the west is busy flagellating itself.
J.Hansford (06:32:30) :
“We, Australians are running our economy on the blood money and the slave labor of these Chinese people….. I told y’all it wasn’t a good idea to deal with China…. or to let our corruptible social elites and politicians rub shoulders with tyrants.
This is all only ever gonna end in tears.”
J. Hansford, you are prescient. In the U.S. we have made ourselves slaves to the Islamic states for oil riches (and china for “conumer affluence”) rather than develop our own natural resources for all varieties of energy use. One might view the Iraq war as based as much on oil calculations (for the Western/developed world, our (security)responsibility) as on the war on terror (not unimportant). If all those dollars of profit since the 1970s had gone to the U.S., the global balance of power/resources would be infinitely different. It is not too late to change — and to help Australia with its energy resources. How about a plank of this sort in a new “Contract With America” — and let’s help China with its pollution problem. At the same time we must stop the bankers from turning all profits in dust and debt except that which lines their pockets.
crosspatch (21:35:46) : I agree about your statements about Oregon.They haven’t figgured out that the best and surest way of decreasing C02 is to run Business out
of the state-no jobs ,no CO2.-So their goals are achieved by proxy.While the few
remaining productive people are waiting to bail out…
Industrial plants need lots of water and water is found in soil depressed areas around bays, rivers, capture ponds; these depressions form basins which hold air trapped by inversions of temperature; if there are arrows to be slung here it ought to be at those who refuse to learn from other’s mistakes.
I think that carbon trade makes it profitable to move production from clean facilities in Europe or US to dirty ones in China, if at the same time the Chinese factories becomes more efficient and cleaner. The reduction is the important thing; what you are payed for.
Why is the US the baddie? Simple — The US is an Western imperialist, capitalist nation run by white men of European ancestry whereas China is an Asian imperialist, capitalist nation run by Chinese men.
Tenuc (00:00:22) :
I disagree. Previous industrial societies got into their state of affairs in part by not having the technologies to do things more cleanly, though “out of sight, out of mind” was far more predominant, especially if you had a convenient river out back.
However, the Chinese have access to the technology, they know things can be done more cleanly, they have a huge iinflux of money. It’s just more convenient to not do things cleanly. Apparently that’s beginning to change, some of the newer coal plants are more efficient and much cleaner.
China has a very strong government. They could impose a subset of “Western safety and pollution regulations.” and still be extremely competitive.
How come I did nit get a credit for posting this in Tips? 😉
Juraj V. (12:08:15) :
> How come I did nit get a credit for posting this in Tips? 😉
I don’t know. I didn’t see it there, and it’s not in the current version.
What did you say about it? I generally skip posts that have a URL and a description like “Anthony, you have to see this.” If you posted the URL and a paragraph about it referring to an award-winning photo essay and included a <blockquote>ed snippet like
Then I would most likely have taken note.
First of all, lets understand that the Chinese industrial and government leadership is not immune to the environmental consequences. Their children, grandchildren, and extended family are subject to the same polluted air and water. The extent to which they are subjected to these consequences may differ but they can not escape it. There will come a time when even they can not tolerate the increase in heavy metals in their children or the lack of clean air or ruined countryside. At some point they will address it for very selfish reasons … self-preservation.
When their own children are born with diminished mental capacity, when their own siblings are stricken with what had been rare cancers, they will finally act. But one thing that spurred cleanup in the West was candidates for government office making such things a campaign issue. And ultimately it comes down to cost. When you make a process cleaner, it generally adds cost to that process. At this point the cost of the changes required are not deemed to be worthwhile. But at some point they will have to assign some value to health and not only to their health but to the health of the nation. That value is today apparently low.
If poverty is the primary limitation on the health of the nation, decreasing poverty is probably of higher value than consequences from pollution but when the primary limitation on health is the pollution, it will be addressed.
@Ric Werme (06:19:56)
I followed and read the links provided. That was some sleuthing on your part, and I thank you for it.
Little did I know, that a memory of a story from my childhood, would directly connect with this post on China’s current problems.
A young women from Denora, becomes a doctor,travels to China, and is reminded of her own memories of death and pollution.
I find the whole thing quite facinating.
@chmd (07:20:44) :
Pollution, mainly the particulates we see and smell, are a threat to our quality of life. Curbing those emissions should be a global concern.
Too much is emphasized on a trace gas that is naturally produced in nature, when our concern should be the well beings of others. Where ever they live on this planet.
I want to see other nations take responsibilty for their own actions. No one put a gun to their head. Those governments CHOSE to follow our lead.
But sadly, there are those among us that wish to impose guilt, for the supposed sins of our fathers, for THEIR choices.
As far as I can tell, the only sin being commited here, is the blatant disregard of the truth.
And that truth is: CO2 is not evil or wrong or in need of control. Misrepresention is. Pollution is. Vilification of our Western Civilization is.
Our consumption of the products they produce is our wrong doing. If you really want to make a ‘green’ difference,dont consume overseas products that are not equal with our own regulations. Look around you. Start making sound choices.
Those nations need to impose regulations on themselves. Those nations need to stop the deaths and pollution they create. Not us.
Freedom, equality and prosperity has been the foundation of our society for centuries. But that is changing.
The greed and avarice of failing institutions, i.e. EPA, Greenpeace and others like them, lead us to a path of destruction of those foundations.
Anthroprogenic Death by irresponsible industrialization and the blatant disregard for truth by environmentalists is the only wrong doing here.
Wake Up!
Apologies if this has been said earlier, I was offline a couple of days and am still trying to catch up.
I blame Kyoto for this. Around that time, we in the West had just started to solve our own problems with pollution. Acid rain was a clear and present danger, which we largely solved by installing scrubbers, and I think we were also addressing the ozone hole.
Then came this nebulous concept of CO2 causing warming and all of the focus of Kyoto was on that. China and India were just starting to industrialize on a massive scale, and because all the focus was on CO2, none of the developing countries were advised / helped regarding the fitting of these scrubbers to their power plants.
It would have been much cheaper to fit them as the plants were being built rather than retrofitting them as is going to have to happen now.
So let’s see.
We have the politicization of science.
We have the brainwashing of our children.
We have the real pollution in the developing countries.
We have riots in the streets in poor countries because they cannot afford food as a result of our focus on biofuels.
We have a chemical compound vital to life now classed as a pollutant.
We have the emasculation of the industrial base in the West, which will result in us becoming second world countries.
There’s no nice way of saying this, these are crimes against humanity, and the sooner these neo-Luddites are called to account for them, the better.
And to top off the Enviro-gravy train, we got this to deal with:
November 14, 2009, 12:18 pm
Your Dot: Turcios and Dougherty on Earth-Scale Ethics
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/your-dot-turcios-and-dougherty-on-earth-scale-ethics/
“Laurie Dougherty, a frequent contributor, wrote this response to a comment on environmentalism as religion:
We dont need an environmental religion. We do need an environmental ethic which redefines our mutual responsibilities and which is grounded in stewardship rather than mastery, in care and concern for the earth and its inhabitants, and in an understanding that collective process does not need to oppress the individual, but rather offers to each individual an opportunity to contribute to the common good.
The religion I fear is the belief that ensnares us now: a belief in free markets and unfettered individualism above all else – a belief that privileges the greedy, the powerful, the shortsighted, and the cruel.”
Enviromorontalists are blaming Capitalism for our current social dilemma. Big business, i.e. fuel fossil companies, are myopic and cruel. The far-left libs of this country want to re-write our constitution. Forget you liberties. Give up your freedom. Sacrifice your prosperity. All in the name of greater good.
The only crime being committed is the lies and deceit and misrepresentions of these eco-fascist liberals that want to destroy our way of life.
“We have the emasculation of the industrial base in the West”
Government competes for the rest of the economy for money. What has happened is that “the people” seem to be demanding that someone else (government) do more and more for them rather than doing it themselves. This results in government requiring more money leaving less for the rest of the economy.
Government will “emasculate” the industrial base when it needs the money. It will put industry right out of business and take the money from the citizens’ pockets. Government and industry are competitors for capital.
evanmjones (21:53:21) :
“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 don’t agree.
If the West had made it’s clean coal technology available to the Chinese from the beginning, a lot of problems today would not have happened.
Besides that, a big part of the investment capital comes from abroad
and the big expansion wave still has to come.
If modern technology and infrastructure is applied from scratch, it is much cheaper than adapting existing structures and introducing new infra structure later.
A good example for this is Panama City where a modern city was build and the officials failed to install a sewage treatment plant. The people that bought the real estate did not take it and forced the Government to take measures. If waste water treatment was applied from the beginning, the costs would have been only 10% of the costs they have to make now.
For China, clean technologies will create an internal growth market and an export market, generating additional jobs, tech and export revenues.
Another argument, in this case for clean water is the fact that China has severe continuity problems with the availability of clean drinking water.
Therefore cleaning up the water systems, installing filter installation and waste water recycling plants will be a necessity.
Finally, it is true that the average age of the Chinese is on the rise but so is the number of people who’s health is effected by a poisoned environment.
Sooner or later someone is going to pay the bill for that.
Insurance companies offering “package insurance” comparable to the insurance packages sold in Europe and and the USA will also result in pressures to clean up
the mess as independent specialist perform section on insured customers that passed away. The first legal procedures are already underway. These and other developments will further increase legal procedures that eventually will force the Chinese State to act.
The recent scandals like lead poisoned paint applied on toys, textiles with high benzene values, the milk scandal etc. are bad publicity for “Made In China” and make policy changes inevitable.
crosspatch (21:57:05) :
“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”.
As I stated before, the entire scheme is aimed at the eradication of the free world and every western politician in support of this eradication should be trialed for treason.
The level of stupidity is mind boggling.
“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
I will tell you were they are Chris. In China about to make a billion more bucks. Maurice Strong, Father of Environmentalism and Global Warming is in Beijing as an advisor to China.
And who does Maurice Strong work for in Beijing? CH2M Hill.
CH2M Hill is “an employee-owned, multinational firm providing engineering, construction, operations and related services to public and private clients in numerous industries on six continents. CH2M HILL offers integrated services that help …”
Maurice Strong along with his buddy Al Gore is part owner of the privately held “Chicago Climate Exchange” that Obama helped set up. I wonder how much of our tax dollars are going to end up in Strong’s pocket via CH2M HILL as they build new industrial complexes in China?
Where does Maurice Strong stand as a CO2 emitter? Well if you think Al Gore was bad, Strong has him topped by a mile as the biggest source of CO2 emissions in Canada!
[quote]
…Ontario Hydro, an industrial concern, headed by Earth Summit secretary general Maurice Strong, which [b]is the biggest source of CO2 emissions in Canada.[/b] This corporation is currently selling nuclear reactors to Argentina and Chile…. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/061.html
Follow the Money….
“For China, clean technologies will create an internal growth market and an export market, generating additional jobs, tech and export revenues.” Ron de Hann
What is this crap about generating new jobs? Am I on a planet of workaholics?
People need income, not jobs! A free market creates wealth. Government hole digging and filling creates nothing but waste.
China will clean up when it can afford to.
Meanwhile, let’s make “clean” as economical as practical so the most people can afford it. That means letting lose the greatest wealth creator POSSIBLE; the free market. The chief remaining obstacle to the free market is the government backed banking and money cartel. Fix that and the free market will once again be free and we will soon live in a clean prosperous world.
You think your way is right,
what everyone should do?
Fine, but first on your own dime
and with your own sweet time.
And should your way prove right
then others will agree;
there is no need to fight.
But if your way proves wrong
should we have come along
into your darkning night?
Re: The west not allowing the transfer of pollution control technology
This is only partially true. They would not allow the transfer of pollution control technology… FOR FREE. China did not want to pay to control the problem, so they didn’t for a while, until the west came in and was allowed to invest. There is a certain set of ethics and standards that is applied to foreign investment in China. You have to built to and run to higher standards than your Chinese counterpart. I have been part of two seperate Chinese projects and seen this first hand.
That said, this is an old problem and not recent. It does nothing to address more modern plants which, by the way, supplants existing Chinese plants at a rate that would boggle the mind. The steel industry is a primary example. A full two-thirds of the currently utilized capacity was built in the last 15 years. The same is mainly true for refinery operations and power plants as well.
Re: The Chinese not taking advantage of pollution control technology
Every plant that is currently constructed in China is state of the art. It has some of the best pollution controls that money can buy. Why? Because they cannot start scheduling their deliveries of raw materials until they have been certified by the government and the government will not certify without this equipment installed.
So why do you still see the yellow plumes in China? As one local engineer explained it to me. When the government inspection teams are coming, we turn on all the pollution control measures. If we don’t they will shut us down. If they surprise us, and we have not chance to act ahead of time, they do shut us down. Of course, this shutdown will not last long. It only lasts until we are sure the government is no longer watching, which normally takes a week or two. Then we start back up and get back to business as usual.
The way I see it, there are two problems in China, and lack of technology, or even installed technology, is not one of them. The first problem is enforcement. They do not have a large enough beurocracy and enforcement agency to handle all of the plants in China. This, by and large, is a by-product of their shifting economy. It is growing faster than they have the capability of growing their regulatory agencies. 8-15% growth over a 10-20 year period is not sustainable without large numbers of offenders slipping through the cracks.
The second problem is an incentive issue. There is no incentive to run pollution control measures in China because there are very few negative consequence for not doing it, and there are no positive consequences for doing it. Chinese plants are measured on total output and to lesser degree resource efficiency. This is what your job as a manager depends on. The dirty secret (or clean secret) of pollution control is that it requires more resources to run a clean plant than a dirty one, which drives a lower output than would otherwise be possible. Since you are measured on output, you are disincentivized to run as clean as possible.
Until these two problems are fixed. China will continue to be the largest polluter in the world, and make no mistake, they have already assumed this mantle. They produce more total pollution than any other country and once they reach about 50-60% of the west’s standard of living for all Chinese people they will also produce more per capita than any other country. At current rates of growth, if they are able to sustain it, that should be in about the year 2025. Personally, I don’t think it will be sustainable, but then again, I’ve been wrong about that before…
Everybody has an opinion. The problem is who’s opinion is the closest to the truth. When I was a child back in the 1930’s I used to live in Niagara Falls. Occasionally the family would drive to Buffalo in the car. We would pass through an industrial area and there were all kinds of chemical smells and clouds of colored smoke drifting across the highway that were horrible smelling. I wonder if after some sixty years since that the same foul problem still exist. Without actually knowing I would guess that the problem with the pollution as I described there has been mostly cured.
China will eventually cure most of their pollution problems after enough suffering by the population has occured. Serious pollution affects the high ranking people in the government when they are exposed to it the same as it does the poor people who can’t move somewhere else to escape the problem.
Here’s an indignant post on China’s pollution:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/174149-are-we-exacerbating-china-s-pollution