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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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.
.
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.