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Subscribe to RSSIn Beijing, the smog is hazardous. ITV's Angus Walker reports.
BEIJING — Air quality in Beijing was the "worst on record" on Saturday and Sunday, according to environmentalists, with pollution 30-45 times above the recommended safety levels.
With a thick smog wrapping the Chinese capital since Friday, the city's pollution monitoring center warned the city's 20 million residents to stay indoors.
Data posted on Sunday by the monitoring center showed particulate matter measuring less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5) had reached more than 600 micrograms per square metre at some monitoring stations in Beijing, and was as high as 900 on Saturday evening.
The recommended daily level for PM2.5 is 20, according to the World Health Organisation. Such pollution has been identified as a major cause of asthma and respiratory diseases.
"This is really the worst on record not only from the official data but also from the monitoring data from the U.S. embassy — some areas in (neighboring) Hebei province are even worst than Beijing," said Zhou Rong, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace.
The Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center said heavy pollution had been trapped by an area of low pressure, making it harder to disperse, and the conditions were likely to last another two days.
Related: Beijing's pollution could cut 5 years off life span
Pollution has been identified as one of the biggest challenges facing China's leaders, with outgoing president Hu Jintao saying during his address to the Communist Party Congress last November that the country needed to "reverse the trend of ecological deterioration and build a beautiful China."
China said at the end of last year that it would begin releasing hourly pollution data for its biggest cities.
Beijing has already committed to a timetable to improve air quality in the city, and has relocated most of its heavy industry, but surrounding regions have not made the same commitments, said Zhou.
"For Beijing, cleaning up will take a whole generation but other regions don't even have any targets to cut coal burning. I bet the pollution here is mainly from those surrounding regions."
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
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This is one more legacy of the insane but still-venerated Mao, who paid a bounty for dead English sparrows, which he regarded as vestiges of China's imperialist past. The birds conrolled the insect population of the Gobi desert, but soon were eradicated. The proliferating insects polished off the grass that tied down the soil. The wind blows, and the resulting dust storms now engulf China. I have watched sun spots with the naked eye from 20,000 feet, so dense is the pollution.
But..but.. liberals want central planners to pick and choose environmental laws and regulations. You mean to tell me a bureaucrat won't be able to protect the environment but might actually make it worse?? Absurd!
To those who say too many people, Do us a favor then and exit asap, help the rest of us out a little!
I say there are to many.
Do you want me to kill myself?
Is that your wish?
Only an idiot would think the world doesn't have to many people.
Is this why the U.S. gave its manufacturing sector to china, to be clean and green?
China, and the U.S. don't need environmental laws, they just need property rights. Coal companies shouldn't be able to dump their wastes into the air which then lands on our property. Our neighbor can't dump a bag of trash in our yard and courts need to enforce the same laws on coal companies to keep them from dumping their wastes on all our yards. Public defense attorneys need to protect public waterways and land from dumping as well.
I have a way to fix their pollution. Maybe the USA can go back to making our own stuff, then China wouldn't need as many factories.
second that
Amen.
Well, you want to pollute, now you have to live in it.
Have fun with that.
Yep. They got all the jobs. They got all the pollution. Killing them with 'opportunity'.
do you actually believe the U.S. is its own planet and what others do wont affect us? so naive.
Before you start slinging naive...you better back peddle through our own history. Do you recall what was the pollution in the US before the manufacturing was exported??? Remember the rivers that would burn?? LA was a brown cloud. Hell, even Denver had a brown cloud - right smack in all the pristine wilderness. St. Louis was down-right nasty from all the industry there.
And when the laws got a bit tight here in the US - our wonderful Corps didn't clean up their act....they just sent it somewhere out of our site AND jurisdiction.....and they made better profits doing so with slave labor.
The Chinese people fell for it hook line and sinker - just like we did.
Now...who did it to who first?
oh yes, i remember....i remember the environmental scientist admitting in their emails that they fudged their numbers on their findings.
oh yes, i remember.
Well, aren't you just precious with your witty one-liners?
OUR pollution was before 'email'.
What a punk.
climate change, global warming or whatever you want to call it, was before man.
Which country still uses slaves?
sooo odd, they say the pollutants are killing the planet, but human life expectancy has increased.
hmmm
The U.S. gave Communist China and India a pass with the Kyoto Protocol, we are restricting coal usage for power generation here but now exporting coal to China and India. The EPA must think the Chinese atmosphere ends with their border, can't burn it here and the need to switch to cleaner fuels but we can sell it to China and India that have no EPA to speak of. Oh well! 7 billion people going to 10 in a few short years, it is time for a great thinning of the herd. No natural predators so we will take ourselves out. The corporations and major industrialized countries are hoping the thinning will all be in the third world. Mother nature however does not discriminate, get ready for one hell of a ride!
looks like a slc utah inversion.
This is what fueled China's economic boom. Burning coal for cheap electricity with zero investment for environmental controls. I imagine the ground and water are treated the same. The problem with air pollution is that after a while it affects the rest of the world. The coal being shipped from America and Australia should have a inversly directed pollution tax attached to each ton of coal. shipped over there. China is not a developing nation and should be treated like Europe and North America.
China creates more pollution in one day than most of the active volcanoes on this planet. China also has a craving for rhinoceros horn, elephant tusks, black bear gall bladders and shark fins, all of which are endangered and prohibited for sale or transport from every country in the world. China is the largest threat to security on the planet (right behind Russia and Iran) and China could disarm North Korea if they wanted, but they keep the Kim regime supplied with materials to make nukes so the US will pay more attention to them than to China. China has destroyed more environmentally sensitive land than any other country in the world even has in their drive for power and money. I say let's just allow them to breathe their own pollution until China gets a corner on the lung cancer market and most of them die.
Or,,,,,,,,, we could all try to work together to solve our problems.
China has done many things to try to solve some of these problems.
Subways, high speed rail. 3 Gorges Dam, the ONE CHILD RULE.
They still have a long way to go.
That is one scary picture too look at.
This is what the world is going to look like in all metropolis areas one day soon.
Can you just imagine another 150 years from now?
I am glad that I will be long gone from this place before that day comes, but feel sorry for my children's kids.
They will have to live in this air sludge one day.
What a mess we have left for them too inherit.
It is a very sad world they will live in.
yes it is...now go jump in your car and use up some of that gas.
Using gas is O K .
Wasting gas is bad.
I am a polluter in China and India. My US factory is 90% shut down because it is too environmentaly friendly. It takes my US factory about 1 1/2 years to produce 1 tractor trailer of hazmat when in full operation. In Massachusetts we are only allowed by law to store hazmat for 6 months or face severe fines. The waste hauler will only pick up full trailer loads from our location. The only solution to stay in business was to move production to China and India where less technologically advanced systems are used creating polution which they just dump in their air/water etc. The EPA/DEP has no interest in reducing pollution, only in generating fines to justify their internal empires.
THANK YOU !!
They sound like OSHA.
Mandated to fine companies 50% of the time.
It's no wonder the kids stay inside their factories and play.................I mean work.
And to think that our Right-wing and Plutocrates think we need fewer environmental regulations.
Who cares about Pluto? We need to fix Earth first.
What would Mao do?
He would kill 50 million and reduce energy use.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping is promising that there is a car in every citizen's future.
If you saw Chinese traffic you would know this is a means of population control.
Every time you get a cab you are risking your life.
there is a glut of manfactured stuff. too many factories, too many choices. pump out the products, then throw them away. then the next generation rebuys the newer version of same items, then throws them away. total insanity. hope china is taking rising health and environmental costs into consideration. billions of people with lung problems don't die quickly. china's pollution is the world's pollution.
What's sad is that mankind has already suffered and learned from this mistake, here in America.
Why, with our knowledge would this ever happen again anywhere in the world is just... unacceptable.
One answer. Mankind does not give a @!$%# about the planet and will destroy it all himself. Pretty sad because we are century's from getting mroe than a dozen people permanently off this planet.
Ah, The three big D's: Deflection, Denial, Destruction. It is the human way!
We are just as much to blame. What is it we buy today that doesn't come from their slave labor force? Their air quality also affects us here. Go buy more Walmart!
they say you can't sqeeze blood out of a turnip but you can make that turnip read reader comments an hour a day. maybe some of that reading will rub off on these turnips who call themselves lawmakers all over the world. these turnips are being pressured by lobyists to look the other way and proceed with business as usual. the ones who really need to be facing reality are the lawmakers of the world and they are apparently in la la land. technology is out there to clean the air. why isn't it being used? just manufacture a trillion dollar/yuan coin and pay for it with that.
Good god that's awful.
Put in some space-smokestacks and Chen's your uncle!