With air quality so toxic that Olympic athletes plan to train outside the city, with its international reputation for peace, love and harmony on show for the entire world, Beijing knows it has to clean up its act. The Beijing News (via the New York Times) reports that city officials want to de-smog the world's most polluted urban atmos by cutting its motorized traffic in half. (That's up from the one-third target that TTAC's Adrian Imonti reported back in August.) To that end, the government is considering implementing the number plate restrictions trialled last summer. The move should take about 1.65m vehicles off Beijing's roads each day during the Games. As you might expect from a military dictatorship, the Powers that Be in the People's Republic of China (PRC) are contemplating other, equally draconian corrective measures. The Old Gray lady reports that the PRC may also shut down factories throughout northern China during the Games. Paycheck? What paycheck? Gone, in the name of Citius, Altius, Fortius.
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I actually trained in Beijing, outdoors during the summer of 2005 – it was, to say the least, BRUTAL.
The air quality is disgusting.
What’s more disgusting are the people – unwashed, squatting in the streets, spitting willy nilly and drinking god knows what type of alcohol while playing Go
I have no idea how they’re going to clean this city up in time
More importantly, how do they plan to censor the international press from letting everyone know what a hellhole the entire country is?
More importantly, how do they plan to censor the international press from letting everyone know what a hellhole the entire country is?
The same way Kim Jong Il keeps the international press from letting everyone know what a hellhole North Korea is.
Don’t forget, per the Kyoto Treaty on “global warming,” China is given a PASS on pollution/greenhouse gas control because,
they are a “Developing Economy!”
R-i-g-h-t. (as Bill Cosby would say…)
My boss returned from Guangzhou a week ago and is still coughing up bits of the Middle Kingdom all over the office. I hope Beijing is in a better way.
When you can taste the air, it’s no wonder they’re spitting everywhere.
I imagine the coal-fired generation plants are a big source of smog too, but it would be hard to run the Olympics without juice. I’m sure some American politicians secretly envy the Chinese for their ability to dictate how their citizens live. (UK politicians, it would seem, openly envy them!)
Yes damaging the environment only matters when non-utopian, capitalist countries do so and when the damage is caused by polution you can’t see or easily measure.
OverheadCam9000-Well, there’s a reason Kyoto was voted down in the US Senate 95-0 (well, it was a non-binding vote on a “Sense of the Senate” resolution, but the main complaint was exactly this-that China and India and the rest of the developing world got a pass).
I don’t know the details on China vis-a-vis Kyoto but India recently pledged not to emit more CO2 per person than we do.
Speaking of CO2 emissions . . . another useless fact
David Beckham emits about 19 times more CO2 per year than the average person
Last year, he flew more miles by airplane that it would take to fly to the moon and back.