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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

China's biggest problem in doing this is not technological, but based on the fact the party doesn't believe in rule of law, so their are nonmechanisms to enforce regulation beyond official fiat and periodic crackdowns, neither of which are sustainable in the long term.

They have crackdowned before, many times actually, but without real continuous enforcement of rules, factory owners are caught in a horrible prisoners dilemma given how hyper competitive production is (if your competitor cheats and you don't, you'll be out of business quickly). In this case, political reform is directly related to the environment.

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Yes. Some inspector who was trying to get a sample of Diesel fuel from a distributor to test for sulfur and such was told "you have the obligation to do that, but not the authority."

Here are the rules for Diesel fuel in China.[1] The official standard for sulfur has been been slowly lowered from 0.2% to 10 ppm, but enforcement is weak. There's a weaker standard for "nonroad Diesel" for tractors and such. It's observed that at night, when the blue trucks roll into Shenzhen, the pollution level goes way up, because they're using "nonroad Diesel".

The US is now <15ppm sulfur for all Diesel uses except ships. It took 25 years to get there. The EPA is (was?) trying to get ships down to 1000ppm within 200 miles of the US.

It's not that hard to enforce this, because there aren't that many refineries. China has only 75 refineries. The US has about 125. Not that many places need to be inspected.

[1] https://www.dieselnet.com/standards/cn/fuel.php

Thank you for the explanation. With that number of refineries that helps give scope to the problem.

> The US is now <15ppm sulfur for all Diesel uses except ships. It took 25 years to get there. The EPA is (was?) trying to get ships down to 1000ppm within 200 miles of shore.

Already done (knowledge only due to personal interest), but it only applies within 200 miles of shore. It's also the IMO (International Maritime Organization, a UN agency) rather than the EPA. Currently the limit on open waters is at 35,000 ppm (3.5%), which will tighten to 5000 ppm in January of 2020.

Sulfur aerosols are just as bad as NOx and create just as much smog. They also turn into acid rain. They have a noted anti-geenhouse effect, but again... acid rain.

It should also be noted that there is basically zero technical or economic justification for sulfur pollution. It requires no significant inputs: a catalytic step that results in hydrogen sulfide, then a regenerating amine reaction (effectively solvent distillation), and finally the hydrogen sulfide is burnt (as in energy-producing) to produce elemental sulfur, which is sold. This is how the majority of sulfur is made.

When the blue trucks role into any of the first or second tier cities at night, you can see the pollution rise in real time.

I think you might be overemphasizing that relationship (or underestimating its consequence).

As a counter example, we can say China can't possibly enforce things like seat belt or drunk driving without political reform but those are largely non-problems now because they were easy politically costless solutions.

The problem is here is prioritization/will rather than mechanism/implementation since China likely believes the environment is a problem with a known solution and wants to milk dirty production for a new more years.

Gorbachev wanted to follow the simultaneous political and economic reform route and that definitely didn't turn out well for anyone.

An anecdote, but I know of a factory that's had severely limited production for about a year due to pollution. The enforcement is ongoing. They do get away it breaking the rules a bit because the inspectors are corrupt, and there's some warning before they come but it's not a complete free-for-all.

What you are saying is true, but Xi seems to be using the great power he has accumulated to really crack down in some areas, like corruption. Maybe he will do the same for pollution.

Xi used corruption crackdowns to amas power by going after all his enemies and getting more of his loyal friends in power. In china, all about of those officials are corrupt, you just have to dig a little to get rid of anyone you don't like.

So in that sense nothing has really changed at all.

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