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Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see a summary of what's been happening in Beijing. What are their policies? Because Beijing air has apparently been awesome these days for the entire winter. My friends who live in Beijing confirm this for me. In the dead of winter, this would have been unheard of even one year ago.

http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://www.stateair.net/web/historical/1/1.html

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Beijing uses very heavy handed policies, that would be harder to implement in London. For example: cars with numberplates starting with A-M are banned on certain days of the week and the rest are banned on other days of the week. They also confiscated wood burning (or was it kerosene?) stoves and although it lessens the pollution, lots of poor people are living in freezing homes because of that.

I know that Paris had similar restrictions on cars a few times recently. If your car had an even number it could be used on one day, odd on another. If I remember correctly they also made all public transport in the city free for them days too.

It was coal, no one uses wood or kerosene to keep warm, but almost everyone was using coal in the villages.

They got rid of coal for not only energy and central heat generation, but also for the villagers in and near Beijing who used it to keep warm during the winter. Coal in the form of dirty personal furnaces was where most of the pollution was coming from.

The downside is that they had to import more natural gas for heating, and there has been a shortage (china has no significant NG production, it’s all imported). Villagers without gas access have been using electricity, and the subsidies they were given to do that haven’t been enough to offset cost, so there has been some unrest. The government is backing off on this aggressive approach a bit for other areas (e.g. in Hebei where the problem has been worse than BJ).

If you look at the aqicn history, the air still isn’t that great in BJ, they spiked red for a few hours today for example. Still a massive improvement, but Beijing is also still at the mercy of the wind when it comes to clean air (but a purple before being a red now is really good, I can deal with a red, but not a purple).

I was in China last year. The airplane newspaper had a few articles devoted to how the government is trying to reduce pollution in many different areas. But one of the big measures seems to be to go hard after corrupt local officials that let industries pollute for money.

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