Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, China Is Winning

Another anecdote: I visited a less-visited area in China a few months ago and was told a steel plant was recently moved there from Beijing.

So, maybe they haven't shutdown or cleaned up many of those polluters, they just moved them to less politically sensitive areas.

Then again if they had a democratic government it is very unlikely they would get in the present state of pollution to begin with.

It looks like it's still pretty bad. Aqicn.org (pretty accurate from what I remember) shows the current PM2.5 level in Beijing at 242. (For comparison, the closest station to my house near Washington, DC shows a level of 27.) I don't doubt that it's better, but it still has quite a way to go.

Authoritarian governments can be great until they go wrong. It's commonly said that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government. The problem is ensuring benevolence, which is really hard in the long term. Democracy's advantages lie not in the ability to get stuff done (which they suck at), but in their ability to transfer power peacefully and limit the damage caused by power-hungry maniacs.

Which lead to the actual US solution: outsourcing production to China.

> Michael Greenstone runs the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and is the Milton Friedman professor of economics at the university.

Mr Greenstone's job likely depends on shoe-horning "market-based" into everything he writes.

Anyway, setting limits and fines are a market-based approach. The author contrasts against "engineering approached", where the central government prescribes action instead of constraints.

I am no expert but I do live in China. AFAIK China's greatest air quality issues are deforestation, desertification, a growing number of cars and the size and concentration of its industrial base, which essentially manufactures for the world. I don't think it's fair or useful to relate its pollution management to that of the US, which has never had the population density, rapid gentrification or scale of industry that China has. Anecdata follows.

A German professional I met recently in the air quality monitoring area (responsible for the development, specification and deployment of sensor platforms for international clients) reported that the trucks you often see driving around China spraying roads and air with water are actually a highly effective means of reducing airborne pollution. I had never seen such an approach until China. The same person told me that even in the capital of New Delhi, many cities in India have air pollution so high it's literally off the charts - as sensor values are unreliable at such high concentrations so nobody actually knows how bad it is.

Whereas, in Shenzhen (which is considered relatively clean but often has uncommon industrial pollutants) the air is often so bad I get asthma-like symptoms (constricted airway) despite no history of asthma, ten minutes after landing, almost every time. I stopped cycling when I realised this was happening after cycling to work, again almost every time. Still, there's many clean places in China (it's a huge country!), things are improving and there's many good sides to living here, but consistent air quality isn't one of them. Some days it's lovely. Most days it's tolerable. Sometimes it's "don't open any windows" and visibility drops from kilometers to meters.

There is no evidence that the cleanup achieved under the Clean Air Act through mandated blanked controls was achieved in a particularly cost-effective way.

On the other hand there is theory for why cap-and-trade schemes should produce results more cheaply. That is the market-based system that was likely being discussed.

Fighting air pollution in the US is not a solved problem.

There's been tons of advancement, which certainly includes the development of technologies and techniques that can readily be deployed elsewhere.

Major population centers like Los Angeles and San Francisco have certainly reaped benefits from industrial and transportation regulations over past decades. The smog is less dense, less harmful, and has more appealing colors.

However, it still exists, does cause harm, and needs constant attention to make sure it doesn't get worse. There's still a ton that can be done.

>It only took the US about 10 years to beat air pollution, and the technology had to be developed. Now, all the needed technology is known; it just has to be deployed.

That was in a time the US was de-industrialized and China was heavily industrialized.

So Apples to Oranges.

The US embassy in Beijing does their own monitoring of air quality and has a public feed for it (this was the source of the "crazy bad" description from a couple years ago). Presumably their numbers agree with these, or the author would've pointed it out.

They have always been at war with Eurasia.

It's already great that the overall direction of what they say and what they do coincides. And cleaning one's air is always an achievement, let's not debase their work just because somebody else made it faster.

It doesn't matter. One big power plant is so much more efficient than a million little ICE cars that you typically end up with lower emissions and less pollution from EVs even if 100% of your electricity is from coal.

That said, China - and most of the world - is on an exponential growth curve for renewables right now. It will take a long time for the world to switch over to EVs, so we're better off starting now, regardless of the current emission profiles for electricity generation.

There are a LOT of differences enabled by the "method of energy transport".

If I own a coal power station that powers 500 000 electric cars, one government inspector shows up and he says "No, no, no, you must install this scrubber, or we will close you down". So now I need a scrubber.

If I own one of the 500 000 diesel cars, the government cannot afford to send an inspector to examine my car, maybe they will ask the mechanic who services it to do their work, but I can trivially bribe him to turn a blind eye. So I can keep polluting.

If I own the coal plant, the government will make me build a tall chimney to pump the waste gases into the upper atmosphere and spread them out more, and of course I shan't build the plant on expensive city centre land, but further away.

But if I own just a car I can spew the waste gases out onto the street, and collectively they will be densest in city centres where the most people are because that's where they use their cars.

We'll know we've turned the corner when the hot spot on local pollution maps is always some big old power station not a city.

With the cost reduction curve of solar energy being as fast as it is, prices might just make solar the default sooner than you think.

Cars are especially good for this, since they all need to use batteries and are parked for most of their lifetime. Peak power usage isn't as much of an issue with smart meters.

You better name the part of China you visited. Because China is too big to draw a broad conclusion.

When the gov announced their war on pollution, I was very much skeptical and wasn't expecting to see a big improvement in such a short time. Lots articles circulated in wechat were talking about moving to the south and immigrating to foreign countries two years ago, the high of the air pollution. Everyone was complaining. I think the Air pollution was on the verge of becoming a bigger problem that could harm the country stability and the party ruling.

Then, We see the pros of authoritarian government in play, to echo another poster.

From what I have heard, lot of factories got shutdown, or gone through mandated facility upgrades to meet the standard, cities are shamed by publishing the the worst polluted list in the national news. Air pollution became one of the local official KPIs.

Beijing's air quality has dramatically improved this year. There were way more blue sky days than I expected.

Granted, there are bad days like the passed few days in Beijing.

But If the Gov keeps at it, I am hopeful that clean air is coming soon.

Coal is the big pollution problem in northern China: Chinese coal is dirty (compared to USA coal), scrubbers are often missing or turned off, much of the coal is also burned in rural personal furnaces for heat. It is obvious now most of the pollution was from coal. Banning was the only thing they found effective, since China does not have enough rule of law capabilities to just regulate it.

Cars, in comparison, usually have all their emission equipment installed, and are not running on shitty gasoline (well, ever since sinopec stopped importing the low grade stuff from Saudi Arabia that no one else would go near). Cars still cause pollution, but on a different lower scale from coal. Well, there are still problem with blue trucks that lack emission equipment and use bad gas from outside the city (they are only allowed in at night and you can see the pollution spike then).

Electric bikes play a bit of a role in this improvement, but mainly in suppressing the need for gasoline-based mopeds popular in the rest of Asia. China moved straight from foot power bikes to electric power bikes, so they never became much of a problem.

EV cars are still new and can potentially lead to future improvements in air quality. For example, getting rid of coal has brought Beijing's winter average down from 300 to 120 or 150, but that is just going from really bad to just bad. EVs could potentially get Beijing into the good column.

Last time I was in Shanghai a couple years ago, it seemed like a good 20% of the motorbikes on the street were actually electric bikes. A dizzying variety of electric bikes too. I've yet to seen that kind of uptake of electric bikes in Vietnam or Thailand. Would be great if most motorbikes were electric, and cars too.

They're still consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined. That's going to continue indefinitely with their current policies. The amount of other energy they're going to need to substantially dent their coal consumption, is truly enormous. It's going to take decades to bring their CO2 output down by a lot. Every time China so much as blinks about cleaning up their disastrous environmental policies, the NYTimes and others write a story about how they're winning. It's absurd.

Many Chinese cities offer a tax rebate for EVs, but only Chinese-made ones; the Tesla S doesn't qualify.

More importantly, they get a separate allocation in the "right to car" lottery in some cities (Beijing), or a reduced plate tax rate, or can even drive everyday instead of 2 out of 3 days.

Electric (battery, not overhead trolly-style) and natural gas buses are increasingly common, though I'm not aware what the current status is here. There was one that passed in front of our apartment building in Beijing.

There's a radio program in my country featuring two country-famous (war|geopolitical)-strategists. They discuss worldnews every week. Lately, China's dominance was the topic, and the phrase "USA only has two things: a nice weapons industry and Silicon Valley" stuck with me. As I thought about it the days after, I could not really find anything to beat the quote with. Only the dollar can maybe come in as a third; but even that has significant competition from the euro and increasingly the yuan.

I cannot get it why people think this is easy. That's a country with f*king 1.4B people in vastly different social systems.

Totalitarian/authoritarian is hard, otherwise it should be the dominant nation structure on this planet.

Every government is a democracy. Monarchies, fascist dictators, republicans, all of them are democracies. They function by the consent of the people. The people may be sheep, brainwashed, terrorized or whatever, but in every case there are more of them then there are government enforcers. If you push them too hard or ask them to do the impossible, it will not work. Dictatorship is not as easy as you seem to think - it still takes effective management to get anywhere.

For a long time, the air pollution control authorities in China didn't have enough authority to make much happen. Inspectors were basically told to get lost, and not allowed to inspect, let alone stop anything. That changed in 2015. Now companies get shut down for violating environmental rules. Some bosses go to jail.