Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai | Hacker News Reader

Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

theguardian.com

210 pointsck2205 comments

I wonder how this compares to the worst smogs experienced in London and elsewhere before the West got its act together with regard to particulate pollution. Apparently the Great Smog of 1952 killed on the order of 10000 people in just a few days. I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952

Well for one, that smog in London lasted a week, compared to Shanghai where it is persistent and getting worse.

London suffered from bad smogs almost century before they did anything to them. Great Smog was just one incident.

Hence the term "London Fog" which was not water.

China uses the term "sea mist" to dupe tourists. It's not fooling anyone, though...

Yeah, I saw a ton of sea mist in Wuhan when I visited.

"pea-souper" was a common term

Certainly, when I was a kid, a trip into London was an adventure. You knew when you were near the centre of town because the buildings were all coal black.

No kidding? I always understood London to have absolutely perfect conditions for real pea soup fog. Much like San Francisco.

I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago.

This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.

I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/documerica111611/s...

From here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...

It didn't compare to the Great Smog, of course, but for Americans, it's closer to home and of course also closer to the present.

That isn't brown air; it's a brown print. That's a sepia print of a black and white photo of white steam coming out of chimneys artificially crowded together by a long telephoto lens, taken at sunset, and excluding the sky as much as possible. Imagine another photo taken from the same spot, with a wide-angle lens that shows mostly sky and a bridge going off for miles, even the distant cars clearly visible through clear air shining in the mid-day sun as if on their way to the beach, printed blue-and-white instead of brown-and-white. Dramatically different emotional impact from the same scene. It's almost as if The Atlantic had some sort of agenda.

Those images of Shanghai (and London 1952, and Beijing and Hong Kong and, occasionally, Singapore) are the real thing, looking like scenes from a forest fire but downtown in a major city.

I'm not sure about Cleveland specifically. But a similar industrial city, Pittsburgh, had a huge air pollution problem up thru the 1970s. See:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/06/...

(The Atlantic again!)

This qualifies as "the real thing". It's well-known local lore that local stonework was turned black by the soot. ("Black" is not an exaggeration.)

That isn't brown air; it's a brown print ... chimneys artificially crowded ... taken at sunset.

You may be right, it may be a sepia print. I don't know that much about sepia. GIMP shows 26K unique colors, and plenty of information in all three layers when decomposed to HSV or LAB. I would have thought a sepia print would be closer to monochrome.

I can assure you the brown skies were real, and that there's not much "artificial" about the crowding of the smokestacks. I still live nearby; the difference between the air quality then and now is pronounced.

It's really an odd thing to do, to approach a stranger on the internet and suggest that their memories are false and any evidence that might support them is effectively fake. How does that go over at dinner parties?

Hello Frank, your memories of reality as you observed it are a lie. Pass the rolls please.

I commented on the photo, not your memories. I didn't comment on your memories, because I had nothing to say about them. They sounded right to me, which wasn't worth a comment.

As a photographer, there were some things that jumped out at me immediately about that photo, though. I commented on it and stand by those comments.

Since you apparently thought I was talking about you and not the spin techniques of The Atlantic--a faux pas I've probably committed at dinner parties--I should have prefaced my comments with, "I think you're right. That photo, on the other hand, ...."

I commented on the photo, not your memories.

That's a really narrow construction of what you said. I said "I remember brown skies just like this" and you suggested that 1) The color is fake 2) I might imagine that scene with blue skies 3) the Atlantic has an axe to grind and 4) other cities have "the real thing." What am I supposed to think?

The photos were part of an EPA project specifically conceived to "document subjects of environmental concern." There was editorial intent, certainly, but nobody at The Atlantic had anything to do with it. This is all explained on The Atlantic's page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCUMERICA

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/collections/...

I'm trying to find out if the photo is in color or not. Certainly most of the DOCUMERICA project was in color, certainly every other photo chosen for this Atlantic feature was color, and certainly the photographer seems to have worked almost entirely with color at the time:

http://research.archives.gov/search?expression=Aleksandrowic...

It would not surprise me, at this point, to learn that the photo was in color. I don't think there is anything artificial-looking about it, it matches my memories pretty well. Yes, it has a nearly monochromatic look to it, but some scenes are really like that. Unfortunately the National Archives record doesn't seem to indicate whether the photo was in color or not:

http://research.archives.gov/description/550175

Do you have any information about scans of sepia photos? How many unique colors might be expected? I have tried doing a color count on several old photos that I'm confident started as real sepia-tint, and found color counts in the 6K-13K range, significantly fewer than the 26K that appear in the Clark Avenue Bridge photo. But I don't think that's conclusive.

There is one clue: Sepia (AFAIK) is a process applied to silver-based prints, but the National Archives record for the photo lists its media type as a slide. If that's right, it's not sepia. And since the brown color wouldn't be from a black-and-white slide either, I think the most likely explanation is that it's a color photo.

The difference with China is that much of the entire country is covered by a blanket of smog & dust. Not just the cities, but much of the countryside as well for hundreds of km. China does things big in a way that's hard to grasp without visiting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2478300/Pictu...

I wonder what similar satellite imagery would have shown in early/mid 20th century europe.

Exactly the same thing.

Has there been any long-term research done on the health effects of particulate pollution?

I was in Beijing last winter when the air pollution was nearing record highs, and every time I blew my nose after returning from being outside, it would be full of black mucus. That has to be a wakeup call.

In addition, when I returned to the states (Chicago), even the air around O'Hare Airport - probably one of the more polluted areas in the city - felt so clean to me!

>Has there been any long-term research done on the health effects of particulate pollution?

Yes. The 2013 WHO report "Health Effects of Particulate Matter" [1] provides a reasonable summary.

Primary long term impacts are increased mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and from lung cancer.

Recent findings indicate no real safe level, with increased mortality observed at even very low levels (as seen in "clean" developed cities).

[1] http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/189051/H...

I usually get my fair bit of black mucus in Central London. Not sure what that means but some places don't smell that good. For example, Queen's Gate road in Kensington has a very strong smell of gas.

That's your nose doing its job. The whole point of the nasal passages and mucus is to filter the air, the good thing about this filter is that it's easy to replace.

Oh, I know that! What I'm not sure of is whether the black mucus happens because of pollution or something else.

It's just dirty. All the particulates it's stopping is going right into the mucus.

Great smog of 1952 estimated at 3000 ug/m^3 of PM10

Source: Open access journal article linked from the wikipedia page you cited ;) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241116/pdf/ehp0...

Found some estimates that appear to be better.

Great smog of 1952 had a measured peak daily average of 1620 ug/m^3 of total suspended matter (TSM) [1].

Reported levels in Shanghai of up to 602.5 ug/m^3 PM2.5 (suspended particles < 2.5 microns).

We can convert from TSM to PM2.5 using ballpark conversion given by: PM10 = 0.6TSM [1; notes to table 3] PM2.5 = 0.75PM10 [2].

So according to these rough calculations the great smog of 1952 probably had a PM2.5 of about 700 ug/m^3, quite similar to the current Shanghai smog, and lower than levels regularly reported in other Chinese cities.

Open access sources: [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240556/pdf/ehp1... (Table 3 reports total particulate during the great fog of 1620ug/m^3, and estimates PM10 as 60% of that number = 972)

[2] http://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/air/guide_...

It really irks me whenever there's a talk about nuclear energy. Nuclear power may have its own set of challenges, but coming from the baseline of coal it's hard to do worse.

Agreed. A recent Stuttgart University report (commissioned by Greenpeace) estimated 22,000 premature deaths per year in the EU alone from coal-fired power stations. [1]

I've seen estimates in the US of 10-20,000 annually depending on the source. e.g. [2], [3].

As someone who lives in a city state so small that the coal-fired power stations are literally next door to housing, I too wish there was more attention given to this.

[1] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international...

[2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/coal-p...

[3] http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/

Don't forget that burning coal releases more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power (because of trace amounts of uranium).

This is where the marketing of various energy options comes into play. The discussion might be different if it was "burning uranium laced coal" vs "controlled nuclear generation"

That could actually be low. This paper estimates 90,000-380,000 deaths/year in the US from combustion, with 23,000-98,000 attributed to power plants (coal):

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/study-air-pollution-cause...

PDF paper: http://lae.mit.edu/wordpress2/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/US-...

(Agreeing, needless to say)

It's especially dour when people celebrate getting nuclear plants shut down or blocked, and you know the unspoken result will be more coal plants. How is that a victory?

I wonder if Japan right now would prefer smog.

As far as I know, no coal plants have ever resulted in a Chernobyl-scale effect.

That's the thing, though. They have many Chernobyls worth of effect over the long term, and will continue to do so. Meanwhile, Chernobyl helped nuclear facilities become far safer.

Surprising that nobody here acknowledges the black swan nature of nuclear power. The comparative average is precisely not the point.

FWIW I once had dinner with an architect of one of the early nuclear plants. They had been lied to about the prospects of a solution to waste disposal and no longer considered it a sensible approach.

Could you elaborate on your black swan comment?

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/24/whats-next-...

Yeah, anytime someone says "once in a million years" and isn't an astronomer I would doubt those numbers. My money would be on "the number we need so people don't freak out".

On the other hand, it's also easy to overstate the magnitude of a disaster. To the best of my knowledge, no one actually died of radiation exposure from the accident (and probably no one will at this point). There are expected to be a number of deaths (somewhere between 15 and 1100) from increased cancer rates in the larger population. I would hope these weren't included in the "one in a million" claim.

Can you say what effect you want comparison with? For example, acid rain has created huge problems in watersheds far away from the original power plants.

I'm talking about a sudden catastrophic global effect. To some extent we got lucky with Chernobyl and it was contained, have yet to see with Fukushima.

You lost me, how can a nuclear power plant create a catastrophic global effect? As far as I can tell there isn't any way for Chernobyl to have been worse than it was but would love to hear your thoughts. Email is in my profile.

Chernobyl is estimated to have a combined death toll of somewhat less than a thousand people over their lifetimes.

Coal power plants kill ten times as many people every year when functioning as designed.

I think that even coal mining kills thousands of people every year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_accident

Better or worse, it is difficult to get public support for moving from with terrible results that trickle out nearly invisibly over time to a system that still has disasters but whose disasters appear as a few big booms.

Clearly, the public is more motivated by a move to solar, which actually appears safe whatever its real overall costs would be.

The problem is that while nuclear power may be potentially have the best cost-benefit of any power source, economics and human psychology seem to imply that nuclear power as it will appear is going to be visibly dangerous something human psychology finds less desirable than the poisonous and costly status quo (see evolutionary game theory etc).

Engineers ... love to solve logistical problems and push their solutions on humans, whether these solve the human's problems or not.

Oh yeah, given the choices I'd way favor a pure solar/wind economy, with pumped hydro storage. But if we need a power plant to keep us going until then, I'd rather it be nuclear than coal.

Honestly, I'm getting optimistic enough these days to think solar may be ramping up fast enough that we couldn't kill coal any faster with nuclear; by the time we built up our nuclear capacity significantly the solar would already be ready to replace it.

(Ignoring the fact that natural gas has already been stabbing coal furiously in the chest for several years now.)

> The problem is that while nuclear power may be potentially have the best cost-benefit of any power source...

Over what time horizon?

The problem with Nuclear Fission is that it leaves behind waste that is no longer be put to any constructive use but...

1) Must be stored securely for decades, since it can be used in dirty bombs. 2) Must be stored safely for centuries/millennia, since it can leak in the environment an make a large area unsuitable for human dwelling over time frames way longer than any (most) of our current institutions have been around (and thus there is no guarantee that knowledge about the risks will be preserved).

This pretty much rules out any private, for-profit entity. The risk of their owners realizing the commercial benefits upfront and then disbanding the corporation without assuming the cost of cleanup is simply too high for this to be even considered from the point of view of the public good.

I am willing to give governments the benefit of doubt concerning requirement #1. They already have to deal with this type of problems and have the know how to do it, but the legal framework must be defined very clearly to prevent some demagogue from abjuring of commitments taken 20 years ago in the name of some pie-in-the-sky scheme. For requirement #2, it is impossible to be certain. Changes of regime do happen, and it would be unwise to expect any particular government to stay around for more than a couple of centuries.

There is only one institution known to me to have a proven record of muddling through and even waxing during uncertain times, (more or less) committing to a mission over millennia. And you can add knowledge preservation over dark ages as the cherry on top of the cake. So I guess you can have your nuclear power plan, and enjoy a relative certainty that it will continue to be taken care of, for as long as it needs to be, if you are willing to let the Catholic Church manage and operate it.

I grew up in Hong Kong. It didn't have the cleanest air in the world but I lived in relative good health. After I left for university I heard things were getting worse and worse although I remained sceptical.

When I returned for work, the air was nowhere near as bad as it is on the mainland now but I simply couldn't survive it. Every day my lungs constricted within minutes (I have asthma.) I realised I could never return to live in my home city as I had intended to.

I was not angered by the existence of the pollution. Things change and China grows on the mainland. What I was angered by was the fact that after the handover, the government was so cowed by their new CCP masters that they wouldn't even tell the truth about the air pollution. You will never hear an HK official admit that the pollution comes from China, yet every single adult citizen who grew up in the city remembers what life was like 15-20 years ago.

China ostensibly has anti-pollution laws. The CCP's colossal corruption keeps them from ever being enforced and entire cities, my hometown amongst them, are now literally poisonous to live in.

There's a big "movement" by CCP to control this thing. It's mentioned in major party conferences. I heard there's going to be 10 Billion RMB poured into this, and pollution would be considered as evaluation parameter for "party leaders".

However I seriously doubt most of the money will end up in vein or simply stolen.

So "enforcement" is to happen but I have little trust in them.

Was it possible for you to breathe the air in the surrounding areas? (Lantau, Macau, etc)

Last time I was back in April of this year, Lantau was a little better but realistically still not good enough to consider living there, much less bringing up kids. I ended up feeling out of breath crossing the road.

I haven't been back to Macau since I was a kid though, so it looks very different now (Thanks to Mr Ho.)

My grandfather grew up in HK too. He passed away last summer, struck down by a rather horrible respiratory based cancer. However, I'm wary of too much confirmation bias in attributing that to the pollution too. It'll be interesting to see what the respiratory disease numbers are like in the coming decades.

Thanks for the info. My condolences for your home land and family.

Yeah, I live in Japan, roughly 3000km from China, but we also have to deal with China's pollution.

Although not that common, we sometimes get an alert with the weather report that the levels of PM 2.5 particulate matter (overwhelmingly blown over from China) are exceeding government safety standards, and that we may want to consider keeping kids indoors.

I remember we had similar 'smog alerts' a few days a year when I was a little kid in Los Angeles in wthe 1980s, and we couldn't go out to recess. But I think that's like what we are getting here in Japan, at a great distance separated by ocean -- nothing compared to what the Chinese people in Shanghai and Beijing are suffering.

For historical reference, here are some breathtaking photos of mid-century Pittsburgh:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2155742/Hell-lid-tak...

I wonder if anyone can cite a source for one of the claims made in the article:

"Also lots of people thought that high smoke output was a sign of high productivity and that coal smoke was good for the lungs and helped crops grow."

If you've lived near farms, pulp-n-paper mills or fish processing plants, you will often be told that the stink is the smell of money and you should stop complaining. I expect it was something similar.

As I would tell my father as we passed a pig farm, "yeah, but it's not the smell of my money."

I've seen sci-fi depictions of over-industrialized mega-city scapes, but I never thought I'd actually get to see a picture of one. To call that surreal is an understatement.

sci-fi? It's more like reminder from the history. Rapid industrialization and increase in living standards seems to follow familiar pattern.

Great Smog of London documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkx-2mT1-q4

I guess we didn't have to wait until November 2019.

But at least we have "cheap" consumer goods!

And Chinese workers have stuff like food.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China#Poverty_reduct...

We could just give people food without having to make stuff for us in return. The world does not have a food shortage.

Meanwhile, in the political system we live in, most Americans think that a balanced budget should be achieved by cutting foreign aid.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/09/americans-want-to-b...

"Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better."

That fosters dependence issues.

What does that even mean? Who is dependent on what in that scenario?

The people receiving food stop working to secure food on their own. They grow entitled, and expect food aid.

It's an observed phenomenon in Africa.

Wasn't that the whole idea - for them to stop producing and polluting the planet? That giving them food would be cheaper. Of course it would threaten our dependence on cheap clothes and expensive gadgets.

It's not a socially stable option. Not because we want cheap gadgets, but because of the social imbalance.

Also from an ethical point of view, it's not very fair to deny them the chance to become a developed nation.

People don't sit around on their bums for too long - it's just not in our nature. If they weren't slaving away in factories they might end up as a society that primarily produces cultural capital (huge social stability there) or they might develop a service-based economy. In the wider scheme, Chinese manufacturing is probably more important to the west than China.

How important Chinese manufacturing is to China has little to do with the ramifications of perennially feeding a country for nothing.

> It's an observed phenomenon in Africa.

Here I was expecting.. "in the western world" ;D

Is there a level of public outcry regarding the pollution?

I realize that criticism may be somewhat muted given the nature of the PRC government, but I can't imagine a city as large and cosmopolitan as Shanghai merely accepting this level of environmental mismanagement. Unfortunately, articles regarding Beijing/Shanghai pollution usually fail to mention public sentiment above the level of brief individual anecdote ("It's hard to breath on the way to the office" - Chinese citizen, etc.).

Perhaps someone local could provide some insight?

I mean, the problem is that there's a bit of a cultural difference between Americans circa-Industrial Revolution, and the Chinese now. So saying that the Chinese will stand up and protest isn't necessarily true. I don't want to speak for all Chinese, but from what I've read -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that there is more of a culture of deference to authority in China. Compare this to Americans, who have a history and pride in rebelling against authority. Now, you might point to China's communist revolution, but realize that with this government came the need for them to propagandize and popularize a love and respect for the government in control, much more so than in the U.S. So back to my original point, protest culture isn't as much of a thing there as it is here, because there's more of a sense of working for the collective good (economic growth of China).

So I'm hoping that there will by outcry, but I think it is unfortunately less likely than it would be in the U.S. due to Chinese culture. I'd also like to here some local insight as well, and I hope I'm proved wrong because it would be awesome if there was a public outcry.

My impression is that it has to do with Tiananmen Square (been there, tried that, didn't work) and being complicit in trading off economic advancement for maintaining Communist party rule. Also many government officials directly benefit from economic advancement via bribery/corruption.

> being complicit in trading off economic advancement for maintaining Communist party rule.

I think 'complicit' might be an overstatement here; it's not like you can just go vote for the Democrats in China right?

I really doubt Barack Obama would be the American president today if the real penalties for advocating for the replacement of the Republican Party regime of 2000 had included death, life in a torture camp, similar things for your family, etc.

There is constant outcry especially since last year. And protest happens daily in China. It's just that normally people stay on particular issues at hand rather than nebular banners such as "small government" etc, for cultural reasons and the protestors' own safety.

There are astonishing numbers of protests in China every year.[1][2] I also think the culture for factory workers during the industrial revolution was one of deference to authority, and that it took extreme conditions to spur them to protest their conditions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_the_Peop...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/02/rising-protests-i...

That's good to hear. My only point about protesting in America was that it's very ingrained in our culture to protest, even for small issues. I didn't really know much about Chinese protesting culture, but it's good to hear they do it in large numbers.

As far as I understand, public unrest is one of the greatest fears of Chinese leadership, hence tight control and censorship. That may speak volumes about the willingness of their public to take control along with protesting (as opposed to the West where protest is seen as a safety valve and therefore encouraged in proscribed forms).

Well, I hope that's true, but I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea "they have an oppressive government thus they must be able to take control with protesting". It could be that the government feels the need to be this way because they know just how screwed up everything (pollution, persecution, etc.) is, and are oppressive as a safety measure.

...think that's what I said - the oppression is a response to perception of a greater evil of instability. Scratch any country's leadership and you'll get the same kind of result. The question is whether that is justified, and historically seems to be more usually a case of paranoia, micro-management, and control freakery.

Agree.There have been some complains and disscussions about air pollution recently. They can easily be found online, whereas you won't find people talking about it or worry about it very much. The way of how Chinese expressing their feelings is far more different than a public outcry. Hence, people are certainly waiting for the action of their government. And, what about those who are so confident and think they will not be the next victim of the air pollution? Was Shanghai one of them who have this thought?

I'm not local but I have friends there. The Chinese were accepting of the pollution at first because of the success they were experiencing on a world stage. They figured that if the politicians and the higher ups could deal with it, then the ordinary citizen can too. Then the average citizen started realizing that the elite didn't actually have to deal with it because they would buy expensive air purifiers for their homes, cars, and work places. There has been more of an outcry against the pollution that is now causing all forms of health problems as of late and despite the heavily authoritarian rule of the regime, the Chinese government is prudent enough to know that a largely dissatisfied citizenry is always a risk. So the various local and national governments are moving, albeit slowly, to try and reduce their pollution levels.

Fair question.

My impression here in Beijing is that people are highly dissatisfied with the pollution situation. They don't want lung cancer and they don't want their kids breathing this crap.

That being said, the government is taking steps to address the issue. Specifically, due to an outcry on Weibo last year about having to get PM2.5 numbers from the US embassy's twitter feed and iPhone app (twitter is blocked, but screenshots of the iPhone app were pasted on weibo), the government here has started reporting pollution numbers in major cities around the country. So there's reporting now.

Second, they've forced the state-owned oil companies to retool to start outputting cleaner gasoline, moved big polluting industry out of the cities (steel plants, etc.), closed down barbecue pits, ended the sale of some of the more polluting coal briquettes that used to be common, and are trying to get construction sites to keep the dust down.

All of those steps are helping, but not reversing the trend (so far as I can tell or have heard). There is a push to move from coal-burning power plants to gas-powered power plants, but they need to find the gas (via fracking or other means).

Is there an outcry? There are certainly people posting about the pollution on Weibo, which is China's twitter. There are also plenty of people emigrating to the US, if they can afford it (voting with their feet, even if they can't vote here). But I think for people to do more than that, they'd need to see the government just not giving a damn. So perhaps the attitude is 'wait and see'?

Hope this helps.

By the way, one of my Beijing buddies said of the Shanghai smog: "In Beijing, we call this Tuesday."

I think I accidentally down voted this great post, sorry! Wish I could change it like on Stack Overflow.

No problem. We're all friends here ;)

>closed down barbecue pits

Mind explaining what those are?

I'm guessing public barbecues

Yes, I guess 'barbecue pit' isn't a good choice of words. I was referring to the street vendors who sell barbecue meat, etc. The ones near my home seem to be shut down.

http://inhabitat.com/chinese-government-bans-outdoor-bbqs-in...

I am guessing coal/charcoal/wood fired street food vendors. I doubt a yearly family picnic contributes enough to worry about.

I also think I read that more than 50% of the nuclear plants currently being built are in China. That is a big way that they will eventually combat this problem.

That is disheartening. For us, that is.

No, you seem to be misinformed.

Somehow your comment manages to be both smugly self-assured and also clear as mud. Bravo!

How does that 50% stack up against how much power they use compared to all other countries that have nuclear power available to them? Wikipedia has China's power usage in 2008 as just below the US's, but growing much faster. It also has much more of their power coming from coal in 2011 (46%, to 13%). It makes sense to me that China would be expanding their nuclear power faster than anybody else right now. Of course it would be nice if we would pick up the pace too...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Right, I have no issues with China using nuclear, it just highlights how much we aren't.

Cheer up, we are building some too; there are 4 nuclear plants under construction at present, which are the first new additions to the US nuclear fleet in 30 years: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/business/energy-environmen...

> I also think I read that more than 50% of the nuclear plants currently being built are in China. That is a big way that they will eventually combat this problem.

Yes, China has 40 GWe of nuclear power coming on-line in the next 5 years. The United States currently has 97 GWe of nuclear capacity, and China currently has 13 GWe.

But China is also building 40 GWe of coal plants each year.

This is what happens when you take 500 million peasants and turn them into urban factory workers within a period of 30 years. Demand grows so quickly that even the world's largest nuclear plant construction program will only account for a fraction of demand growth.

According to http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/pdf/global_coal_risk_..., they plan to build 'only' about 40% of new coal plant capacity, with India taking another 35%.

So, not that that matters for the absolute pollution, but if that >50% is correct, their mix will improve.

Also, they try to build those plants far away from cities. That, hopefully, will spread pollution.

That PDF also states that those plans may not be implemented, as a) coal companies lose money in China because the government fixed electricity prices and b) the public doesn't want their pollution.

On the negative side, their absolute pollution will likely go up, and the gap with the western world will go up even more (elsewhere, new coal plants will often replace older, more polluting ones)

> I realize that criticism may be somewhat muted given the nature of the PRC government

There's no shame in calling a spade a spade. You correctly perceive that the brutally authoritarian PRC government both suppresses criticism and whitewashes press coverage of environmental problems in the country.

As an aside, discussions with other westerners about China feels to me like having brunch with a couple where everyone knows the husband is cheating on the wife. The natural inclination is to engage in heroic effort to make things seem normal--to map the dysfunctional couple's relationship dynamics to that of a normal couple, all in order to preserve the all-important pretense.

80% of my classmates are in China. There are constant messages about PM level in Shanghai, Beijing in all my classmates' social networks in wechat, renren.

Not yet an outcry, definitively discussions, humors, etc.

I see this as a difficult to fake signal that China's economic growth is more real than some folks in the West would like to believe. It is similar to the challenges faced by industrial cities in the West as they exploited the massive production capacities created during WW II. Generally the reasoning goes, high pollution from lots of power plants / factories is a function of production of those power plants / factories.

You can fake GDP numbers but its not as straight forward to fake this sort of environment.

That said, it would be unfortunate if China doesn't get their act in gear soon and start putting scrubbers on plants and cleaning up their act here.

That's true, but you also earn _a lot_ of money ignoring safety measures. They're paying with their lives part of this productivity

> China's economic growth is more real than some folks in the West would like to believe

i know that people in general are racist against the chinese for all sorts of reasons, but this is the first time i've heard this one.

does anyone actually doubt china's economic growth? i mean all you have to do is go there and see it. (granted, very, very few 'experts' on china have ever actually been there)

It isn't racism. This link provides a useful summary of the question : http://ineteconomics.org/china-economics-seminar-0/short-his...

The global interest in China's actual GDP on a comparative scale is to help estimate things like their future consumption of natural resources, their threat to global stability, and to evaluate global recessions/growth more accurately.

The problem with "seeing it" is differentiating what you are seeing with what is. So for example a city in the US that has a lot of large buildings being built is a clear sign of economic growth because the market dynamics are structured so that people don't build buildings unless they believe they can rent them out profitably, so they 'lead' in the sense there is demand for that space, they go up, it gets rented, and now there are a bunch of new jobs in the city which brings in workers with wages etc etc etc.

But in China there are buildings that were built simply because the government said "Build a building." There are buildings that are totally empty (see this link http://io9.com/chinas-brand-new-abandoned-cities-could-be-dy... which has some fascinating pictures).

So people don't trust the economic statistics the government produces and seek out other ways of either confirming or denying what is said. Energy consumption is one such indicator which, when combined with a technology sophistication index, can provide another data point on China's economic strength.

As comments to your first comment have already pointed out, pollution per unit of primary energy produced in power plants can vary wildly among different parts of the world. Yes, we know that China is putting up a lot of buildings. We know that China has huge amounts of air pollution. We don't know if China would be doing either of those things to the same degree if China had a freer market and more effective rule of law. That's why observers like me think that China could still stagnate at its current level of economic development, and lose the growth magic that it (undeniably) has enjoyed during most of our adult lives.

No, it's just a sign that they rely heavily on unrefined coal for power.

China's growth is being sustained by a development bubble, where they are accumulating the infamous ghost towns. But I've never heard anyone deny the fact that they are doing these things. And, of course, everyone in the US already knows that China makes everything. So I don't know who you are referring to here.

China has a lot of ghost towns, but remember that the ghost towns from 2008 are full of people now, so I'm guessing that the current ghost towns will up sooner or later. China has way less square footage of housing per capita than Europe, much less the US so building lots of housing is a pretty reasonable investment even if it doesn't pay off instantly.

But is it sustainable? Heavy thick smog (indicating the prominent use of coal to generate power) are certainly a negative signal when we have much better power sources.

Of course it is, (sustainable that is), it is just more expensive. I don't believe there is anything currently cheaper than a pouring fresh out of the mine coal, down a chute into a burner, which is making steam to drive a turbine. And there are a number of plants in China that seem to be just that.

You can pre-process the coal (remove impurities, create more uniform pellets, etc) to reduce random by products, and you can post process the exhaust plume through particulate and catalyzing filters to remove pollution by products. Much like a modern automobile a modern coal plant does all of that and more.

The down side is that it is more expensive to build, and to operate, and to fuel. Which is why generally government regulations are used to enforce it.

Unbelievable http://i.imgur.com/lef99jm.jpg

Has to take years off your life to be breathing that.

That photo just gave me a great idea for the next Bioshock game.

I don't know, the color palette seems to be from Quake.

What's surprising is Shanghai's life expectancy being really hight (over 82). Would like to have someone with some knowledge about the subject expand a bit on the pollution/life expectancy/statictics subject (there will be consequences later? etc)

People who are 82 now spent most of there life living in the city before it got very bad. The real question is if people born there now will see 82...

I know but my wild guess would be that the tendency should start to show up in stats given the pollution already started years ago (?)

It's a good guess but we probably won't see the impact for a a little while. Before Deng's reforms in the 80s industry was limited and the growth in the past 10 years has been incredible. My own grandfather's health was only really significantly affected by the pollution floating over to HK in the past 3-5 years.

I'd say wait another 10 years before the true consequences start to become apparent.

Thanks for the information

The sky above the port was the color of a TV, switched to a dead channel.

It is kind of funny that future generations may interpret that opening to mean a clear blue sky.

"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." - Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

http://lowlightmixes.blogspot.fi/2011/02/television-sky.html

There's always Beijing: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--W3r4NvkHFg/UPpFQzRcNWI/AAAAAAAACB...

Looks like a shot from Blade Runner.

I am Chinese. The whole China are suffer from air pollution, not noly Shanghai.

I remember visiting Shanghai about 10 years ago. It was very vibrant and exciting, and there were cranes everywhere. I thought, "This is like being on the ground floor of a great new metropolis. Wouldn't it be awesome to work here?" I'm glad that things didn't work out that way. There are health consequences for such massive pollution.

Yeah, today was not a great day to be here. We contemplated not letting our children go outside, but eventually sent them to school.

Curious... from a cancer-risk standpoint, this is the equivalent of smoking how many cigarettes that day?

One? Ten? A pack? Two packs? Fifty packs?

Or do we not have enough data to even guess?

Sad. I love -- _love_ -- that city, but I could never live there again, not breathing that.

and the price of international schools for your kids, right?

If cost is a primary concern, the kids can go to local school (just like Chinese kids who come to the US). The expat continuum goes from 'bubble' to 'going native'. Bubble is most expensive. Might as well stay home, no?

They can? Even local chinese kids without 户口 can't go to local schools, to hear them tell it. That was one of the primary reasons students came to the school where I worked in 2010-11.

You'll have to pay some bribes but its possible. Generally, expats with kids have packages that include private schooling. Expats without packages usually have to leave when they get kids, though that's probably for the better with this air (the better private schools have huge bubbles, by the way....)

No first hand experience, but from what I can tell, children of legitimate Z visa holders can send their kids to local schools for a reasonable fee. See shanghaiexpat.

It is also legal for expats to home school their kids (not legal for the locals).

There is a strong sense of entitlement present in American culture which leads to unrealistic expectations when living abroad. This manifests as the so-called 'ugly American'. China is a place where 'zero-tolerance' is literally a foreign concept, and anything is possible with persistence (and good connections). Which also implies the downside -- nothing is permanent or guaranteed, either.

Depends on the city. Shanghai is much more reasonable than say Beijing; each city in the country has its own often conflicting rules.

Nah, the last job I had there would have paid for schooling. It wouldn't pay for a hermetically sealed bubble of fresh air and water (and clean food), though.

I love China but pollution, the great firewall, and visa complications make it less attractive as somewhere to live.

Speaking as someone who lives in China...

The firewall won't bother you (assuming you wish to get around it); it's there for the masses.

Any idiot with a US citizenship can get a tourist visa, lasting a year and having only the requirement "visit Hong Kong (or any other non-China location) every three months" (I was unambitious, and got a two-month one). Someone of my acquaintance says he paid a visa-help company $1000 and got a business visa, good for a year and imposing no requirements.

I have, in the past, had a working visa; if that's what you want, it's generally done by your employer, not you.

Your "I love China" kind of leads me to believe you'd be familiar with this already... what kind of complications have you experienced?

$1000! Crazy laowai. As a data point, my current F visa is 2 years, multi-entry, 90 days and cost the nominal fee plus about $100 for the visa company to drop it off at the consulate. Apparently, the F visa has been re-purposed and there is a new M business visa. Any practical experience with that?

[of course, China habitually hassles journalists (Bloomberg) over visas]

What's the name (or link) of the visa company?

Also curious ...

Business visa Requirements: 1. One completely filled out “Visa Application Form, which you can down load from my attached PDF file. It needs to type with computer then print out. Don’t leave any blank, write “N/A” in any item which not suit for you. 2. One recently taken 2X2 in. photo showing entire face and without a hat on. Please affix the photo to the application form. Photo should be light background, and taken within 6 months. 3. Original passport with at least 2 blank visa pages and valid for at least 6 months beyond the date of application. 4. Invitation letter from the company or university in China 5. Your company or college in US's letter for proof. 6. Fee: Embassy: $140/per person for single, double & multiple entry in one year Service fee: $35.00 Postage: $22.00 for local people pick up by themselves, +$7.40 for others Total: $197.00 for local/ $204.40 for others.

Make your check paid to: Chinese Service Center .

Lucy Chinese Service Center of Greater Albany, LLC. 2394 Parkville Place Schenectady, NY 12309 Tel:(518)346-0555 Email:CSCAlbany@yahoo.com

EDIT: formatting

Thank you very much for taking the time to provide these details and tips.

I only know what he told me, which is that his visa allows him to enter and leave as he pleases, but, unlike my 60-day multi-entry, does not need to be renewed (much like a residence permit). $1000 isn't an unreasonable price for not having to leave every few months.

I have no knowledge of M visas; I just use Ls.

I assume China is impossible for someone with a bad peanut allergy? (Gets sick just with a bowl of peanuts in the same room.)

Yes, in fact no Chinese person born with a peanut allergy survived more than a few years.

Well, food contamination is an issue with even the nominal food supply, so one must be very careful. The culture is more fluid with the truth then some other places. Lots of vegetable markets, though, so you could buy and prepare your own food.

I lived in Hong Kong 2010 to 2013, but actually ended up living in Shenzhen for most of 2011. 18 pages of my passport are taken up with visas and stamps from the mainland (plus several more from HK and Taiwan)

As a Hong Kong resident I had a 6 month visa and then a 1 year China visa. Notably, though, both times it was a 30 day maximum stay, and as a UK citizen they still always just give me 30 days per entry.

I know all about the sneaky 1 year business visa I could get. (there's some guy who sits in a hotel in TST and sorts it out for you)

But I still frequently hear stories of people who've been living there for a year or so, but when it comes to renewing they turn up in HK, apply for a new visa, and end up being granted just 15 days.

Usually they fix this, and pay someone a few thousand dollars, and they get another one year visa. But this is a hassle.

The internet thing is easily overcome with a vpn, but it's just annoying, especially as latency to western services is already pretty high.

So my choice, is "go live in Taiwan", China without some of the hassle.

Notably when I say "I love China", I frequently mean "I love Greater China".

so you mean "I love Taiwan"

they should use that on their marketing

"Taiwan - THE Greater China"

That depends. Are you talking to mainlanders, or ROC?

VPNs around the firewall are getting less reliable everymonth.

The visa changes made in July are much more strict than before, getting a one year non work visa is only possible if you have Chinese family. The visa companies from before no longer exist. But I have a working visa so I don't care.

yeah, the people I know who've had visa problems are mostly entrepreneurs living in China on a business visa.

My one-year tourist visa was issued July 12th. Did I just squeak by?

The stricter rules took effect on July 31st. But are you referring to validity or length of stay? I've never heard of a tourist visa that allowed you to stay for a year even before the crackdown.

1-year validity, 60-day length of stay.

I know someone over in China at the moment and they said that the pollution was so bad this morning that looking out of a window you couldn't see the building next it. Scary thought of how much damage that'd do to your lungs.

The air pollution levels are similar to living an airport smoking lounge.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-30/beijing-air-akin-to...

EDIT: apparently my post below was predicated on a false assumption, please disregard.

That's Beijing, not Shanghai, and I think we can assume that Beijing is at least slightly cleaner than Shanghai, if not by much.

According this article[0], Shanghai's level reached 602.5, which, when compared to the data on the graph you linked, is about 75 points higher than Beijing.

[0]: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/smog-extremely...

According to the data from this page: http://kopf.github.io/chineseair/ Beijing seems to typically have higher pollution levels than Shanghai.

Beijing is generally worse more often, partly because they get hit by dust carried from the increasingly large Gobi Desert in addition to all the man-made pollution.

Not really. Beijing definitely get dust, but the real problem is that Beijing is trapped in a bowl and gets some wicked inversions. And to think I could see the summer palace from my office just yesterday.

Beijing sits in a geographic bowl (trapping pollution) and is inland from the coast compared to Shanghai. It also gets hit with dust storms from the desert to its west, all of which lead to it being "crazy bad"[0] in relation to Shanghai.

re: "crazy bad" being tweeted by the US Embassy in Beijing -- a cautionary tale on string sanitization. "The "crazy bad" terminology – which was at odds with the normally sober and scientific language of the Twitter account – appeared to have been a joke embedded in the embassy's monitoring program and triggered by a reading that was off the normal scale."

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/nov/19/craz...

For the engineers this is an interesting read: http://cornerstonemag.net/pollution-control-of-coal-fired-po...

According to this article, coal fired stations are no longer the primary source of PM2.5. Road vehicles emit an order of magnitude more particulate matter.

I recall about 20 years ago, Santiago had to implement a system where odd-numbered vehicles were allowed to drive on one day, and even-numbered the next, to cut down on the haze problem.

Perhaps electric vehicles are the way to go.

What? But China ratified the Kyoto protocol and pledged to reduce their pollution. This can't be true! It's almost as if the country completely disregarded the treaty to grow their economy at any expense.

The Kyoto protocol has to do with CO2 emissions, which are very different from the sort of particulate and sulfur pollution described in the article. Also, I have no idea whether China is actually following that treaty, but the reason the US didn't sign was that it did actually allow China to drastically increase the amount of fossil fuels it burns.

Yes, China and India are considered "developing" countries by Kyoto and can produce all the CO2 they want under the treaty, so of course they signed it.

EDIT: and, of course, it was about CO2, not particulates. A country can make certain trade-offs about different types of pollution (particulates v. CO2 v. NOX).

That part doesn't seem too unfair to me, considering that China and India's per-capita emissions are still vastly below U.S. levels. It'd be one thing if they were being allowed higher-than-US-level emissions due to being classified as "developing" countries, but they aren't producing anywhere near that.

It's the total emissions that matter, not per capita, and China leads the world.

That's a silly metric, though, because it just depends on where you divide things up politically. If China split into two independent countries, suddenly it wouldn't lead the world anymore, but the environment would not be any better off. Similarly, if Europe merged into a United States of Europe, its emissions would be much higher-ranked (maybe the largest), but it would not actually emit more than currently. The environment does not care at what scale you draw your political borders.

Per-capita emissions are one way of accounting for the obvious fact that if Denmark (a nation of 5 million people) generated as much CO2 per year as Germany does (a nation of 80 million people), Denmark would in this hypothetical be more blameworthy, and it would be fair to ask Denmark to reduce its emissions more than Germany, as it would already be emitting far out of proportion to its size. Put differently, if every country reduced their per-capita emissions to China's level, we'd actually be in great shape. That suggests that China is not the main problem.

It's not that they don't do anything about it.

In 2012 they emission of carbon dioxide raised by 3%, but that increase was at least lower than in previous years, where it oscillated around 10% (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24742770)

29 of 71 nuclear reactors that under currently under construction are being built in China (http://world-nuclear.org/info/Facts-and-Figures/World-Nuclea...), they also have similar numbers for hydropower (see the previous link).

I feel thankful to be in Beijing. The AQI (air quality index) is only 202 (very unhealthy) here right now.

I lived in Utah which can get very smoggy due to winter inversions. PM2.5 levels sometimes hit 80 mcg in the winter, often the highest in the country and utterly depressing to live in.

Its a scandal when SLC hits 70 2.5PM, its just a bad day when Beijing hits 700 2.5PM. There is just no comparison.

Such a shame; an amazing city with wonderful prospects, becoming almost entirely uninhabitable.

This could amuse me, but it saddens me, of course. The reason this could almost amuse me is that I remember a conversation in 1982 in Taipei, soon after my first visit to China, with a student from France. He too had just been to China, and he thought China was a wonderful place, "Because it has no air pollution." (Compared to 1982 Taiwan, yeah, the P.R.C. had very little pollution because it had very little industrial production. I have never been to France, so I don't know if he was also making a comparison to 1982 France by that comment.) I wish that China (and, for that matter, India) had made it a national development goal to grow in an environmentally friendly way. Once, we didn't know technologies for producing industrial output and raising prosperity without producing quite a bit of pollution along the way, but China (and, again, India) could have learned from the mistakes of other countries and the new technologies they developed to build up output without adding so much to pollution.

Today, Taipei is remarkably clean. I was stunned in 2001, when I last lived there as a permanent resident, by a visitor from Ukraine who arrived in Taiwan after visiting Hong Kong. He commented that he liked Taiwan better than Hong Kong because it was cleaner. I was stunned by that comment because the last time I visited Hong Kong (before retrocession to China), no one would have said so. Hong Kong is downwind of China, and maybe is not as cleaned up anymore now that it is under Chinese rule. Taiwan under democratization has become very clean indeed (although it too is downwind of China). Politicial pluralization through a free press and free elections (an advantage India already has) and effective rule by law (an advantage India is developing) seem all over the world to help countries prosper in a more environmentally sustainable manner. I wish China well in developing democracy and rule by law, and in any event to enjoy clean air sooner rather than later.

India's cities are better -- but not that much better. In January 2013, Beijing made headlines for a record-high PM2.5 of 755 mg/m^3. Nobody paid any attention to New Delhi, whose PM2.5 topped out at 565 mg/m^3 the next day.

India's GDP is currently 1/4 that of China. Imagine how bad things will get in another 10 years, when India's GDP reaches China's current GDP.

Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-01-15/pollu...

Pollution is now the No.1 reason rich people migrate out of China, second to Education of their kids. I claim this from experience.

Kind of unfortunate too -- move away, and leave the problem behind. Of course there's no problem with getting out of the polluted area, but there's a problem with just giving up and moving elsewhere, forgetting the pollution exists and not trying to solve it from abroad.

Having just come back, this week, from a three weeklong trip visiting a large portion of the country (Beijing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Guilin, Shanghai, Nanjing and Shijiazjuang [along with a number of minor cities]) the pollution was by far the worse in Shijiazjuang, though not on the level seen in Shanghai this week. Shanghai was polluted, but the wind was generally blowing most of the pollution away from the city.

My impression was that most people have a rather nonchalant attitude towards the pollution. They know it is bad, but don't really know what to do about it. This includes my American brother who has been living in Shijiazjuang for the last year. Whenever the topic of pollution came up, he didn't really seem to have any strong feelings about the pollution, either way and explained that seems to be most people's attitude too.

It's amazing how much of this is getting to the West Coast of the US.

By one measure 29% of SF's air pollution originates in Asia.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/88/i46/8846news3.html?T+Online+...

So why do people use those flimsy face masks instead of proper gas masks / carbon filters?

Cost is a likely factor.

Self-administered placebo

There's also a lack of understanding on the effects of this pollution, especially as it becomes more regular. I worked and lived in China for 7 years and just getting parents to close the windows of an obstetric hospital with newborns was difficult enough. There is a belief that "fresh air" is always better than what is in the room. When I asked nurses about the public health impact of this pollution on children, they often stared blankly back.

Had the exact same problem with my parents in New Delhi. Father was suffering from lung disease. Wanted to sit outside on the balcony - fresh air, apparently. I tried to explain to him that the air is laden with dangerous levels of particulate pollutants. He didn't care. He died earlier this year.

PM10/2.5 levels continue to be disastrous (1900+/700+ on some days especially around Diwali). Mother still likes to open balcony doors and room windows to let 'fresh air' flow through the house.

Neither are/were uneducated. Post grads in SCIENCE FFS!

Cannot. Explain. It.

But does closing windows really help? I mean sure, short term it slows down the exchange of air between the inside and outside, so it'll be helpful if there's a sudden spike that goes away. But if the pollution is a chronic problem, and it certainly is in Shanghai and New Delhi, then eventually the equilibrium will equalize and the air inside will be just as bad.

It would help if your air conditioning/HVAC system is also doing air filtration (as they do in the US, not familiar with Shanghai/New Dehli).

It helps when there are drastic spikes in PM levels outdoors such as during rush hour or during high pollution events like Diwali. (people burn fire crackers en masse during Diwali, creates a ton of pollution)

Also, we do have air purifiers and air conditioners running indoors so those help a bit, but once you put them off, opening the doors and windows isn't going to help with situation.

What did the cities look like in the US and Europe during parts of the Industrial Revolution?

I cant imagine it was as persistent and thick as some parts of China.

As already mentioned in the thread the London "pea soupers" were as bad, or worse, than the pictures we see here.

Google image search for ["pea souper"] for images from 1950s London.

Here is a good link in case anyone is interested.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2243732/Pea-souper-k...

Air pollution is one thing the leadership suffers as well. Everyone has to breathe. If the people are poor or suffering in some other way but the leadership is living large then they can ignore the issues. But everyone needs air. At some point they have to deal with it.

+1. Also applies to western countries riding their moral highhorse - pollution knows no borders. 1/3rd of pollution in LA comes from China.

And yet your President is still prioritizing coal over Canadian oilsands....

I appreciate how this is currently sharing the frontpage with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860839

Do you guys think this will spur china to jump ahead in greening/pollution reduction? It would be incredibly costly to do so ($$$), but incredibly costly not to (people).

344 2.5 AQI right now in Beijing. I just bought a $1k air purifier to cope last week to cope with what is going to be a very bad winter.

What model?

Blue air. Second largest one.

Damn these Chinese! Can't they cheaply produce our goods with slave labor without polluting our precious planet?

I'd engage in some schadenfreude, but a good bit of that stuff will be lurking over LA none too soon.

Investment idea: Companies that manufacture sulfur dioxide scrubbers for coal plants.

this looks like a good sign for the world economy. S&P 2000!

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