I hosted some Chinese engineers this week (the old “train your replacements” routine). So I’ve barely kept up with events, as my time on the internets was limited.
But I got the visitors on a plane this afternoon, and now I’m trying to get caught up, and back to normal. Or to whatever passes for normal these days….
One of the most interesting and timely links I found so far is this collection of photos of pollution in China.
(ViaInstapundit. )
Interesting because it’s so appalling, yet so artistically beautiful. Timely because of one of my visitors comments.
This guy is 32 years old, and it was his first trip to America. His first trip outside of China, actually.
I picked them up at the airport when they arrived here Sunday. As we left the terminal and walked to the parking lot, he looked up at the sky.
His eyes widened, and his mouth opened with a look of surprise.
He pointed upward, and in broken, though clear, English said,
“ Sky is blue! Sky is blue! I thought that just Hollywood special effect!”
It’s so easy to take for granted the little (or maybe not so little) things.
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That’s really awesome.
My brother from the mid-west Detroit often tells me the same thing re: the sky being so clear here.
After reviewing the link, I’m finding it frightening.
wow.
awesome anecdote. scary, humbling, disturbing. Awesome.
Aziz,
Yes. And I’m still trying to digest it all.
We are certainly living in interesting times!
And China was EXEMPTED from signing the Kyoto Treaty.
McK,
And India too.
Makes you wonder if Kyoto, etc, is about solving the real environmental problems we face, or maybe something else.
I have to wonder if China today is what America looked like some 100 year ago at the peak of the Industrial Revolution.
But, as others have noted about China being exempt from Kyoto, I simply adore the hypocrisy of how the U.S. is getting raked over the coals but China gets a pass. It just goes to show that the “green movement” has never been about the environment – it’s about power. Green truly is the new red.
Yes Kevin I agree, the people at the top are motivated by power and profit (not necessarily in that order, IMO).
But the strings they are pulling on their minions underneath have a heavy dose of guilt, and a huge dose of wealth redistribution.
Those poor Chinese and Indians have been exploited for centuries, don’t you know. They deserve a break!
CO2, of course, has nothing to do with smoky skies.
If China has X yuan to spend on environmental energy improvement, then spending the money on wind/solar (to comply with CO2 caps) would surely have much less impact on visible pollution (and on health problems like asthma) than spending the money on modern combustion equipment and filtration for their coal plants.
That’s just plain terrifying, though, really.
Fortunately, CO2 isn’t actually pollution.
Wait, what ? That can’t be true. Why the media and the left (sorry for the redundancy) makes it clearly daily that the US is the most evil force on the planet. China is a beacon of hope and freedom, isn’t it ?
I just went out and looked. The sky is black with these white sparkly things.
What’s with all this blue sky propaganda?
Probably only a little. Recall that world population was what, 1/3 what it is now. Also, per person, we use dramatically more energy, and GDP / person is an order of magnitude greater, both would imply, even with greener and cleaner tech, we may be ‘polluting’ nearly as much as before.
England, due to population density, may have been closer to that…
In regards to England, look up “killer fog.” They don’t know how many people died in those pea-soupers because they never did comparison statistics, but the last one is thought to have killed hundreds of Londoners— and that was after WWII.
The worst air I’ve ever experienced was in Xi’an in central China, where the pollution is so thick that it makes your nose run and you’ll blow black gunk whenever you sneeze. The sky was a sort of yellow, and the sun looked like a shiny penny. The air smelled of coal and tasted like metal.
The sad thing is Xi’an is otherwise a very interesting city – it’s near Qin Shihuang’s original capital and was the capital of various Chinese states (and all of China after it was unified) for thousands of years – but don’t go there when the wind isn’t blowing.
The air was so bad there that going back to Beijing felt like Yosemite in comparison. And there’s no remote comparison to anything I’ve experienced in the US, other than places where wildfires were within a couple thousand yards or less.
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