Thread: China's Anti-Smog Measures Don't Tackle Pollution at Source: Activists

Authorities across China are deploying giant mist-cannons in a bid to reduce air pollution, as dangerous levels of smog once more engulf northern cities.

The mist cannons, a large machine mounted on a truck that sprays nebulized water droplets, are aimed at trapping and sinking dust particles in the air of Beijing and other worst-affected cities, official media reported.

"Mist cannon trucks are being used to spray in the mornings ... during smoggy days," the Global Times newspaper reported.

However, it also quoted experts as saying that the effectiveness on cities engulfed with smog was doubtful, while the impact on the most-hazardous form of microscopic dust pollution, PM2.5, is still unknown.

Wuxi-based environmental activist Wu Lihong told RFA that the mist cannons are unlikely to have much impact on a city-wide smog.

"I can't see much impact from these mist-cannons at all, personally," Wu said. "They are just there for show, but they're not much use at cleaning up smog."

"They have a range of about 200 meters, and they're used to clear dust out of the air near construction sites," Wu said. "But smog extends upwards into the atmosphere by 2,000-3,000 meters, so how can they possibly clear the dust up to that height?"

"This is a cosmetic measure that does nothing to address the root causes of pollution," he said.

Fake statistics

Wu said many local governments routinely fake pollution statistics in a bid to meet environmental clean-up targets, making existing laws difficult to enforce.

"Local officials protect [polluting industries] because they derive benefits from it themselves," he said. "When there's an inspection from higher up, they switch on the environmental protection equipment, and then they shut it down again after they've gone."

"They don't care about the planet; they are just concerned with doing well for themselves. For them, whether China is polluted or not has nothing to do with them."

Meanwhile, Zhengzhou-based environmentalist Cui Sheng said the mist cannons are only effective when used for temporary alleviation of dust and smog, and are being used to mask the seriousness of air pollution by local governments.

"These misting sprays produce a slight, temporary alleviation of particulate pollution, and they are often placed in the vicinity of air pollution monitoring stations," Cui said.

"They interfere with the readings and the data produced from monitoring," he said.

'Stricter than ever'

China's cabinet, the State Council, on Monday released details of its five-year plan to address widespread pollution of the country's air, soil and water, launching a campaign to reduce PM2.5 concentrations by 18 percent in the worst-polluted cities by 2020.

Vice minister of environmental protection Zhao Yingmin vowed a "stricter-than-ever" approach to tackling pollution, including eight obligatory targets.

But Beijing-based activist Chen Liwen said the government needs to target pollution before it is produced for the plans to work.

"Most of their efforts are directed at cleaning up existing pollution, and power is only passed to the environmental protection agencies after it has been produced," Chen said.

She said too many departments are involved in setting and enforcing environmental policy at present.

"The most progressive way of dealing with it is through prevention, and the environmental protection agencies have very little power to speak up at this stage," she said.

Many thousands die

Experts estimate that some 350,000 to 500,000 people die prematurely per year from air pollution in China alone.

Wu cited a recent report blaming falling male fertility in China on pollution.

"Pollution has already started to affect people's health ... with figures showing an increase in malignant tumors, leukemia, and lung and liver cancer," he said.

"It also affects people's ability to reproduce."

Red smog alerts were issued last week for Linfen city in Shanxi province and Hebei's Shijiazhuang, Baoding, Langfang, Xingtai, and Handan cities in the northern province of Hebei.

Beijing also issued an orange-alert smog warning, effectively ordering schools to cancel outdoor activities and suspending construction projects until last weekend.

Beijing residents woke up to thick smog last weekend, with visibility of just 500 meters in some areas, and pollution readings climbing over the 500 mark, the most hazardous to human health.

China's Anti-Smog Measures Don't Tackle Pollution at Source: Activists

You must have missed the new 5 year plan just published. Why not find it and comment on the plan rather than posting fake news.

^ How about YOU finding it, posting it, and commenting. Show us just how fake this news really is.

But that would be doing what you do constantly, you have made it your reason to post here.

One is enough.

Originally Posted by OhOh

You must have missed the new 5 year plan just published. Why not find it and comment on the plan rather than posting fake news.

What do you think is fake about this? That China has a pollution problem? That they use misting machines? That the misting machines don't work? That authorities report false figures? That they turn of the environmental protection equipment only turnong it on when an inspection is due? What?
I thought you were well experienced in China ways. What would make you think any of that could be fake?

China Environment Watchdogs to Sever Local Government Ties by Year-end

SHANGHAI —
China's environment impact assessment (EIA) agencies will sever all connections with local governments by year-end to avoid conflicts of interest and help bolster the environment ministry's battle against rampant air, water and soil pollution.

Citing the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the official Xinhua news agency said late Thursday that 337 EIA agencies had already been de-coupled from local government or been disbanded. The remaining 13 will be detached this month.

Earlier this week, China punished nearly 700 officials for inadequately protecting the environment in the latest round of rolling inspections. The previous round led to more than 3,000 officials being disciplined and 198 million yuan ($29 million) in fines being handed out for environmental violations.

China's environment ministry was given authority earlier this year to investigate regions and enterprises without prior warning, and was empowered to summon any local government or company official to account for their actions.

China has been trying to strengthen its environmental powers as part of a "war on pollution" launched in 2014 to reverse the damage done by decades of untrammeled growth.

Xinhua said formerly government-affiliated EIA agencies had been ordered to terminate all connections with local government in 2015 to avoid corruption and conflict of interest. It added that China has a total of 984 EIA agencies and 19,700 EIA engineers.

China Environment Watchdogs to Sever Local Government Ties by Year-end

Originally Posted by Cujo

What do you think is fake about this?

I misspoke.

Originally Posted by Takeovers

Originally Posted by Cujo

That authorities report false figures?

Must be true. I have seen it stated on Chinese state TV, on CCTV news. They said the only reliable data on air pollution in Beijing come from the US embassy.

But unlike the Trump the Chinese authorities are actually aware of the CO2 problem. They don't act on it fast as they desperately need growth. But they are aware and working on long term measures. Like a new generation of actually reliable and safe nuclear power plants. They are also forcing solar power plants and do reforestation, though with limited results.

They don't give a fuck about the CO2 'problem'.
Spend a little time in any Chinese industrial city and you'll soon see what the real problem is. They're not forcing solar power, it would be useless in most of the country, the sun doesn't penetrate the pollution. You never see the sky or clouds, just an endlessly grey environment.

Smog Alert: Chinese Cities Cancel Flights, Close Factories


A construction site is pictured in smog on a polluted day as a red alert for air pollution is issued in Beijing, China, Dec. 16, 2016.

A smog-shrouded Chinese city canceled airline flights Sunday because of poor visibility, and parents took children to hospitals on the second day of a pollution alert across the country’s north.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 35 flights in Tianjin, east of Beijing, were delayed or canceled. Highways into the city of 7.5 million people were closed because of extremely low visibility.

Beijing and 22 other Chinese cities imposed emergency measures Saturday, including ordering cars off the road and telling factories and schools to close, after pollution soared to more than 10 times safe levels.

Children hospitalized

On Sunday, news website said the number of children being taken to Beijing hospitals with breathing trouble soared. Photos showed waiting rooms crowded with parents carrying children who wore face masks.

Chinese cities are notorious for noxious air blamed on emissions from older cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants and factories.

Members of the public closely watch levels of PM2.5, particles measuring 2.5 microns across that are easily inhaled and damage lung tissue.

The alert, this winter’s first, lasts through Wednesday. The National Meteorological Center said pollution in a densely populated swath stretching from the country’s northeast across Beijing to eastern China was likely to worsen Monday.

Visibility in some areas was as little as 1,000 meters (3,280 feet), according to the weather agency.

City ‘basically disappeared’

Authorities in Jinan, south of Tianjin, raised that city’s alert to the second-highest level Sunday after the city “basically disappeared” in the haze, the newspaper Jilu Evening News reported. Photos on its website showed downtown office towers as ghostly silhouettes at midday.

Beijing and other cities have tried to improve air quality by switching power plants from coal to natural gas and rolling out fleets of electric buses and taxis.

The Beijing city weather bureau says that despite the latest spike, air in the Chinese capital has improved. It says days on which was it was rated good in the first half of the year increased by 19 to 107, while the number of heavily polluted days fell by two to 14.

Smog Alert: Chinese Cities Cancel Flights, Close Factories

Originally Posted by misskit

pollution soared to more than 10 times safe levels.

Try 100 times safe levels

Visibility in some areas was as little as 1,000 meters (3,280 feet), according to the weather agency.

Try 100 meters.

no more free fresh air. should we export fresh air to China?

China’s Smog Cancels Hundreds of Flights, Closes Highways


Buildings are seen on a hazy day in Xiangyang, Hubei province, China, Dec. 31, 2016. The current round of air pollution struck Friday and isn't expected to lift until Thursday.

BEIJING —
Heavy smog in northern China on Sunday caused hundreds of flights to be canceled and highways to shut, disrupting the first day of the new year holiday.

Large parts of the north were hit by hazardous smog in mid-December, leading authorities to order hundreds of factories to close and to restrict motorists to cut emissions.

The latest round of air pollution began Friday and is expected to persist until Thursday, although it is expected to ease slightly Monday, the last day of the new year holiday.


Particle levels especially high

In Beijing, 24 flights were canceled at the city’s main airport, and all buses from there to neighboring cities suspended, the airport said in a statement on its official microblog.

Average concentrations of small breathable particles known as PM2.5 were higher than 500 micrograms per cubic meter in Beijing — 50 times higher than World Health Organization recommendations.

In Tianjin, Beijing’s next-door metropolis, the smog was not as serious, but visibility was much worse, with more than 200 flights canceled at Tianjin airport and conditions not expected to improve in the near term, the city government said.

Some bus routes and highways in Tianjin were also closed because of the smog, the government added. In Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei province that surrounds most of the Beijing, about two dozen flights were canceled and eight flights diverted to other airports because of the smog, the People’s Daily said on its website.


45 cities on alert

A total of 24 Chinese cities have issued red alerts for the current round of pollution, which mandate measures like limiting car usage and closing factories, while 21 have issued orange alerts, including Beijing and Tianjin.

China began a “war on pollution” in 2014 amid concerns its heavy industrial past was tarnishing its global reputation and holding back its future development, but it has struggled to effectively tackle the problem.

Pollution alerts are common in northern China, especially during winter when energy demand, much of it met by coal, soars. The country’s northern provinces mostly rely on the burning of hundreds of millions of tons of coal each year for heating during northern China’s bitterly cold winters.

China?s Smog Cancels Hundreds of Flights, Closes Highways

China Punishes Polluters as Toxic Smog Swamps Northern Cities

China entered 2017 with toxic smog still choking cities in the north and center of the country, in spite of anti-pollution measures that included punishments for offenders.

China's environmental protection ministry announced it had punished more than 500 enterprises and construction sites and 10,000 vehicles for breaching air pollution alert restrictions.

Yellow, orange, or red pollution alerts are currently in place in 72 cities in northern China, official media reported.

Red alerts automatically trigger bans on heavily polluting vehicles, and trucks carrying construction waste are banned from roads, while some factories are required to cut production.

But inspectors sent by the ministry found that several metallurgy, agricultural chemical, and steel plants in the region had failed to follow the alert-triggered bans, state news agency Xinhua reported.

Meanwhile, the ministry also rapped the government of industry-heavy Tangshan city in Hebei province with a warning for failing to implement a truck ban during the smog alert.

And an unlicensed quarry in the city continued in production even after one of its officers was detained for breaching anti-pollution bans, it said.

An employee who answered the phone at the ministry declined to comment when contacted by RFA on Tuesday.

"If you know of any companies that are in breach of the pollution bans linked to the smog warnings, you are welcome to report them," the official said.

"You can do this via our environmental reporting center."

Set to continue

The smog looks set to continue through Jan. 7, according to China's meteorological bureau.

Beijing resident Sun Baomei said people's lives are severely disrupted by the smog.

"Beijing is no longer fit for human habitation," Sun said. "We are breathing in toxic stuff, and some days we don't even dare go out."

"If we do go out, we wear a face-mask. We all have those poison-gas masks, and if we drive the car it's very difficult to see anything," she said.

"It's easy to get in a traffic accident if you take your eye of the road for a second, so nobody wants to go out."

The ruling Chinese Communist Party at the end of last year announced a five-year action plan on air pollution that aims to slash the country's reliance on coal and shutter polluting enterprises.

Beijing also removed limits on the amounts polluters can be forced to pay in fines.

However, campaigners say that China already has an exemplary set of environmental protection laws, but that close ties between business and officials mean that it is rarely enforced at a local level.

Radical change needed

Song Xinzhou, founder of the Beijing-based non-government group "Green Beijing," said emergency measures can have only a limited impact on reducing the smog that engulfs northern Chinese cities in winter.

"We need to initiate radical change. Until we take into account the wider environment and start to get actual results from the anti-pollution measures, things aren't going to change," Song said.

He said the cold weather had led to a lack of movement in the air over northern China.

"That's making it hard for the pollutants to disperse," Song said. "There's a fairly stable layer of air here right now, which is a normal phenomenon caused by the weather."

"But so many years of pollution mean that this natural phenomenon is now a very negative outcome."

Online commentators hit out at the smog, taking aim at the government for failing to issue the highest alert levels.

"Why don't they issue a red alert?" wrote one commentator. "Do they think it would put a dampener on the first day of the new year?"

Another quipped: "They should give the smog a Beijing residency permit, because it's not going anywhere."

Others pointed out that tourists attending the first flag-raising ceremony of 2017 on Beijing's Tiananmen Square were all wearing gas-masks, according to photos circulated on social media.

Everyone affected

A Beijing petitioner who gave only his surname Li said everyone he knows is affected by the pollution.

"If we can avoid going anywhere, or meeting up with people, we do," Li said. "The smog is here, both the environmental kind and the political kind."

"If we can't put up with this darkness, this pollution, then we shouldn't leave it for future generations to put up with as well," Li said.

Thousands of Beijing residents have left the city to head to southern China in a bid to get away from the toxic cloud over their homes, local media reported.

Some congregated on the summit of Sichuan's sacred Buddhist mountain, Emeishan, to witness the first ray of clear light they had seen all year.

"The smog doesn't extend everywhere, but there is air pollution nearly everywhere now, and it keeps getting worse," a Beijing resident surnamed Hu told RFA.

"This problem has been created by undisciplined actions on the part of the government," he said. "The only justice now is that nobody can escape."

But he said: "If we don't all stand up and do something about this now, there won't be any survivors."

Despite a strong push to improve air quality, China's citizens will suffer over 2 million premature deaths annually due to pollution for decades to come, according to a July report from the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA).

Bad air has shortened the average life expectancy in China by over two years, it said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that air pollution causes at least 6.5 million premature deaths a year worldwide.

China Punishes Polluters as Toxic Smog Swamps Northern Cities

Left to their own devices the Chinese will kill themselves leaving the world a much better place.

Beijing pollution: Police force to combat toxic smog

A new team of environmental police will try to reduce hazardous levels of toxic smog engulfing Beijing, the city's acting mayor has said.

The police will look for local sources of air pollution, including open-air barbecues and dusty roads, Cai Qi says, according to Xinhua state news agency.

The mayor has also promised to reduce coal consumption by 30% this year.

Many residents have been forced to stay in their homes for days at a time to avoid breathing the poisonous air.

The public has been calling on the government to do more to address major sources of smog, including reducing China's reliance on coal-fired power plants, the primary source of electricity in the country.

Officials say unfavourable weather conditions in the capital have prevented pollutants from dispersing.

"Open-air barbecues, garbage incineration, biomass burning, dust from roads - these acts of non-compliance with regulations are actually the result of lax supervision and weak law enforcement," Mr Cai was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

The city's only coal-fired power plant will be closed after the winter, when consumption increases for heating, Mr Cai added.

Another 300,000 high-polluting old vehicles will be phased out, Xinhua says. Polluting factories will be closed and some 2,000 others will be upgraded to meet higher pollution treatment standards.

Beijing authorities had earlier announced that they would begin installing air purifiers in some of the city's schools and kindergartens. They were already ordered to stop all outdoor activities.

Beijing pollution: Police force to combat toxic smog - BBC News