A cold wave arriving from Siberia over the weekend is expected to disperse the pollution. China aims to cut concentrations of hazardous, small airborne particles known as PM2. The PM2. Embassy in Beijing, indicating very unhealthy air. Tangshan, China In this city by the Yellow Sea, some miles east of Beijing in Hebei Province, was obliterated by an earthquake that killed at least , people—around a quarter of the population.
Afterward the city was rebuilt, and it helped build modern China. Flatbed trucks loaded with big rolls of steel are parked on roadsides. From the rubble of , clusters of tall, concrete apartment buildings have risen to house the workers who keep the mills and factories running and the towering smokestacks pumping.
In China today, air pollution kills an estimated 1. But in Tangshan, people are also feeling the costs of the fight for cleaner air. His wife, Li Yong Min, runs the store. Wang works in the mill, purifying molten steel and casting it into billets.
But the pay is good, the bonus reliable. Over the past few years, as factories in Tangshan have been shuttered or relocated, ordered to scale back production or to install expensive air scrubbers, Wang has watched colleagues get laid off. But he thinks his mill will survive the cutback in steel-making. The economic rise has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—and in Tangshan, out of utter ruin. But it has also left many of them with undrinkable water, tainted food, and toxic air.
Chinese cities are pressing residents to give up coal stoves and furnaces at home. Officials have required higher-quality gasoline and diesel for vehicles. Car emissions standards set to take effect in will be comparable to European and American ones.
But the focus remains on heavy industry. In March the national government announced the closure or cancellation of coal-fired power plants, capable of generating a total of more than 50 gigawatts of power. It said it would also cut steel production capacity by another 50 million tons.
Levels of fine-particulate pollution in the Beijing region had fallen by more than 25 percent in and , as initial cuts bore fruit, but in late and early they spiked again.
A Greenpeace analysis revealed why: Steel production actually increased in , in spite of earlier reductions in capacity, because the central government was stimulating demand and local officials were protecting their mills read more about this problem.
The public outcry over pollution offers the central government political cover for painful decisions it needs to make, for reasons having nothing to do with the environment. Overcapacity in the steel, cement, glass, and power sectors, fueled by dangerously high levels of debt, is widely considered an economic time bomb that leaders know they must defuse. Pollution is one problem in China about which there is a robust public conversation.
With stunning but typically Chinese speed, the government has built a nationwide network of monitors tracking levels of PM2. Science Advisers as Policy makers. London: Routledge.
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