China

As thick, choking smog continues to envelop large parts of the country, long-suffering Chinese residents have raised questions

As thick, choking, toxic smog continues to envelop large parts of China, long-suffering Chinese residents have raised the question of what exactly is causing the terrible air pollution.

Have the country’s eco-friendly wind farms slowed air circulation, making it harder for smog to disperse, and has switching to natural gas contributed more harmful particles to the air than the use of coal?

These are the burning questions that Chinese social media users have raised over the past few days as residents across northern China endure the smog that is laying siege to a seventh of the country.

Some critics believe the government’s measures taken to counter air pollution have instead worsened its problems, but scientists say this is not the case.

The burning of coal is the biggest factor contributing to northern China’s smoggy conditions, according to Professor Chai Fahe, a researcher with the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences.

Speaking at a press meeting organised by the Ministry of Environmental Protection on Tuesday, Chai said emissions from burning coal in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei – the most developed regions in northern China – were five times the national average.

The situation would worsen in winter, as many urban communities and rural families in those regions also relied on coal for heating, he said.

To reduce the country’s reliance on coal-fired power plants, the government set up large-scale wind farms.

Most of the wind turbines are located in grasslands in Hebei and Inner Mongolia to the north of Beijing, and sit across a major stream of cold air from Siberia.

A recent study found that near-surface wind speeds in Beijing had declined significantly, from 3.7 metres per second in the 1970s to just 3 metres per second presently.

Xu Dexiang, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, said wind farms could indeed affect the movement of ground air, according to studies conducted both in China and abroad.

Significantly reduced wind speeds had been recorded in areas within 100km from the wind farms, Xu said.

But the impact to Beijing – which is more than 400km south of Inner Mongolia and 200km from Zhangjiakou in Hebei where most of the farms are located – would not be “obvious”, he was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

Xu also said a man-made forest created to reduce dust storms in northern China should not take the blame for the region’s worsening smog.

Such low-lying foliage would not slow down the movement of cold air, which travels at a height of more than 1.5km above ground, he said.

Critics have also raised the possibility that the worsening smog is due to Beijing’s switching winter heating sources from coal to natural gas.

Beijing has in recent years undertaken a massive and costly campaign to use cleaner energy. Natural gas is cleaner than coal, producing water and carbon dioxide when burnt, instead of the dust and smoke that coal produces.

But the water vapour that burning natural gas produces can also increase the concentration of air pollutants near ground. Ongoing research has suggested that tiny water molecules in the air may speed up chemical reactions, leading to worse smog.

Wang Zifa, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Atmospheric Physics, said the burning of natural gas in China pumped more than 300 million tonnes of water into the atmosphere each year – equivalent to 30 times the amount of water in Hangzhou’s famous West Lake.

Nevertheless, water vapour accounts for only a small, “almost negligible” fraction of water in the whole atmosphere, Wang said.

The use of natural gas hence was not a big contributor to the high humidity of Beijing’s smog, he said.

Wang Shuxiao, an environmental science professor with Tsinghua University, said the public should be more patient with the government’s anti-pollution measures.

China could counter its smog problem only if the whole of society worked together to reduce the emission of air pollutants, Wang said.
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Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2056366/what-exactly-causing-chinas-toxic-smog

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/10/29/incomes-rise-china-concern-pollution/

Over the last 40 years, hundreds of millions of people in China have escaped poverty as this enormous nation urbanized and became a manufacturing powerhouse fueled by cheap coal and cheap labor. But this development strategy has imposed enormous environmental costs on the Chinese people. Air pollution levels have soared, rural areas face severe water pollution and food safety continues to be a major concern.

China’s growth strategy also has international consequences. Air pollution from China travels east to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea and across the Pacific to the U.S. west coast. And China’s heavy use of fossil fuel has made it the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, raising the risk of severe climate change.

The Chinese people are well aware of how pollution is eroding their quality of life. The Weibo blogging platform, China’s version of Twitter, features daily discussions about the nation’s environmental challenges. And in Chinese cities, residents are demanding cleaner conditions through their words and their spending choices.

Dirty air and crowded streets

Although wealth has greatly increased in China in recent decades, life satisfaction surveys indicate that the Chinese people are not as happy as one might expect. We believe that pollution is the major cause.

In our book “Blue Skies Over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China ,” Professor Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua University and I argue that rising demand for environmental protection in China is an emerging trend that will improve the standard of living in China and increase overall global sustainability.

Multiple studies have shown that exposure to pollution in China is affecting public health and quality of life. Epidemiologists estimate exposure to air pollution shortens residents’ life expectancy by about 5.5 years in coal-dependent north China. Economists have found that both outdoor and indoor workers are less productive when exposed to higher levels of air pollution.

While China is ending its notorious one-child policy, urban Chinese couples still frequently choose to have just one child and arrange their lifestyles to invest in him or her. Many of these parents are proud of China’s economic growth but worried about how pollution may harm their child’s health.

In one interview for our book we talked to a Beijing resident with a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University, whom we identified at his request as Mr. Wu (many Chinese hesitate to be quoted by name criticizing urban living conditions). He said that his family planned to move to Canada or the United States after he earned enough money, in order to protect his daughter from dirty air and contaminated food and water in Beijing.

We also interviewed an urban planning scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley whom we referred to as Dr. Zhang. In 2015 Zhang was recruited by Renmin University in Beijing and accepted an appointment as assistant professor. But after six months he decided to move to another university because he could not tolerate Beijing’s heavy haze and worried that it would harm his two young children’s health. Zhang’s case is not unique: Chinese urbanites told us that many top universities in Beijing lose out to Hong Kong universities when they try to recruit new economics and business Ph.D. graduates because of Beijing’s air pollution.

Paying for greener lifestyles

Chinese urbanites’ desire for cleaner, healthier living conditions is evident in their purchases. Looking at real estate transaction data from Chinese cities, we found a willingness to pay to live in a city or a location with higher environmental quality. Using data on all of the apartments sold in Beijing around the year 2005, we found evidence that apartment prices were higher in parts of the city featuring easy access to fast public transit, clean air (pollution levels vary across the metropolitan area) and access to green parks.

For example, all else equal, we calculated that in neighborhoods where levels of fine particulate air pollution (known as PM10) are 10 micrograms per cubic meter higher than other neighborhoods, real estate prices are 4 percent lower. In a cross-city study we found that apartments sell for higher prices in less polluted cities than units of the same quality and size in dirtier locations.

And city dwellers are acting to protect themselves. By examining internet sales data, we found daily sales of masks and air filters are much higher on days when the government announces that a city’s air pollution is “hazardous” versus days when government announces that local air quality is “excellent.” (Urban dwellers can track these reports with an Iphone app.)

These results suggest that China’s urban consumers trust government pollution announcements now — but this was not always true. Past research has documented that government agencies manipulated data to overstate the number of “blue sky” days between 2001 and 2010.

Recently, however, the cost of independently monitoring air pollution has declined. In 2008 the U.S Embassy in Beijing installed rooftop monitoring equipment and began providing measurements of local ambient air pollution. Growing competition in the “market for environmental information” has given the Chinese government incentive to truthfully report air pollution levels.

Beijing is also notorious for its traffic congestion. China’s recent investment in “bullet trains,” which travel at roughly 175 miles per hour, has increased access to mega cities. For example, people can now live in the nearby second-tier city of Tianjin and commute to Beijing in 30 minutes by train, instead of 1.5 hours by car.
We have documented increased home prices in second- and third-tier cities connected by bullet train to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Competing for talent

The urban history of the United States suggests that a city’s environmental conditions can greatly improve within a short period of time. Pittsburgh, which was heavily polluted during its heyday as a steel-making town through the 1960s, has transitioned to a high-skill economy and now markets itself as green and sustainable.

Many of China’s richer coastal cities are already following a similar arc. Xiamen is a medium-sized city with a population of about 3.7 million, located on China’s southeast coast and the west bank of the Taiwan Straits. It enjoys mild winters and cool summers, with an annual mean temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, and clean air.

Xiamen’s leaders are pursuing a growth strategy based on the city’s amenities. A high-level municipal official told us they are using beach access, clean air, temperate climate and high-quality urban services to compete for talent and new firms. This strategy creates incentives for local leaders to invest in improving quality of life, and offers mobile urbanites choices about where to live.

China’s leaders still care about economic growth, but now they recognize the importance of attracting and retaining talented people, and are worried about an international brain drain as skilled workers move to Canada and the United States. As part of that strategy, national and provincial leaders are starting to evaluate local officials’ efforts to curb pollution and promote energy efficiency.

One mayor in a small, affluent city in the Yangtze River Delta told Siqi, “I do not want my citizens to complain about the pollution in my city. I do not want to become a bad ‘star’ on Weibo. In this case, even if I achieve very high GDP growth, I will have no chance to be promoted.”

Global benefits from a greener China

China’s transition from heavy manufacturing to a modern service economy will not be painless. Hundreds of millions of low-skilled workers prefer safe employment at a government factory, even if it means their city is polluted. One decentralized approach would be to allow some cities to become green centers featuring technology-driven high human capital industries while others continue to rely on heavy industry.

As China burns cleaner fuels such as natural gas and generates more of its power using renewables, it will become easier for China to be a “good global citizen” and work with the United States and other nations to seek to mitigate climate change. Over 18 percent of the world’s population lives in China, and a majority of China’s population now lives in cities. If China’s growing urban middle class succeeds in its demands for a better quality of life, the benefits will reach far beyond China’s borders.The Conversation

By Matthew Kahn, Professor of Economics, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

One official in Xian also accused of doctoring smog data stored on a computer to massage the figures, according to newspaper report

Three environmental officials in northern China have been questioned by the police after air quality tests were allegedly doctored by putting cotton wool in the sampling equipment to filter out impurities, according to a newspaper report.

One official in Xian in Shaanxi province is also accused of manipulating air pollution data stored in a computer, the Huashang Daily reported.

Environmental protection officials around China are under pressure to take measures to improve air quality after the central government announced two years ago that it had “declared war on pollution”.

The allegations of fiddling test results have been made against the director of the Chang’an bureau of Xian’s environmental protection agency, plus the director and deputy director of the air sampling station in the district, according to the report.

The director of the air sampling station sneaked into the station several times to manipulate data on computer after the station moved to part of the Xian University of Posts and Telecommunications, the newspaper said.

The centre is also overseen by the China National Environmental Monitoring Centre and officials became suspicious after a sudden improvement in the quality of the data.
Surveillance footage shot at the Xian monitoring centre was also allegedly deleted as staff knew the watchdog would be visiting, according to the article.

A source with knowledge of the matter was quoted as saying that the director of the station may have feared punishment because of the poor quality of the data collected.

Measures taken to ensure the accuracy of air quality monitoring include sending data immediately to the national environmental monitoring centre.

Monitoring devices are also programmed to detect abnormal results and watchdogs visit sampling centres without advance warning to carry out checks, an employee at the Xian Environmental Protection Agency was quoted as saying.

More than one million Chinese people died from illnesses linked to air pollution in 2012, according to figures from the World Health Organisation.

The Chinese government has been stepping up its efforts to improve air quality in recent years, including setting up a no-coal zone in cities around Beijing next year in an effort to tackle the capital’s notorious smog.

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Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2039838/chinese-officials-questioned-after-cotton-wool-shoved