Choking Smog

Choking Smog 1.One of the most popular iPad apps in Beijing at present is China Air Pollution Index, both addictive and disturbing. When I checked into a Beijing hotel recently, I found that – even from the 40th floor – I couldn't see further than one block because of the grey smog enveloping the city. And the AQ level was 250 – about five times the level deemed safe. 2. A few weeks earlier I had experienced Beijing at 350, a level that made my eyes sting and lungs ache, even inside a car. Back in January it went as high as 1,000, at which point the US embassy urges people to remain indoors with the windows shut. 3.One study, published in The Lancet medical journal last year, suggested that air pollution might have caused about 1.2m premature deaths in China in 2010 alone – a considerable figure even for a country of 1.3 billion people. Beijing has registered a 60 per cent rise in lung cancer cases in the past decade. 4.With pollution that bad, otherwise innocent sights take on a sinister aspect. Ma Jun, a prominent environmental activist, says that on days when the smog envelops the city he winces when he sees children playing football outdoors. Indeed many schools, foreign and Chinese, now forbid kids from playing outside on bad days. 5.Pollution in China is now so bad that it threatens to obscure the vision being laid out by Xi Jinping, the new president. Mr. Xi has popularized the idea of a "Chinese dream", which seems to involve increasing wealth at home and increasing power abroad. 6.But the choking smog suggests that the leadership needs to rethink its national goals. After all, what is the point of rapid economic growth if it creates cities in which it is dangerous to breathe? 7.In recent decades, the government has derived its legitimacy from growth. Officials speak with justifiable pride about the hundreds of millions of people who have been lifted out of poverty. Yet the pollution problem suggests the leadership needs urgently to adopt "greener" measures. It is not just the air. The rivers are often polluted by industrial waste, and the country has had a series of food-safety scandals. 8.Local leaders and businesspeople also need to change direction. For the past 30 years, every provincial governor with an eye on a big job in Beijing knew that they would be judged by the local growth rate. Persuading them that they should now care as much about their city's air quality will be difficult when their personal and political fortunes are still tied to increasing the rate of economic expansion. 9.Some of the necessary environmental measures are fairly obvious. Insisting on cleaner fuel for cars and stricter emission standards for factories and power stations is crucial. But enforcing those rules will involve facing down powerful interests in the state-owned energy and power companies. 10.If nothing is done, the problem will certainly worsen. Coal-fired power stations continue to open at a great pace and the number of cars on the roads is projected to quadruple by 2030. The latter is, of course, part of the Chinese dream of rising affluence. But personal fulfillment threatens to create a collective nightmare. 11.China can take some comfort from the fact that notoriously polluted cities elsewhere, such as London and Los Angeles, have been cleaned up. But the task for Beijing will be particularly tough. Mr. Ma, the environmentalist, says: "London's problem was coal and LA's problem was cars. We have both." 12.Now the government releases figures about air qualities in real time, which people can check on their phones as they move around the city. Indeed, the desire for cleaner air and water is everybody’s dream. And it is high time that we made more efforts to get there.