Shadow Over China's Boom

San Jose Mercury News ^ | June 17, 2007 | By John Boudreau

[JACKRUSSELL]

BEIJING - A pale orange sun hangs low over the evening rush hour, a brake-light procession of Mercedes, matchbox-size taxis and accordion-style buses that cuts through a canyon of skyscraper construction cranes.

On this spring evening, as on most days, this city of 15 million souls is wrapped in a churning brown gauze of foul fumes and gritty dirt.

"It's a pretty strong cocktail of dust particulates, industrial and automotive pollution," observed Jeremy Goldkorn, a 12-year Beijing resident and Internet entrepreneur. "It's something a lot of expatriates, especially people from Northern California, find very difficult. You blow your nose and what comes out is black."

For China, the 21st century holds boundless possibilities. The awakening economic giant could surpass anything that has come before it. But China is also an environmental time bomb.

Its polluted air is not only choking its citizens but also spreading 6,000 miles across the Pacific, giving Californians - even those with no other ties to China - a personal stake in that country's exploding environmental crisis.

Microscopic soot particles belched from coal-fired plants across the ocean are settling in Sierra Nevada snowpacks. Low levels of mercury from those plants are showing up in soil and water. And dust from expanding deserts in China and elsewhere in Asia can be found in the air high above the state.

Pollution migration is not new - Europeans, for example, get it from the United States. And the current levels of pollutants from Asia do not pose an urgent health or environmental threat. But experts worry about the potential increase of emissions from China as the world's fastest-growing economy continues to expand. At the very least, pollution from China will add to the cost and difficulty of cleaning up California's skies.

[JACKRUSSELL]

Children play on a street near the Beijing Jing Nen Electricity Company, which is located in the Northeast part of Beijing, China. It's one of the few coal fired power plants remaining in the city, due to efforts of the Chinese government to clean up Beijing's air before the 2008 Olympics. April 3, 2007. (LiPo Ching/San Jose Mercury News) ( LiPo Ching )

Prospective apartment home buyers ask questions about new housing complexes during a housing convention at the Shanghai International Convention Centre, in Shanghai, China on April 14, 2007. (LiPo Ching/San Jose Mercury News) ( LiPo Ching )

The remnants of one of Beijing's Hutong (residential alleyways lined with Siheyuan - a four-walled courtyard home) along Yongdingmenhei Dajie in Beijing, China on April 10, 2007. A report by the China News Service in 2006 said that the number of remaining hutongs only numbered around 400, compared to over 3,000 in the 1980s due to Beijing's effort to create a modern city of high-rises. (LiPo Ching/San Jose Mercury News) ( LiPo Ching )

  

[sweetiepiezer]

Thanks for your dedication Jack.

Peipinging others.

[Carbonsteel]

Kyoto, KYOTO!!!

Oh, wait, there aren't any provisions for China to curb its waste in the Kyoto protocols.

[shield]

bfl

[alloysteel]

I love the smell of coal smoke in the morning....

The beautiful picture of industrialization going apace, reminding the world of what the River Rouge Ford plant once was.

The River Rouge plant site has been totally redeveloped since its glory days of the post-WW I days, of course. But it was the site of the first totally integrated site for the building of automobiles, from foundries that forged the steel that built the famed “Flivver”, to the lines that made the tires (yes, Ford once made their own tires in-house, look it up), to the finished product that rolled off the lines and into waiting barges on the Rouge River, where the product was shipped world-wide.

[mom4kittys]

[BradyLS]

Pic 3: “If you aren’t careful, someone is going to eat your lunch!”