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Scientists Fear Impact of Asian Pollutants On US
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 02, 2008 05:07 PM
from the please-cover-your-mouth-when-you-cough dept.
from the please-cover-your-mouth-when-you-cough dept.
During the Olympics we discussed the international monitoring effort as China shut down factories and curtailed automobile travel in an attempt to reduce pollution. Now reader Anti-Globalism sends in a story that reveals that monitoring effort to be ongoing, with a bigger mandate: assessing the impact of China's pollution on the US. In fact the problem is bigger still because, as one researcher put it, "It's one atmosphere." Scientists are finding that pollution from, for example, Europe can travel right around the globe in three weeks. "By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the US annually. The problem is only expected to worsen: Some Chinese officials have warned that pollution in their country could quadruple in the next 15 years. While some scientists are less certain, others say the Asian pollution could destabilize weather patterns across the North Pacific, mask the effects of global warming, reduce rainfall in the American West and compromise efforts to meet air-pollution standards."
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Watching China Turn Off the Pollution 427 comments
NewbieV points out coverage of the effort to assess Beijing's air pollution control efforts. Quote from one of the investigators: "This will be a very interesting experiment that can never happen again." Here's the main project scientist's site on the monitoring effort, and Newsweek coverage that brings out a paradoxical effect of reducing pollution on global warming. "Unmanned aerial vehicles are measuring emissions of soot and other forms of black carbon. The instruments are observing pollution transport patterns as Beijing enacts its 'great shutdown' for the Summer Olympic Games. Chinese officials have compelled reductions in industrial activity by as much as 30 percent and cuts in automobile use by half to safeguard the health of competing athletes immediately before and during the games."
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They're not that bad (Score:5, Funny)
Asian pollutants come to the US without a penny in their pocket. Within a year, they usually have a thriving business.
Fortunately (Score:5, Insightful)
... the solution is simple. Just forbid imports from polluting Chinese factories.
US is exporting pollution (Score:5, Insightful)
If you consider pollutants as a consumption issue, rather than as a production issue, then USA, being the largest consumers, should take some of the environmental responsibility too: That electronic gizzmo cost you $100 + your share of environmental "guilt".
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Re:US is exporting pollution (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair to China, America had it's own "setting rivers on fire" stage during our industrial revolution, and that stage lasted decades, no doubt affecting China with our pollution. It's a bit of "pulling the ladder up after us" to insist that China take a harder path than we did during their industrial revolution.
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Re:Environmentalism causes pollution (Score:5, Interesting)
Overregulation is mostly the doing of companies
1)Pollute
2)New regulation
3)Hire lawyer to fight new regulation
4)Lawyer find a loophole in the regulation so one can continue polluting while respecting the
letter of the regulation.
5)Regulators close the loophole, increasing the word count of the regulation.
6)Repeat 4 and 5 100 times
7) Regulations are now 10000 pages long.
8) Complain about the red tape you contributed creating by not obeying the spirit of the regulations in the first place.
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What is already happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course this is nothing new. Not long ago, Japan was "the place that produced cheap crap". Now Japanese labor is relatively expensive and Japan offshore their work. Same thing is happening in Korea and many other places too.
What really has to change to ward of fear of diminished resources is for people to stop linking quality of life with material consumption. When you're starving then it makes sense, but right now obese people outnumber starving people so there is no food shortage, there is a consumption problem. It really needs people to stop using excessive consumption as a pill for their social ills. Getting a new cellphone every year != a high quality of life.
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Pot, meet... (Score:5, Insightful)
kettle.
One Atmosphere, but multiple markets? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is our pollution. If you outsource industry, you outsource the concomitant waste. So do we wash our hands (in increasingly filthy water), or step up to the plate and deal? (A rhetorical question, I know....)
China (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't the US still number one polluter or did China overtake recently? Either way the per capita pollution is still worse in the states by a hefty margin. Talk about being hypocritical.
Re:China (Score:5, Interesting)
GDP is meaningless... Tell me about industrial output and then we can talk.
Not that I doubt China's industrial environmental standards are very lenient, but considering that much of their industrial output is willfully imported by the US and Europe, it's hard to criticize them without getting quite hypocritical.
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please stop the blame game (Score:5, Insightful)
partisans on the left, partisans on the right, nationalists of every nationality...
please shut the fuck up
the earth is our planet, and we must steward it
this applies to you on the left: a hands off attitude to mother gaia is complete bullshit in a world of 6 billion technologically inclined homo sapiens
this applies to you on the right: yes, human activity actually has an impact on our planet's climate, and yes, we must do something about it. we are sorry you are in denial on this subject. please learn to adapt to reality
furthermore, it does not matter who fucked up our environment, it simply matters that we must manage it, all of us. talking about blame is simply a desire to avoid responsibility. we all have the responsibility for our planet
we must must find ways to turn up the thermostat, we must find ways to turn down the thermostat, and then, we must actively do this. we have plenty of time to adjust and anticipate and counteradjust our manipulations. the scaremongers wish to talk about run away processes, but we are very much in the middle of a fluid and forgiving climate model. no atmosphere would have survived this long on earth were it so fragile and susceptile to runaway change. millenia of abuse from volcanoes and sun cycles and life processes has proven our atmosphere to be quite rugged
but not invulnerable, and certainly totally indifferent to our well-being and our need to grow crops. the earth has no problem turning into tundra or desert. but we have a problem with that. so let us actively manage the atmosphere to stay within comfortable parameters. this is of course completely artificial. the natural evolution OR human-made greenhouse gases migth dictate that the atmosphere go to a hellish extreme at some point. who cares WHY it might drift to an uncomfortable fringe state, natural or man-made, are we to simply sit back and suffer and wait for things to get comfortable again in a couple of thousand years?
no. we are mankind. unlike other animals, we do not adapt to our environment. we wear clothes, build huts: we adapt our environment to us. in this way, we conquer the taiga, and conquer the sahara. therefore, we must begin to actively engineer and manage our atmosphere to our liking, to homo sapiens comfort level. which is, pretty much as the climate is right now globally. freeze the status quo for all eternity
who CARES who is to blame, if anyone. active management is simply what we must begin to do. obviously, this should be a world body, something attached to the un. meanwhile, if we simply sit around passing the buck, blaming something else, nothing gets done, and we all go to hell. literally, in the case of climate change
it's not asian pollution (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I frankly think that pollution wafting its way from the PRC to the USA only serves the Americans right, and they I think the chinese should can all their pollution and send it to the states (or whoever else hired them to make te crap in te first place) and be done with it. This is not Chinese pollution. It is american pollution coming home where it belongs.
Don't single out China/Asia (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't single out China/Asia. Countries have a massive effect upon each other. I live in far north Texas, and have seen haze/smoke from fires in central Mexico. I've always felt a large part of Texas's pollution problem is pollutants coming North. I've heard engineers talk about offering sulfer scrubbers to Eastern european coal-power plants to reduce smog here in the US.
Part of the problem is different countries worry about different types of pollution. In the US, we are more concerned about visible/long-term pollutants than invisible/short-term ones. Some other countries are completely unconcerned about things like leaded gasoline, which is still used in many countries but has been out of the US for decades. America has a bad record, but has gotten some things right in the end. Europeans make a big deal about CO2, but many European
beaches have incredibly toxic water, or land which is unfarmable. Thanks to American pollution reforms, life is even returning to New York's harbor [nytimes.com].
Everything is a give/take. People are worrying about energy inefficient bulbs, replacing them with their more efficient fluorescent cousins, but are ignoring the problems those bulbs have with mercury. Or with LED bulbs, gallium aresenide. For example, the life returning to New York's harbor happens to be devouring all of the wooden structures built since they last died off.
Re:not just their pollutants (Score:5, Insightful)
Unsafe cost-cutting isn't just a Chinese thing, you know.
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Re:not just their pollutants (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:not just their pollutants (Score:5, Informative)
Unsafe cost-cutting isn't just a Chinese thing, you know.
It's not cost cutting, it's just ignoring externalities [wikipedia.org].
If you don't care about pollution, then pollution controls are unrelated to costs.
China & other developing countries literally don't care, though China may be coming around.
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Re:not just their pollutants (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah because we all know how very willing USA is to sacrifice anything for a cleaner environment / better world.
Stupid chinese people! Trying to catch up, teh horrorz!
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Re:not just their pollutants (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall a documentary (BBC?) on a Icelandic volcano named Laki some 200 years back which blighted Europe. The show focused on a cloud of volcanic gas and the resultant illness that occurred among rural peasants. The speculation was that this was probably the result of silica in the cloud being breathed by those who worked outside. Similarly the 1815 eruption of Tambora caused the "Year without Summer" with famine among the Swiss, and unique weather reported in Pennsylvania. Pollutants are not in this league, but, they can indeed have world ranging effect.
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Re:This surpises anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:This surpises anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Course... (Score:5, Insightful)
When the Olympics were in Atlanta did they have to shut down every factory for dozens of miles just go go from 100, to 10 times acceptable particulate levels?
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Re:Course... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Course... (Score:5, Informative)
That study had such crap methodology it should be dismissed offhand..
1) Not a year over study, they compared two three back to back to back 4 week periods (not year over)
2) The study covered the five counties around Atlanta which as a whole saw little change in traffic patterns not just the county in which traffic was actually effected.
3) It measured the decrease of 1.8 cases per day via medicade accounting not hospital records
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None of this is not to say that we don't pollute and that car pollution is noxious but to compare what goes on in Beijing to Atlanta is like comparing locking your kid is his basement with giving them a midnight curfew.
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Re:masks? really? (Score:5, Informative)
Or, alternatively, you could understand that different pollutants do different things. Just throwing that out there, you know. Sorta like CO2 absorbing EM waves in the IR band, and particles reflecting light back into space. Not that anyone would know anything about this.
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Re:And what about the USA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your point would be fair if the Kyoto treaty was actually being met by member nations. Most every nation is improving but they are falling far short of their goals which is the stated reason why the U.S. didn't get involved because they knew the standards were too high and could not be reasonably met without serious compromises to profitability.
Before Bush came into office the U.S. had tough emissions controls on manufacturing and power generation facilities. Things have gotten worse since Bush rolled back the regs but they still aren't near as bad as they were in the 50's and 60's when entire lakes were being rendered toxic.
That also said, cars in the U.S. have stricter regulations than in Europe in terms of emissions which is why all the people with truly fast cars have to import them. Of course America has a lot more cars so that is probably why you feel the way you do about our output.
You are right in that acknowledging and investigating global effects of all things we do is a worthy endeavor.
Of course with that said, what about the U.S. energy policy has been hypocritical? Or are you just trolling about an obviously failed foreign policy which is widely condemned inside the country?
The last thing I'll add is that measures are already being taken to improve matters in the U.S. China is not budging on its position and quite clearly sees no need to. I know my home town is cleaner today than it was in the 80's. Here in Arizona Phoenix is getting worse as more and more people move here but outside the valley the air is quite clear and quite healthy which is more than 75% of the state. Arizona is also going to build a rather large solar array just north of here hopefully becoming one of the largest.
A lot of research is being done right here in the valley to help improve conditions, our malls have recharge stations for electric vehicles. The U.S. is hardly standing still, more can and should be done but why agree to benchmarks you know you can't meet?
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