NASA Releases Orbital Photos of Beijing's Air Pollution 143
skade88 writes "This story should remind us all that air pollution controls are not just about addressing global warming. They also help us have cleaner air and fewer health problems resulting from smog and haze. Starting earlier this month, Beijing, China started having worse than normal air pollution issues. On January 14, 2013 the U.S. embassy's air pollution sensors in Beijing found the density of the most dangerous small air particles, PM 2.5, at 291 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The World Health Organization's guidelines for air pollution state that PM 2.5 above 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air is dangerous to a person's health. To put the problem into perspective, NASA has released two orbital photos of Beijing showing before-and-during images of the air pollution. The photo from January 4 shows parts of Beijing still visible from space. The photo from January 14 shows nothing but a huge, thick cloud of haze with no buildings visible."
that's what the job killing lines get you stuff (Score:1)
that's what the job killing lines get you stuff like this when you cheap out and just dump stuff out with not paying the costs to clean it up.
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Don't worry, soon they will be able to buy a bankrupt North American and use it for a garbage & pollutants dump.
Re:that's what the job killing lines get you stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
You really need to learn about what exactly bankruptcy entails.
Iceland went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The effects make a good case study.
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penny wise and pound foolish.
give me 'teh shiney!' right now and I want it cheap. the rest be damned.
sadly, I don't think we'll learn our lesson or see the trend. half of the US is global-warming doubters or deniers and there is little sign of any of those people really wising up. most of them are older guys who DON'T CARE since they'll be dead in a decade or two, tops; and they think that they can stick it out this far on our destroyed earth.
the pessimist in me says that we will only realize what we've
Re:that's what the job killing lines get you stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
Landfill is a management issue, not a volume issue.
We could dig a hole a mile to a side, put all are garbage into it and it would be half full in about 700 years at our current rate of growth.
frankly I would have separate holes, for different material so we will have easy access when we figure out how to effectively recycle them.
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Who is "we"?
If it's the US, each person creates about 3.5 pounds of trash per day. Let's make the generous assumption that it compresses to 1kg/l, and feed it into GNU units:
So the total annual US volume is 0.04 cubic miles, and your cubic mile hole (which would be impossible to actually dig, BTW, and pointless too because where would you put the dirt?) would fill up in only 24 years, not 1400 years.
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The US has 3.8E6 square miles of land surface. About 18% of that is arable leaving 3.11E6 square miles of potential landfill. Suppose we close the landfill once the depth is 200 ft. That leaves with a mere 124640 cu miles of capacity. At the current rate of consumption we have over 3 million years left.
The GP is right. Landfills are a political problem.
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The GP was not right. Being off by orders of magnitude is not something to brush off.
The problem may be largely political, but that doesn't mean it's not real. Each potential landfill site is surrounded by about a hundred of square miles of NIMBY, and rightfully so. Landfills stink, and looking at a mountain of garbage topped by swarming seagulls is downright creepy. Nobody wants to live anywhere near that, and they don't want their property values ruined. That's why they find it hard to open any new landfi
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That's what the one closest to me looks like *right now*.
You're probably talking about closed landfills. They don't close until after they've been in use for decades. Yes, there are city parks nearby here built on old closed landfills. Irrelevant.
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Land not being arable != land for a potential landfill.
For an example just off the top of my head, how would you turn a mountainside into a landfill?
I'm sure that there are more examples like this...
And let's say, for argument's sake, you turn all non-arable land into landfill. Where do all of the people build their houses? On a landfill? What about the eco-system?
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Perhaps fill grand canyon? :-D
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I'm not a climate denier or anything like that.
The problem is though that it really doesn't matter what the US does. Developing nations are so inefficient and growing so fast that pretty much anything the US does ins't really going to matter much.
So we are going to run a planetary scale experiment and guess what it may not have that great a result.
After all - biologists know that no organism can live in it's own waste products.
Re: that's what the job killing lines get you stuf (Score:2)
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Yes. Put the resources elsewhere. Where they will actually make a difference. FSM knows we have plenty of problems.
Re:that's what the job killing lines get you stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
That is exceedingly sloppy thinking. Pollution is a problem of combined effects from multiple sources. Your claim that the USA, or Europe, or Japan reducing their respective pollution outputs "won't make a difference" isn't just an overstatement, it is false. EVERY bit makes a difference. The same logic you just used justifies every kind of petty offense in the world.
Collective problems require incremental solutions. Just because you cannot personally observe the effects of every increment doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
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That is exceedingly sloppy thinking. Pollution is a problem of combined effects from multiple sources. Your claim that the USA, or Europe, or Japan reducing their respective pollution outputs "won't make a difference" isn't just an overstatement, it is false. EVERY bit makes a difference. The same logic you just used justifies every kind of petty offense in the world.
Collective problems require incremental solutions. Just because you cannot personally observe the effects of every increment doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
No, he is saying that you should spend your money where you get the greatest affect. Asking for a 5% increase in US output for 5 trillion dollars is a waste if we can get a 80% increase in china for 50 billion. And with developing nations that do not even use basic scrubbers that 80% will account several times the clean up that we can eak out of our own country. So, create the equipment here export and maybe even help fund the process, but if we really care about pollution the US has to stop thinking its
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So we are going to run a planetary scale experiment and guess what it may not have that great a result.
Disclaimer - I'm not an atmospheric scientist.
However, I suspect that this sort of pollution isn't really a global problem. This is soot - horrible for your lungs if you breathe it in, but it falls out in rain and such and won't just circulate all over the globe (at least not down in the troposphere). The acid rain might make it to California, but will be relatively mild and not nearly as bad as the soot, which will likely destroy lungs all over China.
CO2 is the bigger problem globally. The only fix for
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Indeed, clean air and water will be hoarded by the "Al Gore sycophants".
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I wonder, how sick do you have to be to believe that Al Gore has anything at all to do with global climate change?
Re:that's what the job killing lines get you stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Nice try, but no. Beijing isn't that big of a manufacturing center (relatively speaking) - most of the pollution comes from IC engines and (especially important this time of year) the decentralized system of coal powered hot water plants that provides most of the cities heating.
Re:that's what the job killing lines get you stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Relatively speaking?
Have you been outside the 5th ring road? Ive seen factories the likes id never seen in my life. Sprawls of smokestacks just chugging away. Not to mention the fact that DAMN NEAR EVERY RESTAURANT AND MANY HOMES STILL USE COAL.
During the Olympics in 08 they had all the factories shut down for a month prior and seeded the clouds for a week to wash the city and air. Worked wonderfully.
Cars are a problem - and a growing one to say the least - but dont be too quick to discount the manufacturing and a city of 16 million still using coal.
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Frontline did a show on this years ago. They attributed the biggest sources to the use of coal for home heating, and outdated car emission standards. The coal stoves that are ubiqutous are indeed pretty nasty - belching all kinds of soot into the air and EVERYBODY uses them. It is even dirty by coal standards - but REALLY cheap.
Imagine getting a hopper full of coal dumped at your house for $100 and just shoveling a little into stoves in each room from time to time and having it last all winter. The stac
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At what point do the particulates start to cause problems with Internal Combustion?
I can find plenty of information on what it does when humans breath that stuff in (hint: a coal miner is you!) but little on when the engines start to choke on their own output.
Diesel engines can operate on some pretty ridiculous fuel mixtures as long as there is enough oxygen. Considering how nasty oxides can be once mixed into water I'd expect something else in the power train (beyond the operator's lungs) would break
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As long as there is oxygen the soot is just more fuel. Air is 20% oxygen - that's 200,000 ppm. The soot is 800ppm and if they keep that up for any period of time the whole city will die from black lung. If they could actually put up enough soot to displace oxygen half the country would look like Pompeii after about 15 minutes.
Clogged air filters are a different matter. Soot doesn't inhibit combustion so much as gum up the works, which is basically what it does to your lungs.
"meat vacuums" (Score:5, Funny)
In a rather Bender-esque way, the literal translation from Mandarin for its populi (the PM2.5 breathers) is "Meat vacuums", and not in a good way I might add.
H.
Hiding from Space? (Score:5, Funny)
Go go gadget smokescreen!
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How to tell if it's natural or man-made? (Score:1)
Aside from the obvious correlation, there's smog in our Street View and Haze in our spysat, is there any way to tell if the "smokescreen" is natural or man-made? How can one tell a dust storm from smog, cloud formations, or the plumes of a gigantic volcanic eruption? I know from elementary science that clouds are pollution.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc (Score:3)
multi-sensory (Score:4, Insightful)
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``air so thick you can cut it with a fork''...---someone
*Live Better® (Score:2)
For those who don't know (Score:5, Informative)
PM 2.5 stands for particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers.
According to the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] particles of this size cause a broad array of terrible consequences in the body.
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"Also at the time of the image, the air quality index (AQI) in Beijing was 341. An AQI above 300 is considered hazardous to all humans, not just those with heart or lung ailments. AQI below 50 is considered good. On January 12, the peak of the current air crisis, AQI was 775 the U.S Embassy Beijing Air Quality Monitor—off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scale—and PM2.5 was 886 micrograms per cubic meter."
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And considering all the wild bush fires almost all over Australia lately, that just helps show how bad China is.
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Additionally, if you read the article (I know, I know), you'll see that the numbers reported by the U.S. embassy climbed up to 886 micrograms per cubic meter, rather than the 291 micrograms per cubic meter stated in the summary (291 was how bad it was when the pictures were taken by NASA, but that wasn't even when it was at its worst), though both the summary and the article agree that 25 micrograms per cubic meter is the cut-off for where things start to get dangerous. That really puts in perspective just
Also on NPR (Score:3, Informative)
Description of AQI and particulates (Score:1)
Here's a handy chart of Air Quality Index and a description of some of the more noxious substances:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/graphic/2013/jan/15/what-in-beijing-polluted-air
This is deliberate policy. (Score:5, Funny)
iSmog (Score:4, Funny)
nuf sed
Why all the fuss? (Score:1)
Someone just turned off the "Disable fog of war" cheat.
Woh! (Score:2)
Lets just thank god they're burning all that coal rather than risking the remote chance of an accident in some super evil Nuclear power plant.
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Straw man. Coal power plants are not the cause of this. Even if 100% of energy was nuclear it would not make an appreciable difference.
Nice false dichotomy too. China is in fact the worlds biggest investor in renewable energy, and of course has a fair few gas power stations, and in fact IS building many new nuclear plants as well.
It is not pollution, it is obfuscation (Score:2)
ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
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We're not causing them to dump pollution all over themselves. You can't run an industry and keep manufacturing here if your competitors aren't. The hands have been forced - we're not exactly willingly sending all manufacturing over there.
I want good working conditions at the Foxconn plants, and less pollution in China. But I can't vote with my wallet if there's literally nothing left on our shores to vote with. I don't mind living in a global economy, but I don't want the Chinese to be exploited by thei
California's air apparent (Score:1)
It was kinda bad in 2001 (Score:2)
Why China sucks (Score:3)
* It's communist
* Rampant pollution
* The kleptocracy that festers when communism fuses with capitalism
* One-child policy plus a society that devalues women means women are shrinking as a percentage of the population; translation, China is a sausage fest.
But, it's a capitalist's eutopia!
Help? (Score:1)
Worse now that I've seen it in a very long time (Score:3)
A 10 minute walk outside is all it takes for a thin film of talc-like dust to settle all over your clothes/hair/skin. For someone exposed to it for a long time, I would imagine it's akin to working in an autobody shop spray painting cars without a respirator.
The stench of sulfur from burning coal is prevalent since many large housing complexes (and even individual homes) use coal fired boilers to create steam heat in the winter. The government hacks that are profiting handsomely from this situation don't care. Their children and their cash are safely stowed overseas.
I don't see any sign of improvement over the past 7 years other than the temporary cleanup for the Olympics in 2008.
not going to act (Score:2)
Didn't notice anything in September (Score:2)
I stayed in Beijing for eight days in September 2012, and the air quality didn't seem significantly different from any Canadian or American cities that I've visited. I also don't recall seeing anyone wearing face masks.
YMMV.
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What you meant to say is "Nothing to see here, move along."
Good news in disguise (Score:2, Interesting)
China has been dragging its feet on global warming reforms. China has been emphatically objecting to any cut in its produce of green house gases (and other pollutants).
Now that Beijing (and surrounding cities in China) are being blanketed by the thick polluted and toxic fog, the Chinese leadership may be forced to alter their strategy and move away from pollution-generating industries.
Re: Good news in disguise (Score:1)
B.S. China has had horrible air pollution for years. This isn't a new thing. They aren't going to change their minds about global warming issues over this
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citations on any of that?
the pollution part seems to be the only part of your post that is in any way correlated with reality.
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This smog blocks sunlight from reaching the earth, thereby reducing the amount of 'global warming' that is taking place.
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The atmosphere (which the smog is within) is part of the earth so by the time the sunlight reaches the smog it has already arrived. The real question would be if the particles in the smog reflect the light or absorb it as heat.
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Chinese leadership may be forced to alter their strategy and move away from pollution-generating industries
OK, so Chinese leadership are buying new homes further away from the pollution. How does this help China as a whole? :-)
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By generating construction jobs.
Re:Oh snap! (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm from LA, too... I can't remember the last Smog Alert we had.... And when I was a kid, most of the summer was First Stage, with a few Second Stage alerts every year.
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I'm from LA, too... I can't remember the last Smog Alert we had.... And when I was a kid, most of the summer was First Stage, with a few Second Stage alerts every year.
Outsourcing works both ways I guess. China might get the jobs but they also get stuck with the pollution.
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I'm from LA, too... I can't remember the last Smog Alert we had.... And when I was a kid, most of the summer was First Stage, with a few Second Stage alerts every year.
Outsourcing works both ways I guess. China might get the jobs but they also get stuck with the pollution.
I'm fairly sure it wont be long before they trick us into buying it off them.
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I'm from LA, too... I can't remember the last Smog Alert we had.... And when I was a kid, most of the summer was First Stage, with a few Second Stage alerts every year.
Outsourcing works both ways I guess. China might get the jobs but they also get stuck with the pollution.
I'm fairly sure it wont be long before they trick us into buying it off them.
You used to be able to buy LA smog by the can.
Re:Oh snap! (Score:4, Informative)
Not true. They may get the jobs, but we also get the pollution. The planet is a living thing, and things that happen in China don't stay in China.
Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research. [nytimes.com]
China dust storms travel to California [nasa.gov]
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Didn't know that. Do now. Still, is it going to be that thick by the time it gets there?
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So, no need to act on this too terribly quickly.
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Re:The US is no better (Score:5, Interesting)
Smog in some US cities was bad way back in the '70's but nowhere near what it's like in Beijing this month. When you call US environmental conditions "woeful" attached to an article about the pollution going on in China, it really lets your ignorance shine. The US environment isn't perfect, but yes, it is vastly superior.
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Exactly!
It's always amazing when folks of the GPs ilk decry the US and it's environmental stance/views/policies/etc... and yet never once raise a finger or voice about China.
At the end of the day it just demonstrates that most of the most vocal environmentalists who spend so much time attacking the US aren’t so much pro-environment... as they are anti-America... ala the GP.
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Reading that comment made all of us dumber.
You can't protest against China, because China doesn't give a damn about you or anything you say. If you're going to lobby for policy changes, it helps to lobby something you have an actual chance of changing.
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China would care if we could get a backbone and actually stop buying all the cheap products which help produce this level of pollution. Plenty of other countries want to have strong industrial economies and we could work with the more reasonable governments to install EPA like restrictions from the get go. It wouldn't happen over night, but eventually China would be forced to clean up its act as they saw the numbers drop.
Simple explanation (Score:2)
It's easy to see why US environmental conditions should be better. China is a more dense country. There are more people/polluters per square area than in the US. A more meaningful comparison would be between countries or political units with approximate population densities and levels of development, say the US vs. Europe or China vs. India.
Re:The US is no better (Score:4, Insightful)
So you should tell us what bliss feels like.
The EPA has actually made huge strides in the U.S. To the point that big cities which used to have smog constantly and you could see the air are now clear.
There is always room to approve...but if you think we are anywhere near China...you aren't really paying attention.
Re:The US is no better (Score:5, Interesting)
The EPA has actually made huge strides in the U.S. To the point that big cities which used to have smog constantly and you could see the air are now clear.
So, naturally, Republicans want to end the EPA [google.com]. Can't let the hippies win!
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The EPA budget for FY 2013 is $8.6 billion dollars (not including other funding sources like enforcement fines). Many view it as too damn costly for the benefit seen, considering that it overlaps heavily with State functions. It's very reasonable to question this spending when you consider this country is in heavy debt and needs to figure out what can be trimmed from the budget.
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Read the news. The Sequester hits the EPA budget pretty hard.
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/04/13/13greenwire-epa-budget-deal-slams-state-regional-programs-26003.html [nytimes.com]
Of course when you read the article all of a sudden you start wondering whether this was the right priority.
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I didn't necessarily think it should be a high priority, just that it was reasonable to look at their budget and nothing should be off-limits for scrutiny. In reality, the EPA budget makes up less than 1/10 of a percent of the overall federal budget. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total [usgovernmentspending.com]. Or about 1% of the total spending deficit. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown [usgovernmentspending.com]. Really insignificant when you consider the total deficit is 17.5-trillion,
No politician is willing to commit political suici
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No politician is willing to commit political suicide by trying to tackle medicare and social security which are the major spending.
That's not true, Paul Ryan has made a big issue of it. Whatever you may think of the man, he's quite impressive in that way.
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Many view it as too damn costly for the benefit seen,
Mostly tea party types. Considering that 8.6 billion is less than the cost of a single week of all Medicare benefits that those mostly tea party types collect, I'd say the EPA is a bargain.
Why don't we cut out tea party types' Medicare benefits in excess of what they paid in? Now that would really save money.
considering that it overlaps heavily with State functions.
So we could have yet another race to the bottom in standards as various states try to "create jobs" by luring short-sighted business owners from other states with promises of lax regulations.
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Libertarian here who isn't collecting Medicare or any other entitlements
But almost certainly will when old enough, just as Ayn Rand did.
And based on actuarial statistics, will collect far more than was ever taxed.
I agree that's a problem, but that can be fixed by substantially raising the eligibility age to match current lifespans. Eliminating or privatizing Medicare is NOT the way to fix the problem.
and actually sees the actions of the EPA against individual citizens as far more harmful that its cost.
I see the actions of would-be polluters against individual citizens' lungs as far more costly than anything the EPA has ever done. After all, that was the point of this whole artic
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Ok, but you don't get to claim moral superiority because you don't collect entitlements (yet).
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If that pressure is unconstitutional, then we need to revise the constitution. I want "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and EPA helps preserve two of the three. I think liberty should always be subject to restrictions when it effects the life of others.
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Affecting plant and animal populations, even if it's not to the point of extinction can still have effects on the human population. Just look at the bees. There's been a lot of research into that situation, just to save the honey. Not sure if the EPA was ever involved, though.
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I wonder how much of that new-found clean air is actually due to the EPA's actions vs all of the formerly polluting industry moving to China. On the one hand good riddance, but on the other hand the loss of all that industry seems to be causing us other problems...
Re:The US is no better (Score:5, Insightful)
Aaaannndddd there it is.
I propose a new 'law', similar to Godwin and others.
Any discussion pointing out a countries problems will include, within the first 20 comments, a reference to how the USA is worse with regard to that particular problem.
We could call it the 'Dumbfuck Law'.
Re:The US is no better (Score:4, Insightful)
I also like how representatives of other countries point to the issues the US had decades ago, in regards to manufacturing standards, health, labor laws, etc. Sure, there were growing pains, but should you not learn from them? The US was after all at the forefront of industrialization. Should you not vaccinate people, but instead wait until your own scientists learn about invisible bacterial, or about penicillin, or about carbon emissions?
That whole argument is very weak to me.
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US environmental conditions are much better, especially since we decided to offshore our toxic manufacturing needs to China.
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The Feds are nazier than the nazis.
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X is worse than Y. Therefore, Y isn't bad.
Hypocrisy as an argument is great.
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Sounds like something that idiot Michael Moore would say. I propose we call it Moore's Law. Oh wait...
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Re:The US is no better (Score:5, Informative)
US standards are PM2.5 of 15ppm annually and 35ppm over 24 hour average, and regions are considered "non-compliant" and have to take corrective action if they don't meet that. China hit 800ppm on 1/12/13. And you know who's fault that is? China's. Don't even pretend their government is somehow owned by US interests. It's getting closer to the other way around.
So, yes, the US is a HELL of a lot better environmentally. Please do the tiny bit of research it takes before saying stupid shit like that.
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Perhaps Americans should consider improving their own woeful environmental standards before throwing stones at other countries
The US did that in the 70s. We've moved on.
The US government should mind its own business.
Why? When was the last general election for the Chinese head of state? It's an out of control, illegitimate government actively harming its citizens. If the free world just lets it fester, then one day, that might harm the rest of us as well (for example, by providing support for a global tyranny). I consider it good international hygiene to publicize the flaws and weaknesses in such a governments and to pressure it to change.
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i forgot - TFA was penned by the US govt.
idiot.