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Cars a threat to green Olympics

Scores of highly polluting cars are fouling the air in China's capital and threaten to undermine Beijing's promise of a clean and green Olympic Games next summer, state media said yesterday.

"Beijing's air quality is still not within the requirements of the green Olympic Games," Shi Hanmin (史捍民), director of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, was quoted as saying in the China Daily newspaper.

Shi said the city has 300,000 highly polluting automobiles -- each one spitting out emissions equal to the exhaust produced by 14 cars that meet EUIII (current EU emission standards).

According to the Beijing Municipal Traffic Management Bureau, the city had 2.87 million registered motor vehicles at the end of last year.

The China Daily report did not specify if the high-emission cars were fueled by diesel or gasoline, but most taxis run on gasoline, with some powered by liquefied natural gas.

Beijing will remove more than 60,000 high-emission taxis from the streets and equip 10,000 buses to run on clean fuel ahead of the 2008 Summer Games, Shi was quoted as saying.

But, he said, the city had hit a bottleneck in its battle to clean its air.

"The capital has implemented almost all the measures it could possibly adopt," Shi was quoted as saying.

The report quoted him as saying that the city had asked for help from the nearby city of Tianjin and the surrounding provinces of Hebei and Shanxi in controlling trans-boundary air pollution, but did not give specific details.
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