China, the world’s most prodigious emitter of greenhouse gas, continues to suffer the downsides of unbridled economic growth despite a raft of new environmental initiatives.
The quality of air in Chinese cities is increasingly tainted by coal-burning power plants, grit from construction sites and exhaust from millions of new cars squeezing onto crowded roadways, according to a government study issued this week. Other newly released figures showed a jump in industrial accidents and an epidemic of pollution in waterways.
The report’s most unexpected findings pointed to an increase in inhalable particulates in cities like Beijing, where officials have struggled to improve air quality by shutting down noxious factories and tightening auto emission standards. Despite such efforts, including an ambitious program aimed at reducing the use of coal for home heating, the average concentration of particulates in the capital’s air violated the WHO’s standards more than 80 percent of the time during the last quarter of 2008.
“China is still facing a grave situation in fighting pollution,” Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection spokesman Tao Detian (陶德田) told the China Daily newspaper.
The ministry said the number of accidents fouling the air and water doubled during the first half of this year, with an average of 10 each month. The report also found that more than a quarter of the country’s rivers, lakes and streams were too contaminated to be used as drinking water. Acid rain, it added, has become a problem in nearly 200 of the 440 cities it monitored.
In recent days, the state media have provided a grim sampling of the country’s environmental woes, including a pipeline explosion that dumped thousands of gallons of oil into the Yellow Sea, reports of a copper mine whose toxic effluent killed tonnes of fish in Fujian Province and revelations that dozens of children were poisoned by lead from illegal gold production in Yunnan Province.
Two weeks ago, the state media reported on thousands of residents in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region who clashed with police as they protested against unregulated emissions from an aluminum plant.
Beijing’s Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs director Ma Jun (馬軍) said many of the government’s efforts to curtail pollution had been offset by the number of construction projects that spit dust into the air and the surge in private car ownership.
In Beijing, driving restrictions that removed a fifth of all private automobiles from the road each weekday have been offset by the addition of 250,000 new cars that hit the city streets in the first four months of this year.
Many of the most polluting industries were forced to relocate far from the capital before the 2008 Summer Olympics, but winds often carry their emissions hundreds of kilometers back.
“We’re at a stage of unprecedented industrialization, but there have to be better ways to handle the problem,” said Ma, whose organization maintains a registry of environmental scofflaws. “Sometimes it’s painful to look at the data.”
A particularly hot summer has added to uncomfortably high pollution levels in Beijing.
Even if they are fond of griping about bad air, Beijing residents have learned to take it in stride. Looking wilted amid the heat and haze on Wednesday, Wang Dong, 34, a livery-cab driver, said he tried to counteract the smog by eating more vegetables and drinking more water. Annie Chen, 26, a sales clerk, revealed a tactic she had learned on a Taiwanese variety show: Apply an extra layer of makeup to protect the skin from contaminated air.
Then there was Zhang Hedan, 46, a street vendor who was fanning his flushed face with a piece of paper.
“Maybe it will blow away the dust,” he said hopefully. Then he had another thought: “Well, maybe that’s not so effective, but at least I feel better psychologically.”
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS