Beijing Is On Red Alert, Chops Car (Access) In Half

The nice people at Marketplace, who provided the above photo, have a fun website where you can put Chinese smog on your favorite city. Thankfully, most American cities haven’t had a smog problem in the 21st century. Beijing, on the other hand, is experiencing the proverbial terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

For the first time in its history, Beijing is on “red alert” for smog. The city has proven tactics that can address the issue; in order to have blue skies for a military parade earlier this year, an “Even-Odd” policy was adopted to restrict cars entering the city to odd or even days based on their registration. “Hundreds” of factories were also shut down for up to two weeks. The result: the desired “blue sky” — which disappeared more or less the moment the restrictions were eased.

Part of the problem has to be China’s standards for diesel fuel. They implemented Europe’s 2005 standards for sulfur content in diesel fuel in 2014. Come 2017, they’ll need to be at 10 ppm, which is where Europe and America largely were by 2007. Combine this with Beijing’s infamous permanent traffic jams, and it’s no wonder that there’s a problem. Even Paris has had to deal with the effect of diesel passenger vehicles in the city. The millions of two-stroke engines, most of them in scooters, probably don’t make things any better.

If you’re in the mood for some unintentional hilarity, you can prowl through various articles on Gawker, Salon, et al and be lectured by the commenters on how things were just this bad or worse in the United States back in 1923 or whenever and how we shouldn’t expect the Chinese to have modern air quality or modern environmental regulations and how they should only be held to the standards of the Industrial Revolution. Most of these same people would blow their aortas out of their chests if you suggested that Foxconn assembled the iPhone in any conditions other than absolute clean-room perfection with a million people singing in squeaky-clean harmony. Oh well. If you want China apologia in these pages, use your Chinese-made computer to invent time travel, return to 2012, and your every wish will be fulfilled.

It’s worth noting that China’s cavalier willingness to poison its population in the name of unfettered profit is part of the reason why General Motors has used American taxpayer dollars to complete its pivot to that part of the world. It’s also part of the reason that GM can easily produce the upcoming Buick Envision in China; doing it in America would just be too much hassle. Building new factories in the United States? Don’t be silly. We have entire arms of the government devoted to making that impossible. We also have clean air. Which is nice, because you need clean air to survive. Most of us, however, also need a job to survive. Figure out how to balance those demands, and you’d be a better Presidential candidate than any of the lineup before us today.