How can you live in that smog without a full face gas mask? ______ Kids ordered indoors as Shanghai smog reaches extremely hazardous levels Shanghai authorities ordered schoolchildren indoors and halted all construction Friday as China's financial hub suffered one of its worst bouts of air pollution, bringing visibility down to a few dozen meters, delaying flights and obscuring the city's spectacular skyline. Shanghai's concentration of tiny, harmful PM 2.5 particles reached 602.5 micrograms per cubic meter Friday afternoon, an extremely hazardous level that was the highest since the city began recording such data last December. That compares with the World Health Organization's safety guideline of 25 micrograms. link
makes Houston seem so clean :grin: seriously though, its about perspective. houston is much cleaner than its major industrial city counterparts around the globe.
From the article: The dirty air that has gripped Shanghai and its neighboring provinces for days is attributed to coal burning, car exhaust, factory pollution and weather patterns, and is a stark reminder that pollution is a serious challenge in China. Beijing, the capital, has seen extremely heavy smog several times over the past year. In the far northeastern city of Harbin, some monitoring sites reported PM 2.5 rates up to 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter in October, when the winter heating season kicked off. As a coastal city, Shanghai usually has mild to modest air pollution, but recent weather patterns have left the city's air stagnant.
Shanghai is just too attractive of a place to live at for it's own good. The economy and job opportunity there is much better than a lot of the other places in the region. It's got a really good and expanding subway/public transport system. The dinning, shopping, arts, social events and etc. are also awesome. Because of this, there's just too many people who are not native Shanghainese moving there. Of the 23 million people in Shanghai, 9 million are migrant workers. There's also about 800K Taiwanese living there. There used to be regulations and etc. making sure that the migration to a city like Shanghai wasn't too great but I've seen that being more looser over the years. I think it's the right move ethically, but the city itself is just not growing fast enough size-wise. http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/life/shanghai-just-officially-got-bit-more-crowded-096925 http://www.taiwaninsights.com/2013/03/27/third-wave-of-taiwanese-business-people-heading-to-china/
Beijing ain't much better. I was there in the summer and even though there were plenty of okay days, some days looked just like that. Environmental issues are going to slow down their economy. They can't continue the way they're going. On a side note, a lot of this is because we outsourced all of our manufacturing to them. If it wasn't for that, I can easily see our cities having much higher pollution levels.
The US has a regulatory regime in place to keep this from happening - China does not (though laws may be on the books...)
Their source of power for factories and heat is coal. Ours is natural gas and heating oil. That fundamental truth renders all other factors moot. I'm leaving tomorrow night for Beijing and will be in shanghai next week. Already picked out my mask. N100 protection suckas
You would think, but no, this is not the full explanation: China's probably surpassed by now, but the fact that they have pretty much no effective emissions regulation kind of makes a huge-ass difference.
Coal accounts for twice the percentage of electricity generation in China as it does in the United States. Beyond that, millions of people heat their homes with coal in stoves that have nothing to account for the environmental impact. That doesn't really exist in urban america. This goes way beyond the staggering difference in electricity generation.
and those stoves don't have any sort of filter or carbon scrubber. can't control millions of tiny sources.
I wonder how it feels to be out in that all day? I remember a few days in Houston and Austin when the pollution was bad and it made my eyes burn and had me coughing. That air in Shanghai has to burn like hell.
I wasn't breathing it all day, but when I was in Beijing a few years ago, my eyes were watery and each breath felt like being in a dusty old attic except 10-20x worse (I had a mask which I dropped after a stupid dog startled me in a back alley).
Thanks the 'dusty attic' gives me a good idea what it's like there -- add in all the carcinogens and you've got a thick toxic brew.
