China’s Massive Pollution Problem

The current environmental situation in China represents what America may have become without the environmental protections enacted by Congress starting in the 70’s and refreshed in the 90’s. In it mad dash to grow economically, China has relied far to heavily on dirty coal as source of fuel for power production, only weakly regulated fuel economy for vehicles, and obfuscated the growing health and social implications until quite recently, and even now only vowing to cut coal consumption 2%.

The effects of ignoring environmental concerns are serious, material, and widely expensive to solve. China’s policy decisions and their horribly obvious detrimental effects should be clear warning to American policy makers who may consider such legislation trivial or worse.

Via Keith Wagstaff at The Week:

How bad is China’s smog?
Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China. The air in some cities there is so bad that, at times, visibility drops to 30 feet, traffic slows to a crawl, and nearly everyone wears masks over their noses and mouths. In Harbin, a city of 11 million people, government officials recently shut down roads, schools, and the airport when air pollution levels hit 40 times the safe limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO). During the “airpocalypse” in Beijing earlier this year, the density of small, lung-penetrating particles reached 993 micrograms per cubic meter — a concentration normally not seen outside of forest fires. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers anything above 300 dangerous, and maxes out its scale at 500. The smog was so thick in Beijing — which English-speaking residents call “Greyjing” — that a factory building burned for three hours before anyone even noticed that it was in flames.

Why is China’s air so polluted?
It’s the result of two decades of runaway economic development unrestrained by strong air-pollution laws, a dramatic increase in car ownership, and China’s overwhelming reliance on coal. China’s cities were filled with bicycles as recently as the 1990s, but thanks to the explosive growth of the middle class, the Chinese now own more than 120 million cars and another 120 million motor vehicles of other kinds. Fuel standards, set by a government committee stacked with oil industry members, have not kept pace. Auto emissions, however, account for only about 25 percent of the problem. Most of the blame rests on coal. China burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined. Despite making large investments in renewable energy, China still depends on coal to meet nearly 70 percent of its power needs. While air pollution is almost always bad in northern China, it really soars after cities turn on their coal-fired collective heating systems for the winter “heating season.” Temperature inversions often trap bad air for days or weeks.

What are the health effects?
They’re widespread and severe. In 2010, air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China, according to a study. Hospitals in Harbin reported a 30 percent increase in patients with respiratory problems after air pollution spiked in the city. Lung cancer rates in China have climbed by 465 percent over the last three decades, despite there being no significant increase in smoking rates. Scientists say the pollution in northern cities is so severe that 500 million people’s lives will be shortened by an average of 5.5 years.

How else is smog hurting China?
It’s damaging the country’s economy. In 2012, smog-related economic losses in four major Chinese cities totaled $1.08 billion, according to a study by Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health. Largely in response to the “airpocalypse,” tourism in Beijing has dropped by 50 percent this year, the Beijing Youth Daily reported last week. The pollution has also hurt efforts by Beijing-based businesses to recruit top foreign talent. More potential employees are demanding hardship pay for having to deal with the city’s awful air quality. With studies connecting prenatal exposure to air pollutants with autism, depression, and long-term lung damage, many foreign and local parents are “second-guessing their living in Beijing,” said family physician Richard Saint Cyr, who is based there.

Are Chinese citizens angry?
Yes, and they are increasingly willing to show it. Chinese netizens this year defied a government ban and began sharing hourly air quality measurements from the U.S. Embassy in downtown Beijing. Microblogging sites like Sina Weibo have served as forums for citizens to express their frustrations with China’s air quality. “Our requirements aren’t high,” posted radio reporter Guo Yazhou. “We just want clean food, clean water, and clean air.” The dissatisfaction has given rise to a growing environmental movement, with 30,000 to 50,000 “mass incidents” of protest every year, according to former Communist Party official Chen Jiping.

Is the Chinese government listening?
The grumbling has become too loud to ignore. This year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang claimed that the country’s smog made him “quite upset,” while the state-run China Daily bluntly referred to major cities like Beijing as “barely suitable for living.” That is a big change from 2011, when the state media referred to China’s choking air pollution with the euphemism “heavy fog.” Now, China says it will spend $817 billion on a plan to drastically cut pollution by 2017. While that might sound like real progress, provincial officials and state-owned businesses in China have a history of ignoring policies handed down from the central government. Critics also note that the new air-pollution plan calls for only a 2 percent reduction in coal consumption — the result of the Chinese coal industry’s powerful influence. Tong Zhu, an air pollution specialist who travels between Princeton University and Beijing, sees political infighting in China’s giant bureaucracy as the biggest impediment to progress. “There is technology available” to fix the problem, he told NPR. “I think as long as there is political willingness, the environmental situation can be drastically improved.”

Fashion-forward protection
Not everybody hates the smog. Companies that make protective face masks are selling millions of them, surpassing records set after the SARS outbreak in 2003. On the streets of Beijing, it’s strange to see someone not wearing a mask, designer Chen Dawei told the South China Morning Post. The result has been a boom in fashion-forward face masks adorned with everything from animal prints to counterfeit designer logos. Wealthy businessmen and government officials are also shelling out for indoor air purifiers, which sometimes sell in upscale showrooms for as much as $3,000. In the first half of 2013, IQAir, a Swiss company, saw sales of its luxury air purifiers triple in China. The trend, however, has bred some resentment from average Chinese families. Their annual income? About $2,100 a year.

 

Get on the Bus

A bus is a much more efficient use of crowded space than a private car,
Photo by Chip East/Reuters

Via Matthew Yglesias at Slate:

Improving bus service—not building new trains—offers the best route to better mass transit.

When it comes to moving large numbers of people efficiently through urban areas, it’s hard to beat good old-fashioned heavy rail subways and metro lines. But these projects come at a steep price, especially in the United States, and don’t make sense in many areas. Yet, politicians looking for cheaper options too often fall for the superficial idea that anything that runs on train tracks must be a good idea. The smarter strategy in many cases is to look instead at the numerically dominant form of mass transit—the humble bus—and ask what can be done to make it less humble.

 

After all, relatively few of the things that make bus travel a low-status option have anything to do with the fact that they run on tires, not rails. The main goal of transportation infrastructure is get people where they’re going.

 

Buses often fall down on the job—not because they’re buses, but because they’re slow. Buses are slow in part because city leaders don’t want to slight anyone and thus end up having them stop far too frequently, leaving almost everyone worse off. Buses also tend to feature an inefficient boarding process. Having each customer pay one at a time while boarding, rather than using a proof-of-payment where you pay in advance and then just step onto the bus, slows things down. That can generate a downward spiral of service quality where slow speeds lead to low ridership, low ridership leads to low revenue levels, and low revenue leads to service that’s infrequent as well as slow. Closing the loop, a slow and infrequent bus will be patronized almost exclusively by the poor, which leads to the route’s political marginalization.

Worst of all, even though a bus is a much more efficient use of crowded space than a private car, it ends up stuck in the same traffic jam as everyone else.

 

The best light rail systems avoid these pitfalls, giving trains dedicated lanes, a sensible way for customers to pay, and stations that are far enough apart that the train isn’t stopping every three blocks. But low-quality rail can have the exact same problems. The much-hyped H Street streetcar line being constructed in Washington, D.C., is beloved by real estate developers, but is going to leave riders with a train stuck in the exact same traffic jams as the existing buses on the corridor. Detroit’s M-1 streetcar project suffers from the same flaw, making it more of an exercise in civic boosterism than a real transportation improvement. But by the same token, it should be perfectly possible to construct bus lines that have the major virtues of light rail and just happen to run on roads rather than rails. This kind of so-called Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) can typically (though not always) be done at substantially lower cost than new rail construction.

 

Montgomery County, an affluent Maryland suburb of D.C. with a strong tradition of anti-sprawl politics, is moving closer to a very ambitious BRT push that if successful should serve as a national model. According to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy’s rating system, only five existing lines in the United States qualify as true BRT and none of them meet the high-end “gold standard” criteria. The current version of the Montgomery plan would create two gold standard corridors, with dedicated busways running in highway medians just as decent light rail lines do. Adding extra concrete to an existing roadway is substantially cheaper than building brand new tracks, so opting for a BRT option will let the county buy more transit bang for its buck.

But the biggest possibility for bus transit wins requires something even more contentious than spending money—repurposing lanes.

Virtually every street in America dedicates the majority of its space to private cars, whether as travel lanes or parking lanes. Far and away the cheapest way to speed the movement of people through congested space is to take some of those lanes away from cars and give them to buses. That will decrease your movement of vehicles, but increase your movement of people since buses are a much more efficient use of space. And it can be done at a fraction of the cost of building new transportation infrastructure from scratch.

Of course the problem is people who drive cars won’t like it—the exact same reason that shiny new streetcar lines are often built to drive in mixed traffic. But public officials contemplating mass transit issues need to ask themselves what it is they’re trying to accomplish. If promoting more transit use, denser urban areas, and less air pollution is on the agenda, then annoying car drivers is a feature not a bug. If the idea is to have a make-work job creation scheme or something cool-looking to show off to tourists, buses may not be the best idea. But while upgraded buses clearly isn’t the right solution for every transit corridor in America, it deserves much more widespread consideration as an affordable path to mass transit.