As I never tire of mentioning, the big opportunity -- and challenge -- of the Obama Administration's interaction with China is finding ways for the countries to work together on climate, energy, and pollution issues. The countries are two of the main sources of the problem, as the two leading emitters in the world. And they're two of the main sources of solutions, China with its manufacturing ability and the U.S. with (we hope!) its R&D.
I am not equipped to judge how the slew of clean-energy initiatives prepared for approval at the Hu-Obama meeting will turn out in practice -- which ones are serious, which ones are for show. That's what I'll be asking my expert friends in the next while. But if you were wondering what US-China "cooperation" might mean in practice, here's a list of seven joint initiatives, announced today in Beijing. Convenient summary highlight below, with links that open up fact-sheet PDFs:
I'll be asking my experts which of these is most plausible. Let's hope the answers begin, "Well, quite a few of them are... "
November 14, 2009
Here's why the China trip matters
Nearly thirty years after he left office, the most important achievement of Jimmy Carter's time as president was his cementing the relationship with China that had begun under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. (Second-most important: Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt. Third: showing that it was possible, at least for a while, to increase the energy efficiency of cars, buildings, power generation, and industry within the US.)
Thirty years from now, the most important aspect of Barack Obama's interaction with China will be whether the two countries, together, can do anything about environmental and climate issues. If they can, in 2039 we'll look back on this as something like the Silent Spring/Clean Air Act moment in American history, which began a change toward broad environmental improvement. If they can't....
Today the Asia Society's "China Green" project ran a full-page ad in the New York Times -- good to see support for the print media! -- and launched another online display dramatizing why such cooperation matters. This one is called On Thinner Ice and documents the accelerating disappearance of the glaciers on the Tibetan plateau that feed nearly all the major rivers of Asia. (Previous Asia Society displays on this topic here.) Sample clip from the display:
For an earlier project by Michael Zhao of "China Green," documenting air quality in Beijing in the year leading up to the Olympics, see this discussion and the Olympic-air site, here. A week ago, according to the BejingAir Twitter feed (background here and here) the city's air quality was in the almost-unbelievable "hazardous" range. My friends in Beijing say that the skies are fresh and blue today, hours before Obama's arrival. Good! Every non-polluted day is a victory. But let's hope the two sides concentrate on cleaning up for the long run.
The pictures below are from an extremely powerful exhibition by Lu Guang (卢广), a Chinese photographer, about pollution and its effects in his home country. His photos have just won a major prize from the Asia Society. While not all of China looks like what he has depicted, I have seen things exactly like what is shown in these photos, and so has anyone else who has traveled outside the big cities or visited factories and mines. Two samples from Lu Guang's work: a power plant in Inner Mongolia, then a migrant laborer in the coal regions of Shanxi province.
These are pictures to bear in mind the next time you read a "China is an unstoppable superpower with an ability to solve all problems" story; it's worth emphasizing, as I have here and elsewhere, that there is tremendous pressure within China to change course environmentally for the survival of its own people.
Many pending messages in the queue with more info about the measurable health effects, for foreigners and Chinese citizens, of China's environmental situation. Will get to them in due course. Thanks to many people who have sent in notes about the Lu Guang photos.
October 21, 2009
I don't know the author, but...
... I am biased in favor of this book:
Chris and Monique Fallows are a naturalist-photographer team based in Cape Town, South Africa, who produce documentaries and conduct adventure trips in hopes of protecting marine life, especially sharks. I don't know them, but there are not that many of us with the same name, so we have to stick together. I bought one of their books when I saw it at the bookstore of the wonderful Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town several years ago. I'll get this new one too. Maybe they'll do the same for mine!
First-hand experience with Chinese air, pro and con
Following this item yesterday, about this article in the current issue on the health effects of living in China, good-news and bad-news reports from American friends with long experience in Asia.
First, the bad news.
"I check the BeijingAir Twitter every time I'm headed there for work. I thought I'd report an anecdote from a friend who has worked in China since the 1970s and lived there for many years (though moved back partly to raise children in a more healthy environment!). She had MRIs performed on her lungs some time ago and they indicated significant scarring and other damage, despite the fact that she has never been a smoker. She has never complained of any symptoms or health problems but clearly some damage was done."
FWIW, I heard similar stories from a variety of people who had been in and out of China since the 1980s, but I don't know of any systematic data. Maybe I'll have another data point two weeks from now, when my appointment with my own doctor for a welcome-home physical exam finally rolls around. Only has taken three months to get on his schedule! Good thing we don't have Canadian-style socialized medicine in this country, what with its long waiting lists and rationing-by-delay etc.
Now, the better news:
"We were back in China for a couple of weeks this past summer to visit my former students in Beijing and then to travel in Hunan for a week or so. I think the air has improved. It was mostly blue skies, even in Beijing, which I rarely saw when we lived there for 10 months in 2003-04. I think you are right to conclude that expats do get over the problems once they leave. At least we haven't had lasting health problems -- at least not yet."
As a side note, based on my experience anyone who wants to visit Beijing in particular should go in October. Even though the current BeijingAir Twitter reading is deep into the "unhealthy" zone, this seems reliably the nicest time of the year.
October 20, 2009
The air over there
In the new issue of the magazine (subscribe!) I have a short article about a topic I discussed constantly with Chinese and foreign friends over the past few years: how dangerous it is, really, just to live in China. To breathe the air, drink the water, eat the food. Won't spoil the suspense about conclusions in the article itself. But the note below is from a reader whose experience is similar to mine:
"I just returned to the US after a four-year tour in Shanghai. I major reason for returning was that I knew that living over there was terrible for my health. I always told myself that I couldn't live in that poor environment for five years. Aside from the terrible air quality, I did four stints in hospitals for food poisoning.
"But since I have been back, I have found that recovery has been easier than expected. I am now running about four to six miles four times a week. I think it may have been like living at high altitudes - you body gets used to being deprived of oxygen and becomes more efficient.
"Plus, just having the space and good weather adds to the motivation. As I am sure you know."
For perspective, here is today's real-time air pollution map for the US, emphasizing the dangerous small-particulate pollution (PM2.5) plus ozone (O3). Green "good" areas have readings below 50; the yellow "moderate" areas are 51-100; and the little spot of orange "unsafe for sensitive groups" air, near Pittsburgh, is 101-150. Maybe they're reopening the steel works? Most times when I look at this map, it's virtually all green.
Meanwhile, readings earlier today from Beijing, taken by the clandestine "Beijing Air" monitoring station I describe in the article:
The point is that the Chinese readings would be in the red "unhealthy" (151-200) or magenta "very unhealthy" (201-300) zones if they were mapped. Like anyone in Beijing, I've breathed my way through a large number of purple "hazardous" days, with readings over 300.
For the benefit of Chinese readers, let me say for the millionth time that to stress this comparison is not to put down China's successes, underestimate the difficulties of dealing with these problems, deny that a high-pollution phase is part of every move toward industrialization, etc. China's situation is tough, and a lot of forces within the country are working to improve it, as laid out at length here. Instead it's worth emphasizing that the people of China themselves are the ones with most at stake in improving its environment. And because of global effects of climate, as I've also said a million times, it's crucial for the US and China, the two biggest-emitting countries, to work together on energy and pollution issues. Indeed, this is the historically most important business for the two countries to take up.
In the meantime, it's a nice day in DC, so like my correspondent I'll plan to take another run.
October 5, 2009
Press items roundup
- TNR/McCaughey watch. As mentioned here numerous times, starting 14 years ago, The New Republic made Elizabeth McCaughey a public figure in 1994 and has been trying to mitigate the damage ever since. Concluding installment, under the circle-closing headline "No Exit" [also the title of McCaughey's original article], from Michelle Cottle here.
- Unknown gigantic cities watch. In my story last year about the surprisingly intense struggles within China to improve environmental protection, I mentioned a visit to Zibo, a coal-and-ceramics center in Shandong province. Zibo is one of countless cities in China that few outsiders have heard of but that are larger than, say, Chicago or Milan. The always interesting Moving Cities site, a Beijing-based effort to document urban design in fast growing cities, recently took a trip to Zibo to show what it looks like. Description and four photo essays about Zibo can be found here. (Note: for me, the Javascript on this site always stalled with Firefox. Worked OK with IE, Chrome, and Safari.)
Downtown view, with housing from the 1980s onward -- horizontal black bar is part of the site's convention for presenting photos:
On the way into town:
Alley that I've walked down myself, with pre-1980s housing:
- Problems of the press watch. I am grateful to Jake Seliger, of The Story's Story site, for a retrospective of my 1996 book Breaking the News. He makes the discouraging but, I think, accurate point that the arguments and criticisms from back in that era are all truer now. I have thought several times about revising or updating the book but have held back for two reasons. One is the shark-like instinct that it's worth always moving ahead to new territory. The other, that the central points to make remain the same; the details would differ and be more depressing.
July 26, 2009
Climate pushback #2 (of 2)
After the jump, excerpts from a few more readers with thoughts to add, in response to this and this, about the notorious famed "hockey stick" chart and the general state of the climate-change debate.
I'll let these speak for themselves -- and also let them wrap up the discussion in this space for the time being.
But a note about a point that could use re-assertion What attracted me to Richard Muller's book "Physics for Future Presidents" and still does, despite varied complaints about parts of its argument, is that it tries to do something that too few experts and specialists bother with. It attempts to explain the way scientists approach complex issues of public policy. How they weigh evidence. What they're skeptical of and convinced by. How they think about data that never perfectly fits -- and how they try to discern general trends even when particular details are messy. I was using this in contrast to a George Will column breezily asserting that a decade of flat temperatures (a claim that itself is disputed, to put it mildly) said something significant about longer-term climactic trends.
How many other experts even try to do this? Explaining their manner of thinking -- which is more valuable than their judgment on any particular point? Rather than simply asserting that they are right on the basis of their expertise. Historians Richard Neustadt and Ernest May -- both unfortunately now dead, both men I admired greatly when taking their classes -- notably did so in their book Thinking in Time, which tried to explain how historical analogies could inform -- mislead. I have not yet read Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think, but the title is certainly promising in this sense. I have read The Art and Science of Politics, by Harold Varmus, and it's a fine example of this approach. Atul Gawande's justly celebrated New Yorker report (on why medical costs were so much higher in one Texas city than another) was great because he applied his knowledge as a physician to explain how other doctors did their work. The Galbraiths -- John Kenneth, and now his son James, especially with Predator State -- earned the suspicion (and envy) of many fellow economists by trying to explain what was right and wrong about economic reasoning to lay readers. To avoid the risk of offending by omission, I'll stop here (rather than talking about lawyers, engineers, biologists, teachers, etc.
The entire purpose of Richard Muller's book was to convey how people trained in the hard sciences make their way through the contradictory signals from the real political world. That is worth noting, no matter what you think about his view on the "hockey stick."
J. Bradford DeLong, of the once-proud edifice known as UC Berkeley, has provided as much info as any reasonable consumer might want on the global-warming "hockey stick" fracas. His post is not 100% flattering to moi-meme, but he gets extra points for working in frog references and for an account of an actual discussion with his UCB colleague Richard Muller. A fact-check on the recent claim from Al Gore's camp, too. It's all here.
Promised second climate-pushback dispatch later on.
Climate pushback #1, from Al Gore's office and others
I will try to do this in two omnibus posts, rather than opening up a running weeks-long discourse. After all, that treatment is reserved for frogs, the China Daily, "starchitecture," and similar topics, of which there is more in the pipeline.
But in response to two recent items, here and here, on how to think about climate change, I have received a ton of email, all in one mode: ie, telling me I am wrong.
The original reason I raised the topic was that I'd seen the latest entry in George Will's ongoing series on why global warming is a myth. In response, I mentioned a book by a UC Berkeley physicist about how to assess the evidence on climate change, and why the problem was indeed worth worrying about, if not for the reasons most often discussed.
My correspondents barely bothered to deal with Will. They were instead upset about the physicist, Richard Muller, and by extension me for being too complacent about climate-change evidence -- and too critical of those (including Al Gore) who had warned about it most prominently.
Below and after the jump, representative samples of this view. Later tonight, I'll put up a few more messages, and the appropriate meta-thoughts on my part. Unless I hear from Muller, or something else occurs, that will be it for now -- simply because I am well aware that detailed argument over studies, policies, and implications already occupies many sites full time. (For instance, this and this, with different perspectives.)
First up, Joseph Romm, of the Climate Progress site and the book Hell and High Water, whom I have known for years. Because he wrote me privately, I won't go into his views of my judgment or Muller's. But here are the references he thinks people should instead read:
-Romm has written two critiques of Muller's book, here and here.
-According to Romm, "The 'hockey stick,' was essentially vindicated by the National Academy of
Sciences, and it is almost certainly correct." Cite here.
- "Gore's essential argument is correct and other than a very few technical
quibbling with word choice, pretty every one on his major carefully crafted
statements is accurate. His Nobel Prize will, sadly, be vindicated by
history." [Note from JF: 'An Inconvenient Truth' also included a particularly egregious display of boiled-frog madness, which maybe we will assign to the realm of "technical quibbling with word choice." Ie, if he had said, "if you remove a frog's brain and put him in a top of tepid water, then gradually raise the temperature..." he'd be square with the scientists.]
The point of the previous item about how scientists think about public policy, which referred to Richard Muller's book Physics for Future Presidents, was that many scientific issues are too complex to be resolved in op-ed columns. Or even Atlantic website posts!
But several people have asked for elaboration of this sentence I quoted from Muller:
"An example of distortion is the melting of the Antarctic ice --
something that actually contradicts the global warming model but is
presented as if it verifies them."
What's the logic there? My main answer is, read the book! But to be more responsive, here's the reasoning in a nutshell (my paraphrase, alongside USGS map of Antarctica):
Higher temperatures (ie, "global warming") would mean more evaporation from the oceans. That would mean more clouds, which over Antarctica would mean more snow. (The air over Antarctica would be warmer, but on average still well below freezing.) More snow would mean more Antarctic ice, not less. Yet the Antarctic ice cover is decreasing, not increasing.
"Does the decrease in ice mean that the model is wrong -- that global warming is not taking place?" Muller asks. "No, not at all. It simply shows the inadequacies of the model. Even with global warming, local weather (even for a whole continent) can cause behavior that deviates from the computer calculation. One result is certain: the melting of Antarctica provides no evidence whatsoever in favor of global-warming predictions." He then goes on to discuss other evidence that does support the predictions. To be 100% clear about it: Muller is not at all a "denialist" about climate change. Eg: "Global warming is real. It is very likely caused by humans. By the end of the twenty-first century it will (if caused by humans) grow enough to be disruptive." He is just urging readers and policy makers to be precise about what the evidence shows and doesn't show.
You know where to go for more.
UPDATE: this site, from NASA, allows you to create your own maps showing how much the average temperature in different parts of the world has risen over any interval you choose since 1880. For instance, this map, below, shows surface temperature differences in June, 2009 versus a 1951-1980 average baseline:
More here from Michael Goodfellow of Free the Memes.
July 23, 2009
Compare-and-contrast reading on climate change
This morning George Will offered another in his series of reassuring columns about the "overstated" threat of climate change. Today's version:
"When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called
upon 'young Americans' to 'get a million people on the Washington Mall
calling for a price on carbon,' another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: 'If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult
life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global
warming since you entered first grade.'
"Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful
clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S.
government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the
sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a
closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was
dying."
Will presented the lack of youthful clamor as a sign of wholesome common sense. If you would like another way to think about the evidence, this one provided not by a columnist but by a physicist at UC Berkeley who has won a MacArthur grant, I recommend Richard A. Muller's book Physics for Future Presidents. I happened to read most of it on a long plane flight yesterday, so I was all set for Will's column today. So you can be ready before his next one appears, I recommend ordering the book now.
Muller is not at all in the most-alarmist group of climate scientists; indeed, he spends a lot of time explaining why he thinks Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth exaggerated the threat in several ways. You can see the beginning of his dissection of Gore's famous "hockey stick" chart of rising temperatures, which begins on page 292 of Muller's book, through a Google book-search excerpt here. (The hockey stick, below)
Muller says that the evidence behind the hockey-stick chart is wrong. (Read it yourself to see why.) "In fact, much of what the public 'knows' about global warming is based on distortion, exaggeration, or cherry picking," he says, adding:
"An example of distortion is the melting of the Antarctic ice -- something that actually contradicts the global warming model but is presented as if it verifies them. Exaggeration includes the attribution of Hurricane Katrina to global warming, even though there is no scientific evidence that they are related. Cherry picking is the process of selecting data that verify the global-warming hypothesis but ignoring data that contradict it."
The real purpose of his book is to set out as clearly as possible the way scientists approach the inevitably-conflicting evidence on big public policy issues like climate change (or the real risks of terrorism, or dealing with nuclear waste). Before the Iraq war, it would have been useful for intelligence officials to set out the way they balance their version of inevitably-conflicting and always-incomplete facts. Muller sets out the way climate scientists weigh the evidence pro and con concerning climate change and the probabilities for each explanation.
By the end of the process he has forcefully re-established the principle that real scientists view propositions as most convincing when all the doubts, caveats, and contrary bits of evidence are admitted -- whereas politicians and the public want to hear an all-or-nothing verdict with no hems or haws. Consistent with this approach, it is all the more powerful when Muller concludes that there really are reasons to worry about man-made climate change. He also provides guidelines about sensible and fanciful ways to deal with the problem. I am not equipped to judge this argument on purely scientific grounds; but the book is addressed to lay readers and is convincing in what it says about the process of scientific reasoning. If this latest George Will opus serves to drive readers to Muller's book, it will have done some good.
July 12, 2009
Atlantic interview with Eric Schmidt
As part of the series of shortish interviews of big shots by Atlantic staffers at the Aspen Ideas Festival, our they-never-sleep web team has posted this Q-and-A between me and Eric Schmidt of Google:
July 8, 2009
Cornucopia of updates #1: "regreening"
Last week I mentioned the impressive and even (somewhat) encouraging presentation by Thomas Lovejoy and David Hayes at the Aspen Ideas Festival, on the topic of "regreening." Their argument was that the earth's own natural biological processes could do a lot more to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere, if forests, wetlands, agricultural areas, and even deserts were protected and managed in a different way.
Via Lovejoy, here is a link to the PDF of a new 68-page report from the UN Environment Programme (sic), that goes into the hows, whys, and at-what-costs of "biosequestration" -- that is, improving the natural ecosystem's ability to absorb carbon. Interesting and worth reading, and again at least somewhat encouraging. Its exec-summary begins this way:
After the jump, a reader's response on the importance of having people like David Hayes inside the federal government. (He is now the #2 official at the Department of Interior.) We take our encouragement where we can find it. ___
On Wednesday morning, before a chaos of other obligations, I heard yet another panel on impending climate-change disasters, but this one left me strangely less despondent than some of the others. The speakers were Thomas Lovejoy, a long-time biodiversity expert, and David Hayes, who has recently become the #2 official in the Department of Interior.
Lovejoy's presentation began with a reminder of all the bad things that are happening to wildlife, to biodiversity, to life in the ocean, etc as CO2 levels in the atmosphere go up, taking temperatures with them. But then, in the pivot to the "you don't have to jump out the window just yet" part of the presentation, he emphasized how huge a role the Earth's own natural processes and vegetations -- its forests, grasslands, wetlands, even deserts -- can play in absorbing much larger quantities of carbon from the atmosphere than they do now and thereby reducing the greenhouse effect, if they are protected and managed in a different way. He called this process "Re-Greening the Emerald Planet," and he supplied several charts (which I don't have) to show how powerful the effect could be.
He tied this analysis to perhaps the most frequently-used chart in modern climate-change thinking -- one produced by McKinsey & Co and the McKinsey Global Institute comparing the relative costs of different measures to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) levels in the atmosphere. (For more on the study, here. For discussion, here.) On the chart, the below-the-line items, on the left side, are GHG-reduction measures that save more money than they cost. Most of these are sheer efficiency measures (insulating buildings, switching to more efficient lights). The above-the-line escalating figures on the right are the rising costs of other abatement measures. The most expensive of them are high-tech "carbon capture and sequestrian" systems, plus protecting forests in heavily-populated Asian countries. (Click for larger.)
Lovejoy's point was that a lot of "re-greening" steps are near the middle of the chart, either actually saving money or costing very little compared with a variety of clean-energy technologies. For more on the latter, see Josh Green's new piece.
So far, so familiar for most people following the debate. But then Hayes stepped up with what was news to me. This was the announcement that the Department of Interior, which is by far the largest landowner in the United States, and which at various points in its history has been seen as a beacon of the "drill, baby, drill!" philosophy of land management (cf: James Watt, passim), was in fact now quite serious about applying a "Re-greening" approach to the 20 percent of the US landmass under its control.
Hayes gave more details than I will recount here. They boiled down to a sequence of: trying to measure and understand the carbon-absorption properties of the various lands under its control; seeing how they can be improved, including with market-based offsets; telling the story to the public of why protecting and expanding forests, grasslands, wetlands, etc has an important climate-change component; making forest-preservation an important part of international climate negotiations (rather than talking only about clean-energy sources); and a lot more. (Including changes in U.S. agriculture, which are of course outside Interior's direct control, so that instead of being, incredibly, a net emitter of greenhouse gases, it has a positive effect. This is related to the Food, Inc. discussion of industrial agriculture mentioned here.)
"If we can come up with some measures that are correct and that people can understand, and show instances where we can positively affect the carbon balance, that can be a huge sea change," Hayes said. "We can show people that there are affirmative things we can do to help our climate. I am very excited about it."
That doesn't solve all the problems, answer all the questions, etc. But it was surprising enough to hear from a senior DOI official and seemed politically and psychologically shrewd, in letting people think that there was some reaction to dire greenhouse gas projections other than holding their hands over their ears and wishing the whole problem would go away.
June 21, 2009
More on Beijing air (updated)
As chronicled in the months leading up to last summer's Olympics, the air in Beijing was alarmingly dense and opaque as the Games drew near. In the end, it remained bad right through the opening ceremonies and the first full day of competition. Then, a powerful cold front blew through from the northwest, with clear, dry air behind it. And for the rest of the competition, and indeed much of the ten months since that time, the air has seemed far better than before. For day by day photos of Beijing's sky before and after the Games, see this wonderful site by Michael Zhao of the Asia Society. For sample shots of recent "Paradise Beijing" circumstances, see here.
Thus in this context of overall improvement, two recent reports are sobering. The first, by Tini Tran of the Associated Press, says that a joint US-Chinese governmental study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, has concluded that the air during the Beijing Olympics was far dirtier and unhealthier than in other recent Games. The Yahoo news version of the story is here; unfortunately, it contains no links to the scientific study itself, which I don't yet see on the Env Sci &Tech journal's site. [Update: study now on line here.] Among the study's findings, according to the AP:
Researchers found that particulate air pollution
did drop by about one-third during the two-week Olympic period. But
coarser particulate matter, PM 10, exceeded levels the WHO considers
safe about 81 percent of the time, while the smaller particulate
pollution PM 2.5, which can cause more serious health consequences,
exceeded WHO guidelines 100 percent of the time.
The second development is the ongoing failure of the Chinese government to report any readings of, and perhaps even to measure, the PM 2.5 small-particulate level in its big cities' air. This matters because the smaller particles, which go deep into the alveoli, are more damaging to the lungs than the larger ones (background and links here) -- and because, by many accounts, their level in Beijing is once again rising. Earlier this week, the readings from a non-Chinese PM 2.5 monitoring station (background here) again reached the "hazardous" level, as had happened several times previously this spring. Glenn Mott sent me this photo taken at Tsinghua University during the "hazardous" day.
Minor conclusion: perhaps one more indication that China's manufacturing economy is recovering, with factories and power plants up and running again? Major theme: if you needed more convincing that environmental and climate issues in China are a first-order challenge for the world as a whole, perhaps this will help. (Background in the magazine here.)
June 15, 2009
Reverse angle equity, and 再见北京
Several thousand times over the past 18 months I've posted shots out the back window of our apartment in Beijing, as ways of illustrating the air quality, or lack thereof, in the big city. For instance, this one back in March:
For the record, here's how the same scene looks from the opposite direction. This is a shot back toward our apartment window, which is almost exactly in the middle of the frame, taken from a pedestrian walkway over a big road just murkily visible in the shot above. The low, reddish-colored, Mao-era building in the foreground of the second view is the same one in the bottom center of the first.
And as we leave the apartment for the last time (I'm scheduling this post for the minute we get in the taxi for the airport), a clearer-sky view out the back from this past weekend. In this view it's possible to see the overpass, and a lot more -- including the arched bridge over the canal shown two days ago. Unfortunately, today the air is back to blear.
再见北京
June 12, 2009
Paradise Beijing, final edition
Previously in the Paradise Beijing series: here, here, and here.
Most accurate air-quality reading today: not "dangerous for sensitive groups" or "hazardous," but "good"! Temperatures balmy, winds light, skies clear. Time for a final run along the canal.
Looking east, toward the Fourth Ring Road and beyond:
Looking west, in toward the Second Ring Road (same bridge, from different sides, in both shots):
Fishermen, bicyclers, drunks and idlers, young romantics, and school kids were out enjoying the paradise too. Carpe diem, as we say in Beijing.
June 1, 2009
Followup on solar panels and climate issues
It appears that Alex Wang, of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Beijing, must have stayed last month in the same part of the Green Lake View Hotel in Kunming that my wife and I recently occupied. Because the "look at all the solar panels!" pictures he took from the hotel window and posted recently on the NRDC Greenlaw site are amazingly similar to those I showed two days ago. If you're traveling to Kunming and want to get in on the fun, I suggest asking for room 2008 at the hotel -- also known as the "view that will impress foreigners worried about the environment" suite.
It turns out that the solar-paneled rooftops of Kunming are about as well known a feature of the city as are gabled rooftops for Paris. As one reader with a Chinese name wrote:
Your latest post of the roof with solar-thermal heating device in Kunming is a typical picture of Chinese city, especially of those second or third-tier cities. People in these cities mostly live in the apartments built in the last two decades. Solar heating device became extremely popular around 2000, for its cheapness, and governments then don't care about its impact on the outlook of the city,ie,barely any regulation.
He also pointed to this Greenpeace report on the city of Dezhou, in Shandong province, where many solar panels are manufactured -- and used. Also, this recent Danwei.org post that includes a Greenpeace video about the city. Les toits de Dezhou:
After the jump, a note from a non-Chinese person about the larger life bargain that solar-thermal water systems imply. ___
This morning, looking north out the window of the Green Lake View ( Cui Yi Hu*) hotel in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province in southern China:
Click above for larger, detailed view. Or, see this closeup of the building nearest the hotel:
Clue, in case you didn't spot it yourself: Every roof as far as you can see has solar-thermal panels for hot water heating. More to come shortly on China's general environmental/climate situation, but I think this vista is different from that in many US cities -- among other details you might notice, in the prevalence of the panels. __ * Originally thought we'd stayed in the Green Lake, Cui Hu. On correction from higher authority, ie my wife, I realize it was the Green Lake View, Cui Yi.
May 24, 2009
As a reminder ....
... that this issue is still with us, three clips from web-based environment sites, all taken within a few-minute span.
1) Real time map of particulate pollution across the US. This map shows PM2.5, the smallest particulates which are most damaging to the lungs:
2) EPA explanation of what the color-coding means.
3) What today's real-time monitoring of PM2.5 in Beijing shows. (Background here.) Note that the EPA charts have no reading or category for levels above 300, like the current 311 in Beijing.
Substantive update on anti-pollution efforts in China coming shortly, following this item a week ago. For now, think I will skip the gym today.
May 15, 2009
Not sure exactly which Chinese people Paul Krugman met...
... before writing his column today in the NYT, but:
While his conclusion -- that China has to be part of global efforts to control carbon emissions -- is obviously correct and important, his premise -- that no one in China admits this -- does not square with my observation over these past three years.* As it happens, I spent this very day at a conference in Beijing where the first five presentations I heard were about emissions-reductions and sustainability in one specific domestic industry. (Also, I wrote in the magazine, a year ago, about Chinese people and organizations making similar efforts in a variety of other fields.)
If blunt-instrument outside pressure like this column makes it more likely that Chinese authorities will keep making progress, then as a pure matter of power-politics I say: fine. But my guess and observation is that it is just as likely to get their back up -- and encourage the ever-present victimization mentality that makes it less rather than more likely that Chinese authorities will behave "responsibly" on the international stage.
As I've written a million times (most recently here and here and generally here), arguably the most important thing that will happen on Barack Obama's watch is reaching an agreement with China -- or not -- on environmental and climate issues. We'll see what's the best means toward that end. _____ * Krugman says:
"Each time I raised the issue during my visit, I was met with outraged
declarations that it was unfair to expect China to limit its use of
fossil fuels. After all, they declared, the West faced no similar
constraints during its development; while China may be the world's
largest source of carbon-dioxide emissions, its per-capita emissions
are still far below American levels; and anyway, the great bulk of the
global warming that has already happened is due not to China but to the
past carbon emissions of today's wealthy nations. And they're right...But that unfairness doesn't change the fact that letting China
match the West's past profligacy would doom the Earth as we know it."
I've heard that Chinese response too many times to count. But it's mainly a throat-clearing prelude to talking-turkey discussions about what the country will and can do, and under what circumstances.
May 6, 2009
Paradise Beijing, late spring edition (updated)
Looking north from Jianguomen intersection, today at noon. Air not that great, but trees in full leaf and a strong, warm wind on the face. Feels good to be outside.
Uh-oh! On coming back home, I find signs of trouble in paradise. The real-time metering of the most dangerous form of small-particulate pollution, here, has a result I'd rather not see. Maybe the moral is the same as in an earlier tale of destruction of Paradise. There are some questions better not asked. The warm wind still feels good to me.UPDATE!!! on re-reading the fine print, the maxed-out code for the air-quality reading indicates "electric fault" with the meter. Never mind! I'll start re-enjoying the day. [Alarming bogus chart now removed]
April 13, 2009
Now this doesn't make me feel all that great....
As mentioned recently, the skies have been ocher in Beijing these last few days. Thanks to a tech source I've recently discovered, I now know that the conditions are actually way more dangerous than I thought. Gee, great.
The official Chinese government air pollution readings, found most conveniently in the right hand column here, give daily average air-quality info for many big Chinese cities. The main pollutant measured in these figures is -- to the best of my understanding -- "PM 10," which covers relatively "large" particulate matter. These are particles of up to 10 micrometers in diameter, including some large enough to darken the air and what would normally be called "dust."
What the Chinese authorities don't seem to report routinely is PM2.5. These are very fine particles, of up to 2.5 microns in diameter, which may not darken the air but are more dangerous to the lungs, precisely because they don't get filtered out in the nose or throat and instead get down deep into the alveoli. The US EPA does feature PM2.5 in its particulate measures of US air quality -- for instance, the real-time map here.
None of this is new, including the PM10 / PM2.5 omission in Chinese monitoring. What is new to me is that an unofficial monitoring station in Beijing puts out, via Twitter, hourly measures of PM2.5 readings. And after checking out the readings for earlier today I say... gacckkk, ccougghhhhh, haccckkkk.... In the columns below we have: date and time; PM2.5 reading for that time; Air Quality Index on the US scale (321 in the first one); air quality classification on US scale; and average figures for the day.
Note that the US classification system, here, does not even allow for readings above the 300 range, which it lumps together as "hazardous." As I check the real-time map just now, virtually every reporting city in the US has an AQI reading below 50 ("good"), and one or two miscreants are around 70. The reading through most of today where I live has been above 300. Hmmmmm.
Action plan for me: I decided to skip going to the gym for a breathe-hard workout today. Action plan for US and China: no joke, working on environmental, climate, and energy matters is the most important thing that will happen during this new U.S. Administration. More on this front when I catch my breath. __ Note: to avoid causing problems for some people inside China, I have slightly changed this posting from an earlier version. Anyone who notices the difference, please keep it to yourself.
April 11, 2009
Happy Easter from Beijing
The view at 11 am on this springtime Sunday morning:
It was glorious just one week ago, and in the six+ months since the Olympic games, skies have generally been far clearer than in the previous six months. The economic slowdown / factory shutdown / decline in electricity use (and therefore combustion of coal to create power) has to have been part of the answer. Maybe this is an early sign that the Chinese economy is indeed coming back? Green shoots in an ironic brown guise? In any case joyous Easter wherever you are.
March 19, 2009
Shanghai, Beijing, and the face of Chinese cities
This is an incomplete, opening entry on a subject that's increasingly on my mind: who is responsible for the look and feel of today's enormous, expanding Chinese cities, and who is happy and unhappy about their emerging character.
Two reasons it's on my mind at the moment: - Spent several days again in Shanghai, my former home, after being away for eight months; - Recently went to the top of Beijing's first true skyscraper, the newly-opened Park Hyatt hotel, and saw the city from an entirely different perspective while on the building's 65th floor.
This is not a "which do you like better?" discussion, which I've learned to finesse in a way that is both politic and true. Having now spent an equal amount of time based in each city, my wife and I have learned to appreciate the virtues of both. Their virtues are different, as Chicago's are from LA's, but are both real. (In short: we've learned more from being in Beijing, and we enjoyed the texture of daily life more in Shanghai. We feel fortunate to have lived in each place.)
Rather the question is why the look and feel of Beijing seem so clearly to represent the direction Chinese cities are heading. To oversimplify what this means: although Shanghai probably contains more people than Beijing, it feels smaller. The roads are narrower, they're more likely to bend or twist, the city unfolds on a smaller scale of neighborhoods and courtyards and little houses. Beijing is bigger and squarer and broader and more grandly imposing. To illustrate: a photo of the intersection outside our building in Beijing, followed by a place we were walking ten days ago in Shanghai.
Crossing the street at the Guomao intersection, as I do when leaving my apartment each day in Beijing:
Looking across a street in the French Concession district of Shanghai:
Yes, yes, I could have chosen pictures of each city that looked more like the other -- a little hutong in Beijing, an elevated highway in Shanghai. But anybody who has been in both cities recognizes the difference in tone and scale. This view southward from the Park Hyatt's 65th floor China Bar -- which really is the first time this view of Beijing has ever been available (since airplanes almost never fly overhead) -- gives more of the idea.
A few more pictures, and the question they suggest to me, after the jump.
As I've mentioned several times (eg here and here), the air in Beijing has seemed much better in the six months since the Olympics ended than in the incredibly murky six months before. Seasonal difference? Probably. Unusual prevalence of strong, cleansing winds from the northwest? Important too. Residual effect of some Olympic-caused restrictions on pollution sites and traffic? Perhaps.
But the general slowdown in factory and powerplant activity during those same six months has to have played a part.
So, is the economy picking up again? View out the window, Guomao area of Beijing looking south, on March 18, 2009, at noon China time, a relatively balmy day:
For a different kind of discussion about when and whether things will turn around for China, I have this story in the current issue of the magazine.
February 23, 2009
Even more on US-China climate cooperation
It can seem odd when something you've been expecting for years actually starts to occur.* Since practically the first discussion I had in China in mid-2006, I've been hearing that the US and China "had to" or "would soon" work together to deal with energy/environment issues, given that they are now the two most-polluting countries in the world. With the change of Administration in the US, it does indeed seem to be happening. At least, talk about it is happening -- including from Hillary Clinton, on her visit here this weekend -- with specifics on what the countries should do next.
(Subtle reminder of why this would be useful: a recent view of Beijing:)
I've previously mentioned the Asia Society/Pew and Brookings proposals for US-Chinese cooperation. Here is another one, from the National Resources Defense Council, which has been doing environmental work in and with China for a long time. As a bonus, here is the summary of its 9-point action plan:
1. Engage in serious bilateral meetings on climate change and address the key sticking points to reaching meaningful agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009 2. Establish a US-China forum on climate change strategies that promote green jobs and economic recovery 3. Mobilize the untapped potential of energy efficiency 4. Assist in the deployment of renewable energy sources and technologies 5. Promote low-carbon, high-efficiency vehicles, fuels, transportation systems, and community development 6. Expand research and investment on carbon capture and storage technology 7. Improve greenhouse gas emissions monitoring and data transparency 8. Conduct co-benefit analysis on GHG [Greenhouse Gas] emissions controls 9. Invest in regular exchanges and sharing of expertise to improve enforcement of environmental law and energy efficiency standards.
The full report spells out steps toward each of these goals. Like the others, worth reading and putting into action sometime soon. _____ * And I'm not even talking about the long-predicted current financial meltdown.
February 20, 2009
More on China-US climate issues, more on F-22
- About China and the US cooperating on environmental/climate issues:
Yesterday I mentioned this detailed and valuable report from the Asia Society and Pew. It turns out that Brookings has just done something similar. Summary here, with links to PDF versions in both English and Chinese. Transcript of event unveiling the report here. I haven't studied the report carefully, but anything in this vein has to be a plus.
- About Mark Bowden and the F-22:
Yesterday I said that I enjoyed Mark Bowden's current article but disagreed with its implied endorsement of the F-22 fighter plane. It turns out that Sam Roggeveen, of the Lowy Institute's "The Interpreter" site in Sydney, has already taken up this topic and gotten a reply from Mark. Roggeveen's initial critique here; Mark Bowden's response here. I should note that, like Roggeveen, I did a double-take at the sentence in the original article saying that at least five other countries were now flying planes that matched or bettered the F-15. For context on that point, it's worth looking here. Also, this Reuters story from three months ago talks about the real-world difficulties in maintaining the "stealth" systems for radar-evasion that are supposed to be one of the F-22's main virtues.
February 19, 2009
The US, China, and saving the world
Anyone who has looked seriously into China's environmental and energy-use emergencies ends up thinking, saying, or merely hoping that the US and China will work together urgently on these fronts. That would be good for China because it needs all the help it can get to avoid poisoning its own people. It would be good for America and everyone else because China's approach to carbon-emissions control will largely determine whether the world has any chance of dealing with climate problems.
Or to put things in a cheerier way, precisely because so many Chinese farms, factories, power plants, and buildings are now so inefficiently run*, there are more opportunities to make big environmental improvements here than practically anywhere else. (My contribution to this school of thought in this article.)
Everybody understands this point in the abstract. Now there's a useful new guide to what it might mean in very particular detail. For many months a scientific/technical task force run jointly by the Asia Society's Center on the US-China Relations and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change has worked on specific recommendations, which were unveiled last week. Press release is here; overview here; PDF of the report in English here; in Chinese here. Introductory video, with overview rather than specifics, below.
Promising Kremlinology note: the co-chair of the project was Steven Chu, who stepped down from that role only because he had been nominated (and now confirmed) as the new US Secretary of Energy. The report is very much worth checking out -- and, in my view, worth supporting and implementing.
___
* Chinese farms and factories "inefficient"? Yes, very much so -- as I explain at length in my Atlantic article. Their output is often inexpensive, mainly because Chinese labor rates have been so cheap. But, as is typical for developing countries, they tend to be wasteful in their use of energy and other inputs. Chinese office buildings take much more energy to heat and cool than Western ones, because the insulation is so poor. Farmers often use more water and chemicals per bushel of yield than in advanced countries. Out-of-date Chinese factories use more fuel and create more pollution per unit of output than in Europe, Japan, or the US. This profligacy helps explains why the air is so murky in China, but it also illustrates the opportunity for big, relatively easy gains through efficiency here.
January 7, 2009
I thought it got easier to breathe back there in August!
As attentive readers may recall, the air in Beijing through the six months before the Olympic games was almost unbelievably horrible. Lest we forget: this was the view out my window in mid-June, which was not that different from how it had been day upon day through the spring and early summer.
But even as I was wheezing my way around town and truly getting depressed by no view of sun and sky (and being told by a doctor that I should stop smoking, when I'd never started), I was reporting in the Atlantic on plans to get things cleaned up by the time of the Olympics. The first two days of the Games looked pretty bleak -- but then a line of thunderstorms moved through, and the air looked far better, and the environmental threat to the Games was averted.
Since then, the air in Beijing has seemed better -- not all of the time, God knows, but more than before. How much of the improvement is due to factories being shut down because of the recession? (They must have been running 40 hours a day in the spring, given how bad things were then.) How much because of typically strong late-fall winds blowing in from the northwest? How much an actual long-term change? I don't know.
But, courtesy of a tip from an engineer at NASA, here is new evidence that all the anti-pollution steps taken because of the Olympics really did make a difference in air-quality measures in August -- and, it seems, some of the time since then.
The NASA map below will make more sense if you read the full report, here. Highlight version: the deep red west of Shanghai and north of Hong Kong (where Shenzhen and Dongguan are), plus through the central coal-and-factory belt in places like Shanxi province, is a bad sign. The light green around Beijing is relatively good! (The red zone on the coast just east of Beijing is the city of Tianjin.)
As the NASA report says of Beijing's special Olympic anti-pollution rules:
During the two months when restrictions were in place, the levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) -- a noxious gas resulting from fossil fuel combustion (primarily in cars, trucks, and power plants) -- plunged nearly 50 percent. Likewise, levels of carbon monoxide (CO) fell about 20 percent.
Why does this matter? Because it shows that corrective steps can improve even the most hopeless-seeming environmental disasters.
It's worth trying to do something, rather than just hunkering down in bed and trying to
take very, very shallow breaths -- my strategy in the months from April
to July.
In other words, Yes We Can.
January 5, 2009
Tibetan glaciers: impressive videos
The most obvious environmental problem in China is air pollution, as I have from time to time -- OK, maybe five million times -- mentioned in this space. But environmental experts consistently stress that the most consequential problems are the related issues of CO2 output, climate change, and water supply. (On Chinese environmental issues in general, here is one article by me and one very valuable blog site.)
The Asia Society's "China Green" project has just posted a riveting and sobering series of videos on how climate change is affecting the once-vast glacier fields of the Tibetan Plateau that are in turn the source of nearly all the major rivers of Asia: Yellow and Yangtze in China, Mekong and Salween in Southeast Asia, Brahmaputra and Ganges in India, Indus in Pakistan, and others. This is an introductory three-minute trailer:
There is a lot more, and a lot that's more dramatic, at the project's main site, here. I recommend spending a minute with the interactive opening-page splash shot, which allows you to run your mouse over a photo of Mt. Everest and watch how its surrounding glaciers have changed from 1921 to 2008.
This past August, during the Beijing Olympics, Michael Zhao of the Asia Society posted a wonderful series of daily shots of air-quality conditions in Beijing in the months leading up to the Games. They showed, among other things, the minimal correlation between what was officially a "blue sky day" and how the sky really looked. (The photo-chronicle is ongoing.) Zhao has also put together the Glacier project and really is demonstrating the potential of online video to dramatize public issues everyone "knows about" but has a hard time visualizing. Making these issues vivid is a necessary though not sufficient step to getting something done about them.
UPDATE: Have swapped a version with English subtitles for the previous Chinese-subtitled trailer. Ever considerate!
December 15, 2008
Every day brings a surprise
You may have read that the Chinese company BYD made big news today in unveiling the first plug-in electric car, ahead of Japanese and US competitors.
More on the substance of that another day.
You may not have imagined how the presentation began, this morning in Shenzhen. Life is interesting. (Click for larger.) The US lounge-singer industry may need to start looking over its shoulder at China, along with the automakers.
The performers in a pensive moment:
December 11, 2008
The good news is...
... that Beijing had a record-high number of "blue sky" days in 2008, including a long stretch during and after the Olympics when the air really was marvelously clear and clean.
The bad news is that today counts as one of the "blue sky" days, since the pollution index is 96, just below the blue-sky cutoff of 100. Ten am, December 12, 2008:
Maybe it's just fog. And, I can see the sun:
For the big-picture perspective on serious Chinese efforts to improve the situation, please see here.
December 10, 2008
Beijing Metro
Recently I took my 200th trip on the Beijing Metro. I know because I used up the fourth 100RMB charge on my Metro card, below. (Rides are for now 2RMB apiece, about 28 cents, regardless of distance.) Actually, the 200th ride since the metro finished its switch from paper tickets to magnetic cards early this year.
The card, like its owner, is beginning to show the wear and tear of life in the big city. That's its peeling-off plastic covering in the upper right corner. But, having complained every now and then about certain imperfections of urban life in Beijing, let me take this opportunity to remark on what a miraculous change the rapidly-expanding metro has wrought in a very short time.
As recently as the middle of last year, the subway system didn't go many places -- and could be ferociously crowded when it went there. (I am thinking mainly of Line 1 at rush hour, as locals will know.) Here's how the route system looked when we arrived:
The map below shows the working system as of now -- the interesting detail being that lines 5, 8, and 10 have come into operation on our (brief) watch here in Beijing. They are the magenta, green, and light blue lines, respectively. (Also, the "airport express," the diagonal red line heading to the northeast.) Line 10 in particular is nothing less than a godsend. My wife and I live in the "Central Business District" at the Guomao intersection, right at the place where the horizontal red line crosses the vertical light-blue line on the map above. Before line 10 opened in July, getting to two other main parts of town I visit many times per week -- the "Kempinski"/Sanlitun/Gongti area two miles or so straight north, and the university/high-tech "Haidian" district several miles to the northwest -- could be done only by driving (bus or taxi), and through traffic so unpredictably horrible that you had to allow an hour or two if you wanted to be there on time. Now the Kempinski-etc area is a few quick stops north on Line 10, and the far northwest Peking U /Tsinghua U /Google/ Microsoft areas involve just one change of subway lines. That still takes 45 minutes -- but it's dependable, and you're not sitting in a taxi worrying.
And more is underway. Here is the route plan for three-plus years from now, with a lot of cross-town and zig-zag routes that will make a huge difference in land travel:
What's my point? First, recognizing something good that's happened in a city about which I and many others often complain. And second: Wonder if infrastructure and public-transport improvements can make a difference in basic livability? Yes they can.
December 9, 2008
I guess it wasn't all cloud
I mentioned yesterday that, after a spell of very cold and very clear days in Beijing, the ferociously cleansing wind from the northwest had abated and the dark laden air had returned, held in place by an inversion layer. As a reminder, the view out my window yesterday at 10am:
I rounded off the post with a chipper hope that all I was seeing was cloud.
Apparently not.
Thanks to Michael Standaert's China Notebook report, with a link to this official daily Chinese government pollution-reading site, the air pollution index yesterday was an almost incredible 246. A full discussion of the ins and outs of pollution measure, and how China counts some pollutants differently from the way the US or Europe does, is here. But this chart, from the same Beijing Air Blog as in the previous link, might get the point across. You'll note that 246 is not even on the scale.
To put it differently: I think it's likely that people in the United States, unless they have been in a forest-fire zone, have not in many decades experienced a 246-scale day. That could be wrong -- can't find data at the moment -- but the general impression is correct. And the only other thing I can say is: I think I'll have one of my remaining Sam Adams beers and see how it looks tomorrow.
December 8, 2008
Hmmmm.....
Last week, Beijing's weather was very clear and very, very cold. Both conditions were thanks to some enormous howling Siberian gelid-air mass that made its way down from the dreaded boreal land of snow. For a reminder of how things can look when clear, try here.
Today temperatures are moderating, which means that the northern wind is not there to do its brutally cleansing work. Ten am, December 8, 2008.
Some of this could be cloud, although air-quality readings the last two days have been bad. Here's hoping a lot is cloud!
November 21, 2008
Somewhat encouraging environmental report
A real if inglorious fact about environmental and climate-change issues is that people can stand to read only so much depressing news. Especially when the rest of their life is depressing enough. The economy's falling apart, half the people I know are losing houses or jobs, so what do I feel like doing at 10pm: pick up a thriller / turn on a comedy, or read further details about how the polar bears are drowning and the forests are dying and we're all doomed anyway?
And imagine if the election results had gone the other way.
So it's worth highlighting every bit of information that gives a believable (not flat-earthish or denialist) reason to think that sensible actions, taken in time, can make a significant difference. This was one of the virtues of my friend Gregg Easterbrook's 1995 book A Moment on the Earth, feather-ruffling as it was at the time. This has also been a consistent strategy of Amory Lovins' work at the Rocky Mountain Institute.
In a similar vein, I highly recommend this new report from the American Physical Society, the professional organization for physicists in the United States, about the very specific hows, whats, wheres, and how-much's of practical ways to increase energy efficiency. A cover letter says (emphasis added by me):
Can lower energy consumption come about in the United States? It
already has. Per-capita energy use in California, about half the
national average, has stayed flat for the past 30 years, largely
through an ambitious program of appliance standards and other
innovations in building design....
The report points out that the enhanced funding need only match federal
energy research levels in place in 1980. Research around that time led
to a major improvement in efficiency standards. For instance, compact
fluorescent lights and refrigerators now use about one-fourth the
energy needed for comparable models of 30 years ago. Air conditioners
are twice as efficient as those in 1980. Such dramatic improvements in
energy use could be sustained, many experts argue, but only if a
concerted energy research program is put in place.
I assume the Relevant Government Officials are well aware of such data -- at least ones from the incoming administration -- but it doesn't hurt to have the general public know too. (Thanks to UCSB physicist / Cirrus pilot Roger Freedman.)
October 22, 2008
For old times' sake (updated)
Beijing, 3pm, October 22, 2008 -- 32 days after the Olympic/Paralympic emergency "clean air" rules came to an end. Feels like home again!
UPDATE: After a big thunderstorm last night and passage of a cold front, it's beautiful the following morning. Picture shortlybelow.
Here is what a good cold front will do! Same pattern during the Olympics. For the first two days of the Games, despite all the cleanup measures, the air was opaque. Then a powerful cold front brought intense thunderstorms, and behind it clear, cooler dry air. Problem is, the fast-moving fronts are much rarer in northern China than in the eastern two-thirds of North America,where they're moving through every few days. Subject for another time.
For now, the view on October 23, 2008, at noon:
October 17, 2008
As if it were all a dream
Next Monday, it will be one month since the special Olympic-era traffic and pollution rules came to an end in Beijing. Through most of the last ten days, the skies and air have been spectacularly clear and beautiful in town. Here, blue skies are reflected in office windows in the Dongdan area a few days ago:
Today - oh boy. Traffic like the bad old days, and same for the smoky skies. Let us hope this is an aberration, rather than the new (and old) normal.
September 21, 2008
Back to the future: Beijing after Sept. 20 (updated)
I'm temporarily out of China, but like all other Beijing residents I am acutely aware that today is the day when all the Olympic/Paralympic "blue sky" rules come to an end. No more even/odd license plate restrictions on how many cars can drive each day. No more limits on construction and construction dust. No more sweeping shutdowns for the cement plants, smelters, steel mills, and other heavy-industrial operations anywhere upwind of Beijing.
The emergency clean-up rules -- plus strong seasonal winds out of the northwest, plus what is usually the nicest time of the year -- have made a real difference:
Just before the rule change:
A month later:
Back in August, the Imagethief blog offered an instantly-popular (if slightly premature) simile for the impending change:
Like a giant kid who's been holding a fart in during a three week
[now eight week] elevator ride, Beijing has apparently relaxed its many industrial
sphincters and let a big one rip.
I'll next see Beijing when the city has had a week to get back to "normal." Can't wait to get a look. It's been nice while it has lasted!
Update: Jim Bishop, who lives in Hebei province southwest of Beijing, writes to report on Day One of the new era: "The air went completely to hell here in Baoding this week.
As bad as I have ever seen it in over six years." Hmmm.
September 12, 2008
Paradise Beijing
I have a slight modification to propose to the International Olympic Charter. I suggest that the Olympics, and the Paralympics, be run back-to-back, nonstop, month after month and year after year -- and always in Beijing. It could be tough on the athletes, but think of the golds they could win! And with this system, the city might continue to enjoy the phenomenal blue skies and beautiful weather that have prevailed for most of the last four weeks. This morning, Sept 12:
Yesterday afternoon, Sept. 11:
The traffic and factory shut-down rules that started on July 20 will still be in effect for eight more days, thanks to the Paralympics. The Paralympics have been moving and impressive in ways I'll describe later. For now, we're enjoying these moments while we have them; assuming nothing about the future; but hoping that the Chinese citizenry and leadership have noticed how transformed the city is when it looks like these pictures -- and not the one from two months ago, mercifully after the jump.
For the last week, Beijing's skies have been, mostly, glorious. I went for a long run this afternoon, and got sunburned while doing so, a risk I had not previously feared.
Out the window today
Same window two weeks ago (and much of the preceding six months)
All credit to whoever and whatever made this happen, from the Chinese scientists I quoted a few months ago saying that it would play out more or less the way it did; to the Chinese officials implementing the factory- and traffic- shutdown plans; to the American scientist who accurately predicted that the wind would shift to the proper, cleansing direction two or three days into the Games; to whatever powers were fundamentally responsible for the change of wind. The Japanese concept of 神風 -- kamikaze, "divine wind" -- unavoidably comes to mind.
In the bleak days just before the opening ceremony, I wondered whether the air could be such a problem that it would, through sheer shock, force a reconsideration of China's environmental policies. Now it's possible to imagine the opposite prospect: that Beijingers, having for once seen how transformed and pleasant the city can be when not under a pall, might resist being pushed back into the blear. As Jake Barnes once put it in different circumstances, Isn't it pretty to think so.
August 20, 2008
Sincerest sign of gratitude for Beijing's new air
For the first two days of the Olympics, things looked bad on the air front. Then after two big thunderstorms and the passage of a cold front, things have been nice! Confirming my oft-expressed optimism that it would all work out just in time.
And after 25 months and zero outdoors runs in China, I've gone for four- or five- mile runs three times in the last week! All this along a reasonably nice flagstoned path along the canal that is just south of Tonghuihe North Road, between the old Beijing Train Station and the 4th Ring Road. (Only peril is migrant workers sleeping on shaded parts of the path during the day. I barely avoided planting my foot directly on one, in a dark underpass, today. I jumped over him at the last second and he didn't wake up.)
Previously I had praised the USATF.org site as a way to map running and bike routes. It turns out that MapMyRun.com works provides the same kind of mappable routes even in China! Ah this modern age. I'll keep this up as long as the good times last.
August 12, 2008
Tuesday Olympic Notes - I
1. 北京加油! 空气加油!
It's a nice day in Beijing today! Blue visible in the sky, for the first time in one week. It's warm but not sweltering. It actually feels, dare I say it, good outside. View at 4pm August 12:
The traffic- and factory- shutdown orders, and the weather rockets, and the cold front, and the thunderstorms, and the weather gods, and whoever else helped out, are all now doing the job. Congratulations and thanks to one and all.
2. Good translation! Most visitors have already learned the two-syllable foundation of Basic Olympic Chinese: the cheer jia you! It's written 加油!, and for Americans it would be pronounced more or less "jah yo!" -- yo as Sylvester Stallone would say it in Rocky.
Sunday morning, Beijing looked truly horrible -- here, courtesy of Isaac Kardon, is a screenshot of the CCTV Olympic commentators -- but this time the cause actually was "weather," that unmistakable pre-thunderstorm heaviness.
Around 5pm, the lightning bolts and the drenching rains began. This was a short-term inconvenience for Olympic operations, to put it mildly. (My wife and I were 30 miles out of town at the rowing site, where the last stages of the competition was postponed and then cancelled. More later.) But it could be a long-term blessing. Now, on Monday morning, the skies still have a gray overcast, but underneath the air looks washed and clear(er) in a way it usually doesn't. This is the same pattern -- cold front, torrential rain, successive clear days -- that brought blue skies ten days ago. So it's the first cooperative step by the weather gods since the games began.
Update: 1pm city view not so washed-and-clear any more. Still, the passage of a cold front has got to do something to push out the previous pool of stagnant air.
August 7, 2008
The big day is here!
And I simply do not have the heart to show what it looks like today -- August 8, the magical 08/08/08 chosen for its positive auspices for the Olympics. I'll just say, it looks very much like this view from six weeks ago. This is a disaster.
About six months ago, I interviewed the (impressive) Chinese scientists responsible for monitoring Beijing's air quality and later reported their views in the Atlantic:
The last PowerPoint slide in a presentation that one of the scientists
showed me read, "We are confident that the air quality goals for
Olympics 2008 will be met in Beijing." When I asked, "Really?" all eyes
turned toward the senior CAS official in the room, a British-trained
scientist. "I personally am sure the goals will be met," he said. Even
if the winds are wrong? "Ninety-nine percent."
So either we're in the one-percent case, or they were fooling themselves. Or required to say what they did. It doesn't matter.
I suppose there's also a one-percent possibility that the international embarrassment will be a Chernobyl-type stimulus toward truly radical environmental action in China and around the world. But maybe that's fooling myself too.
Here we go.
About those U.S. cyclists with gas masks
I don't mean to judge them as people. They did the right thing in apologizing. But in wearing protective masks inside the Beijing airport they were acting like jerks.
Photo by AFP
I grant: these are athletes at the peak of their conditioning. But they can't endure the air inside a building? While they're walking, rather than running or breathing hard? And for the few minutes it would take to get past all the photographers and into the privacy of their buses or cars?
Yeah, no kidding, the air in Beijing is worth complaining about. I've done so plenty, starting with an article I wrote more than two years ago, shortly after I arrived:
Many aspects of the new, improved China will be up for the world's
inspection during the Olympic Games. But there is one little catch: the
air. Unless something radical changes, I do not understand how athletic
events can take place in air as dirty as Beijing's....
Everyone assumes
that when the time comes for the Games, the authorities will do
whatever they have to--closing factories, banning private traffic--to
bring pollution down to an endurable level.... Still. If the marathon runners, or
even the archers, can finish their events without clutching their
chests and keeling over, the Chinese authorities will have accomplished
something special.
But complaints should come in the context of realizing that Chinese officials, companies, and citizens actually have done quite a lot to try to cope with the problem (details here) -- and that it's sad in many ways, rather than contemptible, that the first view the world's TV audience will have of spiffed-up Beijing will be of the opaque gray-brown skies. Unless, of course, there's a big cleansing wind out of Mongolia right now.
It's embarrassing enough for the Chinese hosts that the air looks so bad. It's tasteless, prissy, and showboating for visitors to rub it in this way. (Again, I'm talking about wearing the masks inside, in front of cameras, while standing around -- not sensible precautions for training.)
Why should I rub it in, now that the cyclists have done themselves and their country credit by apologizing? Just to set down an early marker that there is such a thing as dignified and considerate behavior -- even for athletes on the cusp of the competition of their lives, and even when coming to a country where there are ample legitimate grounds for complaint.
August 6, 2008
End of an era: last pre-Olympic snapshot (updated)
Opening ceremonies tomorrow, August 8. This is the view as of 10am, August 7, from our same old window in the Guomao area of Beijing. I suspect that a lot of this actually is "mist," very high humidity, etc. That is, it can't be that much more polluted than it was 36 hours ago, when things looked much better, as shown here. Mainly completing the chronicle, for the record.
Here is the way the same area looked on a nice day about six months ago. I understand that if I'd been here this previous weekend, I could have seen even clearer views.
Three more views of pretty blue-sky Beijing days in the same general neighborhood are: from early this year here and from late last fall here and here. Ongoing air coverage available on the Asia Society's interactive site, here. Now I will give the window-camera a rest.
UPDATE: For those interested in the actual science of the Beijing air-quality situation, I also highly recommend the ongoing charts and explanations on Dr. Kenneth Rahn's site, from the University of Rhode Island.
This one-page Power Point slide, updated daily, shows the trend in pollution readings in the weeks leading up to the Olympics. (Warning: it is legible only if viewed in Internet Explorer, not FIrefox or Safari. Don't even bother without IE.)
This longer presentation explains the readings, including why Beijing's situation is so tough and how much difference the emergency shutdown order for cars and factories actually made. Its trend lines also clarify this important point: while hazy skies don't necessarily mean polluted air, as Chinese officials ceaselessly point out (it could be fog, it could be mist), in harsh reality the days when you can't see very well are also the days with the most dangerous air. (Thanks to Robert Kawaratani.)
Good to know (Olympic air dept).
This is certainly a relief! Jacques Rogge et al set our minds at ease.
Full text of the story (from the state-controlled English-language official outlet) is here. It begins:
Beijing's air does not pose any health risk for athletes, officials and other visitors, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said Tuesday.
Dispelling all fears over overcast and hazy skies in the city, the IOC said data on Beijing's air quality is being assessed on an hourly basis.
Haze does not mean poor quality air, a senior Beijing environmental official said a week ago.
FWIW, view at noon today in downtown Beijing. No scientific or medical judgment implied here -- it could just be a kind of fog. Simply chronicling how it looks with two days to go. (PS: for anyone who doesn't know about it already, this phenomenal site, produced by the Asia Society, gives a searchable day-by-day view of what Beijing's skies have looked like over the last year. Informative and excellently done.)
August 5, 2008
Innocents abroad
Americans' faith that they can do anything, that they won't be bogged down by the frustrations that stymie lesser peoples, is one of their (our) greatest attributes. And one of the most dangerous.
The French got bogged down in Vietnam? No problem, we'll do it right. The Brits in Iraq? The Soviets (and Brits) in Afghanistan? Step aside, and we'll show you how it's done.
Thus this note in today's NYT from a writer who is determined to keep up her running discipline while in Beijing for the Olympics:
Yes, I'm going. I'll be part of the New York Times reporting team.
And yes, I intend to run when I'm in China. I'll even have a training
schedule and will e-mail my results to [her coach] and talk to him via Skype.
One
running partner, if our plans work out, will be Mary Wittenberg,
president of New York Road Runners. She hopes to run for an hour at
least every other day, if not more often.
"I'm going in there optimistic," she said. "How bad can it be?"
Hooo boy. ("How bad can it be?," Donald Rumsfeld asked as he approved the stripped-down troop plans for Iraq. "How bad can it be?" asked Robert S. McNamara...)
Before coming here two years ago, I had been a pretty serious runner for many decades in the past. Never broke three hours in the Boston or Marine Corps marathons, but came close. (3:02, but who's counting.) Once insanely took part in a 24-hour relay marathon, in which teams of ten people took turns running a mile each on a track, around the clock -- and our goal was to average under 5:15 per mile over the whole period, though that was long ago.
Yet I have not found it sensible to run outside, even one time, in Shanghai or Beijing. Of course there were days when I could have done so. But on average??? That's what the indoor gym is for, with its illusion of filtered air.
Good luck to the NYT running team, and to the Olympics as a whole. And may America preserve the good parts of its touching "how bad can it be?" creed.
Much nicer day today
In contrast to yesterday's heart-sinking blear, today, August 5, three days before the opening ceremonies in Beijing, ended up very nicely!
Jianwai Soho towers, from under the Guomao bridge, Beijing central business district, 6:30pm, August 5 2008:
As always, hoping this is finally a trend...
August 4, 2008
Out at the Olympic site
A trip today for a preliminary press event. Good news and bad news.
Good news: transportation! Only 20 minutes via the new subway Line 10 from Guomao station, in the central business district, to Beitucheng station, just south of the main Olympic areas. Line 10 train was populated but not overcrowded. Security check on way into the subway reasonable-seeming rather than too intrusive. (Handbags and briefcases go through a screening machine; people themselves don't have to.)
In theory there is a way to connect at Beitucheng from Line 10 to the new Olympic Line 8. But the cops seemed to be steering anyone without a formal Olympic credential (which I don't have) away from Line 8 and out onto the street. No problem: A few minutes' walk away was a depot for various special Olympic bus lines that circle the venues. The bus-route maps I saw were written only in Chinese -- or sometimes transliterated into Roman characters in a way most visitors wouldn't recognize. (For instance, Guojia Tiyuchang, the pinyin version of 国家体育场, rather than the more useful-to-outsiders terms "National Stadium" or "Bird's Nest.") But there were many cheery young English-speaking volunteers willing to help puzzled foreigners.
Bad news: Well, it doesn't appear to have just been "morning mist" today, as I speculated earlier. Below and after the jump, a few pictures from the Olympic site early this afternoon. At this point, 100 hours before the opening ceremony and seven years after the decision to hold the Olympics in Beijing, there is really not anything to "do" about the city's air anymore -- except hope that whatever cleansing wind blew through over the weekend comes again.
National Stadium -- "Bird's Nest" -- barely visible on the left, National Aquatic Center -- "Water Cube" -- on the right, 1pm on August 4. (Click for larger version.)
Just back to Beijing after seven days in parts of China where the concerns are far more elemental than hosting a successful and "harmonious" Olympic event. (Eg, villages being inundated by new dams -- more another time.) Headed out right away for a kickoff PR event.
In the meantime, hoping that this morning's prospect out the window is in fact just morning fog, as is sometimes the case. Heard from friends in Beijing that over this past weekend, the emergency air-clearing efforts had finally paid off (or a big rain storm and wind played their part) and the skies were gloriously blear-free and blue. Indeed on arrival late last night, we could see the moon! Hope more of the same is ahead -- another report this afternoon..
8 am, August 4, 2008, downtown Beijing:
July 27, 2008
Eleven days to go (updated)
View southward from Guomao area, 8am, July 28, 2008. Eight days into large-scale factory and traffic shutdown. Eleven days from start of the Olympics
Who knows how much of this is morning mist and so on. Once again this is just for the record as pre-Olympic chronicle.
The next time we'll have a chance to check will be one week from now, when there will be four days to go. In the hinterland in the meantime.
Update: Lead story on China Daily website, state-controlled voice to the outside world, reassuringly reports that the government has noticed that things aren't working out so well with its air cleanup plan and is preparing more drastic measures:
..the recent hot and sultry weather, with occasional breeze, and the
still high emission level, have raised fresh concerns over the weather
during the Games. ["Weather" is the normal euphemism for air pollution.]
The city has not experienced a "blue day", that is, healthy air
quality in the past four days. The air pollution index (API) has stayed
above 100, the national standard for good air quality. Yesterday's API
in the city was between 103 and 124. [A reading of 100 would be unbearably polluted in most European or North American cities. Over the last year a striking number of readings have come in right at 99.]
Among the measures being considered, apparently, is not an even/odd license plate system but an "exact digit only" system. On a date ending in 9, like July 29, only licenses ending in 9 could drive, and so on. In theory this could cut traffic by 90%.
Considering the past, implacable "everything will be fine" / "pollution? what pollution?" official stance, this is welcome news. So too are airport conditions, as we have just experienced them. On a weekday mid-morning at Beijing Airport's Terminal Three, no big crowds outside the entry doors (unlike a week ago), smooth and efficient security checks, generally an easy flow.
We'll take all these as promising omens for the Olympics -- which, as mentioned earlier, is what everyone should want.
July 26, 2008
Sunday morning Beijing
8 am, July 27, 2008, looking south, twelve days until the opening ceremonies, one week into the big shutdown of factories in nearby provinces and traffic in Beijing.
I'm not sure how much of this is "mist," how much is simple moisture, how much is whatever else it might be, or how the scene might look this afternoon. This is just for the ongoing record, of what athletes like those I saw arriving at the airport yesterday might see when opening the curtains to look out the window today.
Three hours later: If anything, it looks worse at 11am. I really would love to hear the conversations, which must be going on, between the International Olympic Committee and the host organizers: "Now, you've been telling us for seven years that the air was going to be fine, and... these next ten days really are going to do the trick? Really, for sure? Just thinking out loud now, what if they don't? What's our Plan B?"
July 19, 2008
Everything changes tomorrow
This is the view at 10am, July 19, 2008, with 20 days to go until the Olympic opening ceremonies. Not that bad! And everything changes tomorrow.
Tomorrow the even-odd license plate rules go into effect to cut car traffic in Beijing. Three long-awaited subway lines (are supposed to) open. Factories are shut down in the neighboring provinces. Construction projects in the city (are supposed to) stop. And new extra-tight security measures go into effect at the airport, on the subways, in public places, just about everywhere. I'm going to the airport tomorrow afternoon and will leave plenty of time.
On whether the environmental rules will bring clear skies for the games themselves, I remainoptimistic. By the time I get back in a week, I really do expect a different vista.
That is different from saying that the Olympics will make a longer-term difference in Beijing's horrendous air-quality situation. On the evidence so far you'd have to say they won't, since the steps starting tomorrow are so obviously on a last-minute emergency basis.
Other last-minute notes:
- A few days ago, lunch with a group of professional-class Chinese friends at a software company. I ask what they think about the Olympics.Several of them mention, in a "of course this is common knowledge" fashion, that the government security teams have already been finding and removing bombs that terrorist teams were sneaking into the airport, the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium, and other important venues.
For several days skies have looked better and better in Beijing, and last night I rashly declared to friends that I thought the corner had been turned.
Well, maybe there are a few corners ahead. Here's the view just now,11am, July 16, 2008. Way better than it's been in the very recent past, but still some room for improvement with only 23 days to go:
Here's the new angle: An article today in the China Daily, the English-language vehicle for official views, took a much more tentative tone about Olympic "weather" than I'd seen before.
We heard from friends that skies were blue and clear in Beijing yesterday. Here is the view at 10am on July13, 26 days before the opening ceremonies and one week before the emergency shutdown of factories and traffic is supposed to begin.
Perhaps not blue, but better than it was eleven days ago and through most of the preceding three months. We'll hope this is a trend.
Update: with 25 days to go, this appears not to have been a trend, at least not a positive one. But only six days now until the sweeping shutdowns. I believe the neighboring factories will close, as advertised. Somewhat more cautious in my assumptions about the cars, since I've met so many people who have mentioned that they've obtained both even- and odd-numbered licenses plates, to cope with the even/odd restrictions on driving each day.
July 1, 2008
East or west, home is best
Beijing, 10am, July 2, 2008. Thirty-seven days until the Olympics.
June 20, 2008
Forty-nine days and counting (updated)
A little variety in perspective: an outdoor view, 9am June 20, looking toward the nearly-completed CCTV tower in Beijing's Central Business District. Distance to the tower is roughly half a mile, less than one kilometer, in this shot.
I was joking when saying earlier that maybe the factories are running 30 hours a day, 10 days a week, to meet output targets before the expected mandatory pre-Olympic shutdown next month. Now I'm not so sure it's a joke.
Either there is some unusual output surge underway, making the air for the last few weeks the worst I've seen in a year. I have not seen the sun or anything resembling blue in days and days. Or some catastrophic underlying change has occurred, making it all the more challenging to bring the air to acceptable levels in the next 49 days.
Whichever it is, I now get the point and will spend as many of those remaining days out of Beijing as possible. See you at the Games!
Update: CCTV from a nearby but different angle last November, when the building was much further from completion and a strong north wind had just swept through town.
June 18, 2008
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself *
I said recently that I would stop bellyaching about the air in Beijing until the beginning of next month.
Then I woke up and looked out the window this morning. Here we are at 10am, June 19, 2008, fifty days before the Olympic Games are to begin:
I guess I had not imagined how "just in time" the air-cleanup plan for the Olympic Games was going to be. I mean, is anyone from the International Olympic Committee getting the slightest bit nervous?
*Note for the kiddies: Title is of course from the Atlantic's own 19th-century contributor Walt Whitman. A recent noir-novel allusion to Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" may have skipped past me, but not this one! Naturally I think of Whitman's next line, "(I am large, I contain multitudes)", after multi-course banquets in the hinterland featuring items whose provenance I can't guess.
June 14, 2008
New entry for the lexicon of disorders: PAD
When I lived in Seattle, I used to hear about Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD, the moodiness that would set in when people went weeks without seeing the sun.
I wonder if there is a place for Pollutional Affective Disorder, PAD? Here is what I see out the window at 11am China time, June 14, with 55 days till the Olympics begin. To be fair, it rained hard last night, and the roads are wet, and some of what's out there could be an ochre-tinted fog. Still. It's looked this way for days, when the city was bone dry.
No more in this vein until early July, when some new Beijing subway lines will have opened; the moratorium on construction will be in place; the shutdown order for surrounding factories will take hold; and some actual officials, broadcasters, coaches, and perhaps even athletes will begin drifting in.
Update: as promised, no pic, but the view the next day is exactly the same.
June 12, 2008
I dunno, maybe I am getting depressed?
Another summer morning, 9 am. You get only so many summer days in life. The good news is, just 56 days to the Olympics, so very soon now things will be great.
Word from Pandas International is that an NBC-TV crew has recently been to the Wolong Panda Reserve, heavily damaged in the recent Sichuan earthquake. Reports are scheduled to run on both the Today show and the Nightly News with Brian Williams tomorrow, Friday, June 13.
"Are scheduled to" is not the same as "will." But for the heck of it, why not tune in? I would if I could.
June 9, 2008
Two months to opening day
The opening ceremony for the Olympics will be at 8:08 pm on August 8. The first full day of competition will August 9, two months from today.
June 9, 10am, standard southern view from our apartment in Guomao area of Beijing.
May 27, 2008
Seventy-three days to go (updated)
In my article about China's environmental-improvement efforts, in the current Atlantic, I talk about the Chinese scientists in charge of monitoring air quality in Beijing as the Olympics draw near. They laid out for me the timeline for getting cars, factories, power plants, etc under control so that the air is acceptable before opening day, August 8. Interestingly, the working definition of "acceptable" is "comparable to the L.A. Olympics in 1984."
I wonder whether it's about time for the shutdown and cleanup plans to start? It's been pretty bad these last few days. (May 27, 9am, Guomao area of Beijing:)
I also wonder, only half-jokingly, whether right now the factories are running extra fast (and extra smokily), to get as much produced as they can before the impending multi-week shutdown. As with everything on the "We are ready!" front, we'll see...
Update: I wasn't imagining it! Via Sage Brennan, a reminder of this (Chinese language) monitoring site for Beijing municipal air pollution. It reports the pollution index today in many downtown areas at 500! That is bad. I'm betting it's the top of the scale, too, since there are no readings above that. As a benchmark, on New Year's Day readings were generally below 50. Yesterday, which was no one's idea of a crisp, clear day, they were only in the mid-100s. Jeesh!
May 22, 2008
How to find the "Envision" company of China: look for "Vision Wall"
The June issue of the Atlantic went online a few days ago. It includes a lot of great political and cultural coverage (this and this and this, among many others). I also have an article in that issue on the surprisingly positive aspects of China's generally-dire environmental situation.
Since the issue has appeared on line, I've received several queries per a day about a question I tried to answer here earlier: where to find more info on the "Envision" company that is featured in the story? This is the company that makes super-efficient window glass but has been having a hard time breaking into China's construction market. Outside China, the company is known as "Vision Wall." You can learn more and make contact here.
May 10, 2008
Correct link for VisionWall/Envision -- in China environment article
The June issue of the Atlantic has started to reach subscribers. Not me in China yet, and not a number of friends who've written to ask about it. But enough to remind me to add one point of clarification.
In this issue I have a long narrative article called "China's Silver Lining," arguing a case I had not at all expected to argue before trekking across the country to see a variety of anti-pollution efforts. The argument, in brief, is that the environmental situation here is less uniformly disastrous than most outside discussion assumes -- and that recognizing where, why and how much it is improving (and where it isn't) is crucial for taking the next big steps forward. Those next big steps, in turn, are necessary so that Chinese industrialization doesn't kill everyone in China and half the people in the rest of the world.
You can judge for yourself. (Subscribers will get it in the next few days; online edition goes up in a couple of weeks.) Here is the additional info I am thinking of:
In the article I tell the story of a Canadian-based company whose Chinese operation is called Envision, and which is making a radically more energy-efficient form of window glass. Unglamorous innovations of this sort are significant because Chinese buildings standards have been so grossly inefficient that it takes dramatically more energy to heat or cool a new building in Shanghai or Beijing than its counterpart in a similar weather zone in Europe or North America. Thus merely installing different glass could, over time, spare China the need to burn millions of tons of coal.
The window company I'm mentioning is a small part of a larger drama, and I am not trying to advertise it in particular. Several people have asked how to find out more about it, which might not be obvious from the story. Outside China, it is known by the name VIsionWall, and its site is here. FWIW.
April 30, 2008
99 days to go!
May Day, 2008, 10am, view out our window in downtown Beijing. Opening Ceremony for the Olympics now 99 days away. Getting excited!
Update: Reader Paul Camp makes the reasonable suggestion that, in any future photos, I should include the front page from that day's newspaper somewhere in the frame, in the fashion of a kidnap-ransom photo. This is to eliminate the suspicion that I am using the samebleakpicture again and again.
For the record: stupidest moment in policy ever?
Usually I see no reason to chime in on an issue that many other people have discussed. But, perhaps because I've just come back to China, I feel obliged to register a view for the record about destructive nuttiness in my homeland:
The pandering and ignorance-across-party-lines represented by the John McCain-Hillary Clinton united front for a temporary reduction in the gasoline tax should make Americans hold their heads in their hands and moan. No one who has thought about this issue thinks that it will actually reduce prices or -- more important -- help the the people disproportionately hurt by $100+/barrel oil and $4 gasoline. And to the extent it has any effect on America's long-term approach to energy policy, transportation, oil dependence, and climate change, the effect will be perverse.
I can imagine that John McCain, who boasts about his sketchy command of economics, might consider this a good idea. But the master of policy, Hillary Clinton??
Please. This is embarrassing. It makes me long for the good old days of debating about flag pins on the lapel. And I wonder: has there been bipartisan agreement to stupider effect in, say, the last fifty years? The US Senate's 88-2 vote in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 doesn't count: they didn't know what lay ahead. Hillary Clinton, at least, knows why what she is saying is wrong. I will pay for a year's subscription to the Atlantic for anyone who can come up with a more foolishly destructive bipartisan example.
Update: The 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force vote that paved the way for war in Iraq doesn't count either. That vote reflected terrible judgment, in my view, but not outright stupidity or, as with the current gas-tax charade, certain foreknowledge that the policy being recommended would do no good.
April 19, 2008
My two home towns
Redlands, California (view out the window from my dad's house, orange groves across the street)
Beijing, China (view out the window from our apartment, just before I left)
143 days until the opening ceremony of the Olympics, but the sandstorms will have ended by then.
Out the same window, on a nice day last fall:
February 29, 2008
Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Du (Beijing air watch dept)
(Updated, below.)
Another very good Beijing-byline story by Mei Fong in the Wall Street Journal (link here, if it has not gone behind the firewall), about the ramped-up efforts to clean up the local skies before the Olympic games.
Two interesting details:
- Making vivid what it might mean to "do whatever it takes" to close down factories, traffic, etc long enough before the August 8 opening ceremonies to make the air acceptable:
One plant affected by the Olympic cleanup is a Beijing Eastern factory in southeast Beijing, which will be closed by the end of June, according to the Xinhua news agency. Workers at the plant confirmed that the factory -- which employs about 1,000 people -- will be suspending operations in May and reopening in a new facility in southwest Beijing at year's end. Many workers don't know what they will do in the interim, or if they will continue to receive their wages. "No one knows what will happen tomorrow," one worker said.
- The print version of the story, in the Asian Wall Street Journal, intriguingly has a final paragraph that is missing from the online version. It ends with this quote from Mr. Du Shaozhong, deputy head of the Beijing Environment Protection Bureau, who pleads with foreign journalists to give their readers a more positive image of Beijing as an Olympic venue:
"We need help from the media," said Mr. Du. "Tell them what you see with your own eyes."
Hoooh boy. What I saw with my own eyes today was extremely nice! After ferocious winds yesterday, this afternoon's skies were beautiful in Beijing, and the air was even kind of non-frigid! Jianwai, near Yonganli metro station, looking east, 3pm today:
But if outsiders are going to convey what they see with their own eyes -- well, let's hope it's all like today.
Update: What I am seeing with my own eyes, the next day:
February 20, 2008
OK, I really will stop after this
Beijing skyline, February 21, 2008, 10am. 169 days to go until the Olympics
As mentioned earlier here and here , in a reverse-backflip way it's been heartening to see the air quality deteriorate so catastrophically as China goes back to work after a two-week holiday. After all, that suggests that the closed factories and limited traffic during the holiday had some effect. By that logic, I should be growing more heartened by the day.
February 18, 2008
Feeling more encouraged still
If yesterday's Beijing skies were weirdly encouraging, I have to feel even better today! Guomao, looking southward, the city's second day back at work after Spring Festival.
Last on this topic for a while.
----
Update: Here is how the sky looked about a week ago, when the city was shut down and a ferocious wind had howled in from someplace cold. This is of course the new CCTV tower, whose two legs have recently been joined. It's not far from the scene above.
February 17, 2008
Weirdly, I find this encouraging
After ten days -- or ten months, I've lost track now -- of nonstop explosion-enhanced welcome of the new Year Of The Rat and Of The Olympics, Beijing appears to have returned to work today. That's what I judge from the jammed roads this morning, and the jammed sidewalks this past weekend, full of people carrying suitcases as they come back to town.
And it's what I judge from the air. It's been quite nice these last ten days. But this morning, at 10am, we have:
In the short run, plenty discouraging! So what's the good news here? If closing down China's factories and cars for even two weeks made a noticeable difference, maybe there is some hope that the widely-expected months-long closedown before the Olympics will do the trick. Especially if the famous Chinese weather-modification teams can arrange for some of the gelid Siberian blasts that have roared through the city in the past, blue-sky week to reappear in August. Just a thought...
February 8, 2008
Six months to go!
Six months from this morning, the first Olympic competitions will start in Beijing. Opening ceremonies: 8/8/08 at 8:08pm. The next day, August 9, let the games begin!
At 9am this morning, February 9, with the city practically shut down for Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year), and with the atmosphere cleaned out by an arctic blast from Siberia or somewhere, it looks pretty nice outside! (For past comparisons, including the same out-the-window view on other days, go here.) Because of the glare, it's slightly hard to see in this picture, but roads that are ordinarily jammed have virtually no cars:
An omen that this new Year of the Rat will bring clearer skies, if not fewer cars? And an environmentally-successful Olympic games? Let's hope.
December 21, 2007
Last comment of the year on the Beijing air situation
As promised earlier, I'm not planning to belabor the Beijing-air question while the Olympics are still more than half a year away. And as stated many times, I hope the Beijing Olympics will be a big success. China deserves to feel good about what it is putting together, and it will be best for the whole world if the Chinese people at large feel satisfied about this huge effort. I'm not being flip here: I'm rooting for China to pull this off just right and bask in deserved praise.
Also, these last three or four weeks in Beijing have included a lot of nice-seeming, if cold, days.
But the juxtaposition of the story below, from in today's Olympian, a weekly supplement to the state-controlled China Daily in the months leading up to the Olympics; and the picture below that, a view out the apartment window at 1pm today; and the almost unbelievable NASA satellite shot that is the third image, taken on December 17, a recent "nice-seeming" day, prompts reference to a few other observations. (The satellite image came via Danwei.org and BeijingAir.)
As my wife headed out for language class a few minutes ago, I (sincerely) said: It looks like a very nice day!
November 16, 2007
Are foreigners dissing China by noticing the smog?
After the jump are parts of an intriguing note from Shelly Kraicer of Beijing. He is a Canadian writer and film-festival programmer, based in China for the last four years, who runs a web site on Chinese film, ChineseCinema.org I don't know him personally.
His note is in response to my repeated ."sky is falling" screeds about the disaster of air quality in Beijing nine months before the Olympics. (Note: today, November 16, was a pretty nice day.)
His note raises a question I can't do more than acknowledge at the moment: whether the Western focus on environmental catastrophe in China is, in some way, part of a long process of belittling the Chinese. He recounts the comments of a Chinese media friend:
...who pointed out that the focus on pollution before the Olympics is a phenomenon of the typical inability of the Western press to focus on more than one idea at a time, when they're thinking of China (if at all). ... Now the big idea, Olympics branch, is Pollution Disaster! She pointed out that Athens' big Olympic story was Preparation DIsaster! But since, here, things seem to be generally on schedule, that story is unavailable. So the foul air story is its replacement. I think that what she's describing has an all too predictable undercurrent of looking down from lofty developed Western heights to squalid undeveloped Third World depths ("tut tut, of course they just can't get it right, the way we know we could").
At a strictly logical level, I know that these things are true:
* I personally hope the Olympics turn out to be a big success for China. I'm convinced that the general public here sees them, or has been led to see them, as an occasion of pride for China as a whole, not just "the regime." It would be better for everyone if China ends up feeling happy and successful in its efforts than if it feels embarrassed or, worse, disrespected.
* I genuinely view environmental carnage as Problem Number One for China itself, and as the biggest problem posed by China for the rest of the world. Fewer Chinese people feel as strongly about this because, I think, fewer of them have seen how it is elsewhere.
* And I think that to raise alarms about the air and water in China is fundamentally supportive of the people of China rather than in any way dismissive of them. After all, they are the ones who breathe this air their whole lives.
But I know that more than strict logic is involved in these questions. The note, below, is worth thinking about.
I'll wait until I see some of the local Beijingers resorting to masks. Even a middle-aged duffer has pride. And actually, it's been nice today.
November 8, 2007
Pandas en masse
Story about the Wolong Panda Reserve, the one place on earth where you can see herds of pandas, now out in our December issue. Story here. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) Free narrated slide show here. While I'm at it, Pandas International site, where Americans can make tax-deductible donations to support Wolong and other panda protection efforts, here.
Young pandas in action: chow time:
Young panda in repose:
Not just a beautiful backhand: brainy, too!
(With update, below)
I see from outside-world reports that Justine Henin might give up the chance to defend her Olympic gold medal in tennis, because she is so concerned about what the air in Beijing might do to her lungs. She has asthma and recently had to drop out of the last tournament she attempted to play here.
As noted earlier, I am against the idea of any threatened official boycotts of the Olympic games. The Beijing Olympics have become (despite many local grumbles) a source of pride for Chinese people broadly, not just for the regime. But I wonder whether we'll see many more individual "boycotts" of the sort Henin has mentioned.
This is becoming less amusing (Olympic air-quality watch)
Today, noon, downtown Beijing:
I like the painterly juxtaposition of the splash of red, from the (ubiquitous) Olympic poster at lower right, with the chemical gray-brown-ochre of what lies above. It's not fog.
I'll keep taking such pictures but will stop posting them. The point is made. But while I'm at it, a couple more after the jump.
Only days ago I was bragging about how crisp, clear, beautiful, and blue the Beijing skies were on the first three days of November: Thursday the 1st through Saturday the 3rd. Maybe November should be Olympic month?
Then it turned out that, by November 4th and 5th, things weren't looking so great any more. Maybe the 1st through 3rd as a concentrated Olympic schedule?
Now I find a report from an American who actually went for a run on that same blue-sky Saturday, Nov 3 afternoon that had raised my spirits -- only to be laid up as if with a sudden case of emphysema. As a reminder, here is how it looked that day:
And here is what it was like to go for a run:
Well, apparently poor air quality doesn't begin to engulf your lungs until they are stressed... With each passing step it became more painfully obvious that the air had overtaken my lungs. For perspective, it was like a having a large man press against my chest and every attempt to gasp for more air only made him heavier.
Small world dept: He was running along (a different part of ) the very same road shown in the blue-sky picture above, within an hour or so of the time I took it. Which means -- something, maybe that there is stuff in the air even when it's blue.*
So, I guess the Olympic target dates are down to Nov 1 and 2. And if you're thinking that Nov 6 might work, here is the view out the apartment window this morning, with 276 days to the Olympics:
*Small world #2: The runner is a young man named J.P. Fielder, who was with a visiting delegation from the National Association of Manufacturers. When I happened to meet him yesterday at a discussion session, he looked very much like a healthy 20-something specimen training for his next marathon, which I gather he is doing. He just won't do much more training here, I'm guessing. Thanks to Carter Wood of the NAM for posting Fielder's account.
Maybe they should hold the Olympics on Nov 1 through 3?
In Beijing the first three days of November were spectacular, as they had been last year.
Yesterday, November 4, some brown and grey in the sky. Today, some more:
Looking south from our apartment on Jianguo Road near East Third Ring Road.
Two hundred and seventy-seven days to go now. It's probably time to take a picture of the sky every day as the Games draw near, for later chronicling purposes to see how and when the campaign to clean up the air finally kicked in. Assuming and hoping that it does.
November 3, 2007
Maybe they just need to hold the Olympics in November?
Two hundred and seventy-nine days until the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, according to a big sign downtown. And -- unlike someotherdays -- it couldn't be more beautiful!
My family's first two days of residence in Beijing coincide with two days of spectacular weather. Robin's-egg blue skies; not a hint of pollution; the briskness that follows the passage of a cold front from Mongolia/Siberia, without the actual cold.
Looking north from near the Guomao subway stop, toward the half-constructed new CCTV building by Rem Koolhaas:
Looking east along Jianguo Road:
I was here one year ago today, at the time of an African presidents' summit, and it was just as pretty. Maybe this, as opposed to mid-summer, is the time for international games? Just a thought.
October 20, 2007
Ever wonder what Chinese reforestation looks like?
Well, in case you did, here's the answer. At least, this is what it looked like last month in Gansu province, a very poor western part of the country that also contains some very beautifulscenery.
In less scenic parts of Gansu, including near the capital of Lanzhou, hillsides were long ago stripped of trees and shrubs so they could be turned into little terraced farming plots or grazing areas for sheep. Many then eroded and turned into pure wasteland. That's where the trees are going back in.
It appears to work this way: local farmers are paid to girdle the hillsides with row after row of little foot-wide terraces. They plant trees on each terrace. Somehow they must get water to the trees (it's a dry region). On a few hillsides, we saw thickets of saplings 8 or 10 feet tall, which looked like they would survive. Most hillsides look like the ones below (and after the jump).
Now you know.
(Scale note: the baby trees in this first shot are about three feet tall; they're shown on a very small hill.)
Through odd circumstances, I ended up introducing Al Gore at a technology-world conference 36 hours before the Peace Prize news was announced, and then seeing him from the back of the room at his post-award appearance this morning in Palo Alto (below). Three quick points:
1) Whatever he must be feeling inside, Gore's statement was as non triumphalist-sounding as imaginable. He said that the recognition was all the more significant because he had the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; that he hoped this would help get out the message about a planetary emergency; that he would go to Oslo on behalf of the thousands of people who had been working on this issue for years; etc. He allowed himself not one displayed note of "I told you so." Update: Yes, of course I understand the Uriah Heepish concept of "ostentatious modesty." But in real time, and in the circumstances, it was an impressive statement.
Five minutes after the movers show up, to collect all the goods from our Shanghai apartment for shipment to Beijing, I see, via my Atlanticcolleagues, this new report on the most- and least-livable among 72 of the world's major cities.
The good news for my wife and me is that we're leaving city #71, the next-to-worst!
The bad news ...
5 Worst:
68. Bangkok
69. Guangzhou
70. Mumbai
71. Shanghai
72. Beijing
But, hey, life's not just about livability. It's pretty interesting here.
October 6, 2007
Olympic air-quality: the experts speak
Caijing magazine is an indispensable Chinese publication, conveniently now with an English-language website. Its name, 财经, means economics and finance. Its editor, Hu Shuli, is one of the most influential women in China. She and her staff well understand that the one part of the Chinese media with considerable latitude to expose and reveal is the business press. They have consistently used a lot of the operating room this allows them.*
In the latest issue: news on the ever-tantalizing "can Beijing possibly clear up its air before the Olympics?" question. (Previously on this theme: here, here, here, here, and, in more encouraging mode, here.) The magazine interviews Zhao Fengtong, vice mayor of Beijing with responsibility for traffic and related issues. The Asian Wall Street Journal has an English version of the full interview (subscribers only) -- Caijing's English site has only a summary.
If this doesn't look like much of an improvement, then the pictures aren't really doing their job.
Mere byproduct of the change of seasons, with Fall usually the least-polluted time of the year? Conceivably an indication of something more? As my wife and I prepare to move here, naturally we hope (as opposed to assume) that this is a pre-Olympic trend rather than just a seasonal fluke.
August 23, 2007
Olympics air-quality countdown: first results are in
Friends in Beijing said that the recent four-day experiment in ordering half the cars off the road was encouraging in two ways: It really sped up commute times (for those still driving), and it reflected some civic spirit about the Games. I'd be skeptical if this impression came solely from the (state-controlled) press, but independent email and blog reports suggest that people mainly did observe the restrictions -- only odd-number license plates some days, only evens the other days -- and demonstrated some "let's improve our city for the Olympics!" sentiment about it.
Unfortunately, by all accounts other than those of the state media, the experiment did little or nothing about Beijing's woeful air quality. For instance, this report from the recent "Beijing Air" blog, or this from the Guardian's Jonathan Watts:
Prayers for strong winds look set to become a major component of Beijing's Olympic preparations after a traffic-reduction trial failed to shift the smog that hangs over the city.
More than a million cars were taken off the roads for the four-day test period, but there was no improvement in the air quality, according to city officials.
Yesterday the skies above Beijing were the same dirty grey shade as when the test started on Friday.
From the start, everyone has assumed that the government would do whatever it takes to make the atmosphere acceptable for the Games. The question is becoming: will "whatever it takes" be enough? I hope more experiments are in store.
August 19, 2007
More on actually avoiding lead-covered toys
You learn something every day. Recently I made the off-hand comment that, short of a home metallurgy lab, families couldn't tell whether the paint on their children's toys contained too much lead.
Well, it turns out (with thanks to readers) that there are fairly cheap counterparts to the home metallurgy labs, for instance this one.
This doesn't change the main point -- people really shouldn't have to be checking toys this way after they've bought them, any more than they should have to check the drinking water for e. coli or each carton of eggs for salmonella. This is what public health departments are for. But it could be useful info for people who already have questionable products at home.
August 10, 2007
I guess I wasn't hallucinating (Beijing Olympics watch, cont.)
I spent Wednesday of this week going with my family to Nanjing, which is fascinating but which on that day fully justified its reputation as one of the "Three Furnaces of China" (with Wuhan and Chongqing). It was so hot and the trains there and back were so packed that soon after we reached Shanghai we fell asleep with the room lights still on and the TV news droning in the background.
In that hallucinatory state I half-noticed the shots of celebrations from Beijing, as the one year countdown to the Olympics began. Then I thought I heard the head of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, say something truly astonishing: that the air in Beijing was so bad that some events (like, the ones where athletes have to breathe) might have to be postponed!
In the morning I couldn't be sure whether that had been dream or reality.
Today was Olympic Countdown day in China, with the opening ceremonies in Beijing scheduled for one year from tonight. Eight -- ba -- is the luckiest Chinese number, so the games will begin on 08/08/08, at 8 pm. Auspicious enough for me!
Two items of media interest from the festivities:
* CNN International began its report talking about what is obviously the main deal-breaking threat to the Olympics: the air. The correspondent had gotten far enough into the story to say, "Some foreign athletes fear..." and then the screen went blank for the next two minutes or so. The same PR wizards who were at the satellite cut-off switch yesterday were apparently at work again today.
* As part of its extensive coverage today, the (state-controlled, English-language, China's-face-to-the-world) China Daily had a lead editorial that mentioned every possible threat to the game -- except the one that matters:
To the obvious question -- how could you possibly have a major athletic competition in conditions like these?? -- there are four main answers from people in Beijing:
(Central Business District, Beijing, 3pm, July 27, 2007 )
The countdown clock on the highway in from Beijing Capital Airport says 379 days before the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. Or maybe 378. In any case, just over a year to deal with situations like this:
View to the south, July 26, 8:30am, from apartment building in the Chaoyang Park neighborhood of Beijing. The obscured buildings in the "distance" are perhaps 100 yards away.
Another View From My Window {tm} shot after the jump.
No, not about the Sopranos. Didn’t see any of this season; don’t want to hear or read about the finale; will get the whole-season boxed set for $5 or so from the local dealer when it’s ready in the next few days.
According to today’s (English-language, state-controlled) China Daily, the vice-minister of Construction, Qiu Baoxing, has noticed that non-stop bulldozing, paving, and skyscraper-building have been less than ideal for China’s cultural and architectural patrimony.
Indeed, he goes so far as to compare the cultural/architectural effects of today’s gilded age construction boom to those of China’s two outright catastrophes of the past half century: the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Beautiful evening in Bangalore; big schooners of draft Kingfisher beer on the garden-veranda of a luxurious hotel in the center of the city. Evening falls. To perfect the experience and make sure we are not bothered by mosquitoes attracted to the ornamental pond nearby, a helpful touch from the hotel management: our own chemical fogger.
Kingfisher with an overlay of aerosol insecticide -- hard to beat!
May 3, 2007
My first sandstorm
A few days ago in Shanghai: 5pm. Threatening skies all day, walk out of a building into the kind of gusty wind that, back in Washington, would make me think, A thunderstorm is about to break. It rains hard for a minute, but mainly there’s grit. Suddenly my eyes are full of it, it’s on my teeth and the back of my throat (maybe I should hawwwwwkkk and spit?), I can feel it when I breathe. The sky is a yellowish color I’ve heard about as a pre-tornado warning. Sandstorm! At least a little one, enough to make me wonder about the dreaded blasts from the desert toward Beijing.
Or perhaps "mist"? As mentioned earlier, the relatively grim vista on Sunday morning -- Earth Day! -- could have been affected by weather that led to rain on Sunday afternoon. And today, Monday, it's actually bright and pretty outside. But a friend reminded me of what the cityscape looked like (from a higher floor in the same building), not long ago on a dry day. He calls his picture, below, "Shanghai Sunrise," since he was looking east toward the daybreak over Pudong. It features a sun whose color can't easily be explained by "mist" or "fog."
April 22, 2007
When people say China has a pollution problem... (updated)
.... this is the kind of thing they are talking about. Shanghai skyline, from our apartment near People's Square, 8:30am China time, Sunday morning, April 22, 2007. And Shanghai's not even that bad, compared with most other big cities.
UPDATE: After the jump are more photos of the blear, followed by the way the same scenes look on a very nice day here.
Signs that the apocalypse is near (Shanghai edition)
1) On a beautiful spring afternoon in the city, the gingko trees along (relatively) charming Da Gu Lu, beginning to leaf out, are filled with .... twittering birds! Where did they come from?
More ominous thought: how long can they last?
2) On Chengdu Lu, beneath the North-South Elevated Highway, a taxicab roars up to a red light, like always, and prepares like always to mow down the pedestrians in a marked crosswalk, with the green light in their favor. But a uniformed "traffic assistant" steps bravely into the cab's path,
A week ago I noticed a dark object arcing across the sky, at eye level from our 22nd-floor apartment in Shanghai. I just caught it in peripheral vision, rather than looking at it directly. Without thinking consciously, I began speculating: maybe a hawk? Maybe one of those turkey vultures that seem to show up against stormy springtime skies? Maybe just a crow, or a large and very dark pigeon?
Then I turned and saw what it was: a black heavy-duty plastic trash bag, swooping up and down in the turbulent wind. I thought a minute more and realized what I had been seeing but not noticing through the previous months: there are no birds in big Chinese cities.
