Alex Wang's Blog
Can Beijing Clear the Air in Time for the Olympics?
August 10, 2007
Posted by Alex Wang in Curbing Pollution , Greening China
The hot topic in Beijing this week is whether the murky haze of smog that usually covers the city will be lifted when the world's athletes begin to descend on Beijing in August 2008. This summer certainly hasn't been pretty from an air quality perspective here in Beijing.
Dramatic things are possible though and we may be surprised at what we see come August 2008. One of the key measures Beijing is taking to clean the air is to remove a dramatic number of cars from the roads. There is going to be a trial run of this from August 17-20, when some 1.3 million of Beijing's 3 million motor vehicles will be taken off the road. A smaller scale practice run last fall (a mere 800,000 cars!) during a China-Africa forum showed drastic and virtually immediate reductions in NOx levels of 40 percent. There are some amazing satellite photos and stats on the NASA Observatory site:
Like many things in China, the scale of this endeavor is simply mind-boggling.
Other techniques to clear the air include shutting down factories, holding up the massive amounts of construction going on, and unleashing China's substantial artificial rain-making apparatus in the days before the Games. I've heard that the main concern is forcing clouds to rain themselves out before they hit Beijing so as to avoid a rainy opening ceremony; however, rain almost always whips up winds that blow pollution out of the city for the following day or two. If it helps to remove pollution, I can't imagine that Beijing will not use it in the lead-up to the big show.
So, I'm not too worried about the air during the Beijing Olympics. The real challenge is for China to sustain this long after the Olympics are done and gone. There are a lot of steps that China can take to make this a reality (while continuing to grow and improve economic conditions for the nation's people), but the devil will be in the details of implementation and making sure that leaders have the will to do what it takes. More on this later...
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