Today marked the beginning, and sadly, the end of the Chinese year of the horse. Everything started off fine. There were fireworks, celebrations, feasting on cats and dogs, and a day off from corruption and reporting fake economic data.
But then dawn broke over Beijing and the edible toxic smog rolled in.
The horse died abruptly and the Chinese year of the horse was over.
They will still take the next two weeks off to enjoy the toxic haze, feast on toxic Chinese cuisine, visit a few ghost malls, and buy a few more apartments in vacant high rises.
Admin raises one of my favorite topics, Chinese pollution. They have screwed the pooch on this one and I do not think any current technology is going to save them. Large swaths of China is so polluted, especially in the industrialized mega cities that they are a hazard to the health of everyone living in them.. Their water pollution problem is intractable. They have poisoned their country and themselves to achieve an accelerated dive into the 21st. It has made a very few extremely wealthy, they will escape by and large, we see it in Massachusetts as many wealthy Chinese nationals buy up properties for their children to go to school here. Then proceed to move the family here. They always pay cash oftentimes over a $1,000,000 for a property. An excerpt from a recent article:
China’s massive pollution problem
Air pollution has made many cities in China “barely suitable for living,” and is making the population sick — and angry
By Keith Wagstaff | November 9, 2013
Tweet
inShare11
18
Quite literally sick and tired of the smog.
Quite literally sick and tired of the smog. (ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images)
H
ow bad is China’s smog?
Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China. The air in some cities there is so bad that, at times, visibility drops to 30 feet, traffic slows to a crawl, and nearly everyone wears masks over their noses and mouths. In Harbin, a city of 11 million people, government officials recently shut down roads, schools, and the airport when air pollution levels hit 40 times the safe limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO). During the “airpocalypse” in Beijing earlier this year, the density of small, lung-penetrating particles reached 993 micrograms per cubic meter — a concentration normally not seen outside of forest fires. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers anything above 300 dangerous, and maxes out its scale at 500. The smog was so thick in Beijing — which English-speaking residents call “Greyjing” — that a factory building burned for three hours before anyone even noticed that it was in flames.
Link to full article:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=13&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CGMQFjAM&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftheweek.com%2Farticle%2Findex%2F252440%2Fchinas-massive-pollution-problem&ei=LbzrUpyuBMGBrQeUoYGIAg&usg=AFQjCNEyHZRmEGSVdIFTQteWO1G1WgkbmA&bvm=bv.60444564,d.bmk
Bob.
Yo,
My daughter’s high school sends a group of kids to Beijing each year as an exchange, they have a fairly intensive Mandarin program that my daughter takes. In the last few years almost every kid has returned with hacking coughs and various lung problems. They can not become acclimated to the horrendous air pollution over there six weeks time. One girl was sent home, as she had not notified them that she had asthma. They freaked out and sent her home immediately out of fear for her life, and their own liability. It is sad, the average poor working stiff in these cities are getting screwed to enrich a few corrupt connected people at the top of the ranks.
Bob.
If you live in China, don’t have kids.
Pirate Jo
You’d love China. They don’t like kids either.
Admin,
I think China’s one-child policy sucks. If the only way to limit our population to something environmentally sustainable is through some creepy, totalitarian, ham-fisted government program, then screw humanity. If we aren’t smart enough to figure it out on our own, then we aren’t worth saving and get what we deserve.
Wish I could find some of those China shitfests with Smokey — the lover of all peoples named Wu,Hu, Ding, Dong, Wing, Wang, Fuk and Yu.
I’ve been beating like a rented mule the fact that Environmental Collapse will lead to the demise of China. He stuck his head in the sand. Where is he now??
“edible toxic smog”
When I lived in Korea, the smog was terrible in Seoul, you could actually see and taste it. It made your clothes smell, and when you did the laundry, the water was black. They are poisoning themselves to get rich and sell us cheap cars and cheap crap, and they’re getting paid in worthless dollars and are accumulating worthless t-bill IOU’s. Well, except for the gold, they’re getting all the gold.
Yeap Stuck,
You live in a overpopulated East Coast corridor, can you imagine putting another billion people in the U.S.
“can you imagine putting another billion people in the U.S.”
Just imagine what the unemployment rate would be …
Smokey just posted a comment a couple of days ago, surprised you missed it
Bostonbob says:
“If you think the air is bad, check out the water problem:”
the water guy delivered drinking water in a bottle that is virtually indistinguishable from the deionized water we use. the beautiful blonde got worried that either we were using drinking water in our batteries or we were drinking potentially poisonous deionized water.
I explained that the label says it is merely purified water and that it is basically drinking water without the minerals added for taste. She did not buy that and had to test the resistivity of the water, the de-io and the purified read zip, tap water had a small reading, exactly as stated in Wikipedia, still, she remains on alert until she gets a second opinion since mine is always suspect.
I told her when I was in the army the water treatment guys must have given us a 1:1 chlorine/water blend to make the water safe. I added that the local water company dumps chlorine in the water but gives us a report of all the metals and poisons in the water in parts per million,
this water here is purer and we are spoiled to have such clean water on tap…she did not want to listen to my long explanation, no doubt she will come back next week and tell me that her unemployed neighbor told her that purified and distilled water are the same as de-io.
El,
People do not realize how well we have it in the US water wise. Here in the northeast there is an abundance of water. If other nations such as China and India saw the millions of homes and tens of millions of acres of lawn we irrigate just to the pretty green grass they would freak out. I built a large condominium community on Cape Cod, essentially in the sand, on a golf course. They have their own wells and water at will, then fertilize the shit out of the grass, then pay a landscaper a small fortune to mow it weekly. It does look fabulous, but what a waste. All boomers and silents. This is not an indictment of a generation. It is just that they think these excesses are normal and can go on forever. They think this is normal because they grew up in an era when water from the tap was endless, cheap and always potable. It will be interesting to see what will happen when the water supply has a significant interruption. The people in China have learned to accept crappy polluted conditions, most Americans would not survive there very long. Certainly not the pampered suburban American.
Bob.
They took 14 air [Beijing samples over seven consecutive days. Using genome sequencing, they found about 1,300 different microbial species in the heavy smog period of early last year. The scientists compared their results with a large gene database. What about their findings? Most of the microbes they found were benign but a few were responsible for allergies and respiratory disease. As Nature News reported, the most abundant species identified was Geodermatophilus obscurus, That is a common soil bacterium. Streptococcus pneumonia, however, was also part of the brew, which can cause pneumonia, along with Aspergillus fumigatus, a fungal allergen, and other bacteria typically found in faeces. “Our results,” wrote the researchers, “suggested that the majority of the inhalable microorganisms were soil-associated and nonpathogenic to humans. Nevertheless, the sequences of several respiratory microbial allergens and pathogens were identified and their relative abundance appeared to have increased with increased concentrations of PM pollution.”