China’s whitewashed green initiative

China plans on shutting down many Beijing-area factories and cement plants for two months beginning in late July as a key part of the effort to clean the city's famously polluted air for the Olympic Games. Sorry China, temporary closures, while all eyes are on you during the Olympics does not count as cleaning up the environment.

Oh but they are planning on banning the use of half the city's 3.5 million vehicles, disallowing spray paint and other harsh chemicals to be used outdoors, closing about one-tenth of the city's gas stations, and halting construction in the Beijing area, which now has about 40 square miles of construction sites. This is only a temporary measure. They are basically going to put the city on hold during the Olympic games.

Their idea of staging “green games” does not involve anything more than to temporarily mothball 19 heavily polluting enterprises, including steel mills, coke plants and refineries. Coal-burning power plants, in China, account for a marked increase in soot, toxic chemicals and other climate-changing gases emitted into the atmosphere last year. In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the American West Coast.

The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.

Sulfur dioxide production threatens the health of China’s citizens, contributing to about 400,000 premature deaths a year. It also causes acid rain that poisons lakes, rivers, forests and crops. Photo courtesy of Chang W. Lee, New York Times.

China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

China has a history of buying cheap and often antiquated equipment from well connected domestic suppliers rather than importing costlier more fuel efficient modern equipment from other industrialized nations that would better serve to help clean up the gases and other pollutants emitted from their coal burning plants.

China is beginning to enjoy the increased access to electricity that until only recently was available for a few hours in the evening for many rural families. Bringing electrical power to hundreds of millions of people will take some time and the quickest and cheapest way to do this is through burning through their abundant supply of coal. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is suffering from the resultant pollution.

Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.

Shutting down a few factories and banning cars from Beijing’s roads may help visitors breathe a little easier during the Olympics but China has a long way to go clean up the air we will all breathe after the Olympics are over.