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Cleaning up for the Olympics
One of the major concerns that athletes have been having over the upcoming summer Olympics in Beijing is the notorious air pollution there. The government has responded by basically making that area of China be *not* China as much, as that is the only way to address the issue fast, halting production at the worst offending factories, taking millions of vehicles off the streets, etc, and it is apparently slowly working, the weather there with the air pollution index has been getting progressively better. The question then is, if the Games come off well, with no major bad incidents, will the idea of clean air having intrinsic human value translate into year round controls? Their economy is based on industry of all types and exports, a lot of it in the "fast and dirty" mode, so can it be changed, will the lesson sink in? It has already had a significant impact on millions of people there, the emphasis on having the most fantastic games ever has cost them billions in direct expense and more billions in lost productivity and major personal annoyances for so many residents, but a lot is riding on the outcome for them nationally speaking in terms of world "face".
Millions of residents have been driven off the roads because of a partial ban on cars, while tens of thousands of workers have been forced to move away because their factories were relocated. ed.z.: No free lunch. You can't ramp up such a huge massive shift from an agrarian society to a manufacturing society and ignore all the pollution realities and still have a clean environment. The west works under much stricter rules, so the investors went where the labor was much cheaper and until just very recently no rules other than making product cheap, environment be damned. I am hoping that their exposure back to some clean air during the games will lead to them -all the Chinese people "them"- taking their environment more seriously, and help to get the planet back onto a more competitive and evener playing field. Fair is fair after all. Air and water respect no imaginary dotted lines on a map (which to me was the most serious flaw of Kyoto). Their pollution is everyone's pollution, we all have been paying for it even if it isn't in the form of a direct cost for that last thing you bought at wallyworld.