Pollution Pollution Go Away

That (very scary) satellite picture of the smog enveloping Beijing was taken sometime last year, before the Chinese government turned the knob up to 11 (and spent $17 million) on their air cleanup initiatives. In the last few months, Hu Jintao and his crew have done everything from construction freezes to forced factory shutdowns to prohibiting gas-powered leaf blowers. The last of these pre-Olympics cleanup programs kicked into effect on Sunday, as Beijing cut its automobile traffic in half (Beijing has 3.3 million cars). It's actually a less drastic plan than it probably seems; you can drive on alternate days depending on whether your license plate number ends in an odd or even number.

(If you don't think shutting down construction is a big deal, by the way, consider that China's construction industry is absolutely booming right now. The country will consuming over 1 billion tons of cement this year, and tradesmen are working on sites through the night, often in pretty dangerous and poorly lit areas. I walked out of my house one day at 9am, came back at 5pm and found an small one-storey building on my way home had been completely razed. A couple days later, they had an earthmover in there, and the day after that you'd never know that a building had ever been there. A couple days following that construction started on whatever they were building next.)

Whether the cleanup efforts are too little too late remains to be seen. As discussed on the Freakonomics blog, Mexico City's been on a similar system for years now (depending on your plate number, you have to park your car one day each week) but the whole scheme has actually served for further dirty the air as older and more polluting cars are being kept on the road longer. Beijing actually did a test run of the system last summer, and even though car usage was cut by 50%, Kenneth Rahn writes in the Journal of Geophysical Research that particulate matter floating around in the city's air only fell by 10%.

Beijing obviously doesn't have to deal with the old dirty car factor in the short term, but as Rahn tells Wired, you still gotta worry about the (goddam) Mongolians.

"[The city's] worst air-quality days are often not the result of human activities, but meteorological phenomena -- namely, the lack of cold fronts pushing across the city from Mongolia...China's basic air problem is that the city experiences roughly weekly meteorological cycles in which stagnant, polluted air coming from the provinces south of Beijing is flushed out by cold fronts from Mongolia. When the weather doesn't cooperate, there is little that the authorities can do."

I hope for everyone's sake that the Mongolian cold fronts cooperate. Now there's a sentence I never thought I would say.