Smog and Mirrors: China’s Plan for a Green Olympics
Smog and Mirrors: China’s Plan for a Green Olympics
I’ve posted about China in the past but with the Olympics coming up there is a real urgency to clean up the place before everyone becomes ill. I hope they’re up to the challenge.
But on a bad day — come August, say, when temperatures approach 100 degrees — the atmosphere around Beijing becomes a photochemical bouillabaisse of coal smog, steel-mill spume, and tailpipe crud, mingled with concrete dust and baked in the oven formed by the surrounding hills.
…An official “Olympic Action Plan,” released in 2002, laid out a layer cake of city wide improvements — including more than 400 miles of new expressway — liberally plastered with green icing: “pollution- free burning, geothermal-operated pumps, solar energy power generating, solar energy heating, fuel cells, and nanometer materials.”…Whether they can strong-arm upwind provinces — including much of China’s industrial heartland — into blowing off a couple weeks’ worth of GDP to clear the air over rival Beijing is an open question.
…Should air quality threaten to steal the show, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau promises to have its fleet of cloud-seeding aircraft warmed up on the runways, ready to bomb the sky with silver iodide and set off air-scrubbing showers over competition areas.
…Either way, Wilber and his team at the USOC’s Performance Services Division are recommending an unusual addition to US athletes’ bag of competitive tricks: activated-charcoal face masks, both on the field and off.
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