Onion News: China Celebrates Status as #1 Air Polluter

A new report from the Onion News Network highlights China’s reaction to the fact that it is now the world’s top producer of air pollution, with the Chinese Ambassador to the United States calling the smog levels a “grand symbol of Chinese supremacy”. A celebration currently going on in China includes the 100 Widow Smog Dance and a magnificent Coal Ash Dragon kite.

Watch:

China Celebrates Its Status As World’s Number One Air Polluter

“The labor of the people has made the sky black with progress!”

Link [The Onion]

Book Review: Smogtown – The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles

If you think the air is bad in Los Angeles right now, you probably didn’t live there for much of the past century. When the thick, view-obscuring gray haze first appeared in the city on July 26th, 1943, nobody knew quite what to think of it. Was some factory suddenly spewing tons of pollution in to the air? Was it some kind of chemical attack? Citizens of this Southern California city didn’t yet realize the cost of their own modernized lifestyle, wherein practically every single resident owned their own vehicle.

“Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles” by Chip Jacobs and William Kelly tracks the smog invasion of LA from the first moment it arrived through the many efforts to combat it.  This might not sound too exciting – especially for people who aren’t hardcore environmentalists interested in every detail of our nation’s struggle with pollution – but you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that Smogtown is thoroughly entertaining from start to finish.

It’s a dramatic story, playing out like it was written for the screen, with clear protagonists and villains – and humor peppered throughout. While Smogtown does an excellent job of providing the hard facts about how the pollution got so bad, the weakness of the government in controlling it and the difficulty of convincing Los Angelenos to sacrifice any part of their lifestyle to make it go away – it’s also a gripping tale that will keep you eagerly turning the pages. What with the terrified citizens crashing their cars in panic at the appearance of the smog and bewildered, ineffectual government officials bumbling about, it’s almost like Godzilla, but with pollution as “the beast”.

Of course, we all know how this story ends. Air pollution is still a major concern in Los Angeles, and despite knowing that the automobile is the source, LA is still crawling with cars and lacking a decent public transit system. But don’t let that stop you from giving this lively story a read. It’s got sex, plenty of Hollywood glamour, scandal, and murder – but never falters in its brilliant coverage of an incredibly important environmental issue.

Check out the Smogtown blog at lasmogtown.com for lots more info, including the latest news about efforts to fight pollution in LA.

Link [Smogtown]

So Much for Less Traffic Pollution in Beijing

Last summer, Beijing surprised us all when the city actually managed to reign in air pollution by removing thousands of cars from the streets (and temporarily shuttering certain nearby factories) during the Olympics. The program was so successful, the Chinese government decided to keep it going, actually paying drivers to give up their cars. Unfortunately, something went wrong somewhere along the way. You see, Beijing is somehow adding 1,466 cars to the roads every single day.

From Reuters:

“The city is facing serious traffic pressure and safety risks due to the growing number of automobiles,” Song Jianguo, head of the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau, was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying.

Beijing registered 65,970 new vehicles in the first 45 days of the year, or a daily increase of 1,466, Xinhua said.

China has introduced incentives to try to boost domestic demand but official data shows car sales in January fell 7.76 percent from a year earlier as traditionally roaring economic growth slowed.

Beijing has also introduced rules aimed at taking a fifth of private cars off the road each day, according to license plate numbers, to ease congestion and pollution.

I wonder if the exodus of Chinese villagers from rural areas affected by drought, desertification, pollution and economic depression has anything to do with this? Likely the growing middle class has a hand in it, at least. It just seems insane to have such a large increase of vehicles on the roads despite efforts to curb traffic within city limits. This definitely won’t help them get their notoriously dirty air under control.

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: Flickr user poeloq

How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air

You can dramatically increase the health of the air in your home, office buildnig or business with just a few plants. Research has shown that with only three varieties of plants, we can “grow our own fresh air” in indoor environments – the Areca palm, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue and the Money Plant.

This idea was tested at the Paharpur Business Centre and Software Technology Incubator Park in New Delhi, India where they filled the 20-year-old, 50,000 square foot building with 1,200 plants – 4 for every occupant. It has since been found that there is a 42% probability of increasing blood oxygen by 1% if one is inside the building for 10 hours, and incidences of eye irritation, respiratory symptoms, headache, lung impairment and asthma have decreased dramatically.

Surprisingly, one effect of placing so many plants in an indoor space was energy conservation. GreenSpaces found in an experiment that energy costs were reduced by an amazing 15%. They now plan to test this concept on an even larger scale, in a 1.75 million square foot building – using over 60,000 plants.

From GreenSpaces:

Kamal Meattle reported the results of his efforts to fill an office building with plants, in an effort to reduce headache, asthma, and other productivity-sapping aliments in thickly polluted India. After researching NASA documents, he concluded that a set of three particular common, waist-high houseplants—areca palm, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue, and Money Plant—could be combined to scrub the air of carbon dioxide, formaldehyde and other pollutants.

At about four plants per occupant (1200 plants in all), the building’s air freshened considerably, and the health and productivity results were staggering. Eye irritation dropped by 52 percent, lower respiratory symptoms by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent and asthma by 9 percent. There were fewer sick days, employee productivity increased, and energy costs dropped by 15 percent.

GreenSpaces believes that the use of indoor plants could help reduce energy consumption around the world. By “growing” fresh air indoors, there’s less need for a constant supply of external fresh air in air-conditioned buildings.

Bringing plants indoors is such a mood helper, too – especially during the winter. You can keep the air you breathe cleaner & healthier, beautify your indoor space and brighten gloomy days just with a few inexpensive houseplants – who wouldn’t want that? We can’t wait to see what the results are of the test in the new GreenSpaces building.

Link [GreenSpaces]

InterIntel Working to Bring Environmental Solutions to Haiti

Daniel Schnitzer is Co-Founder and Director of Project Management at InterIntel, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity based in Cambridge, MA.  InterIntel works at the community level to improve energy services and environmental management with empowering, self-sustaining projects.  They are presently organizing three projects on the southwestern peninsula of Haiti. In this post, Dan explains how he started the organization with the goal of “democratizing sustainability”:

Back in August of 2008, during my first trip to Haiti, I was standing in front of the heaviest paperweight I had ever seen in my life. It was a perfectly new 170 kW diesel generator, connected to a non-functional streetlighting grid in a coastal town called Tiburon on the western tip of Haiti’s southern peninsula. My Haitian friends had told me that the local congressman spent tens of thousands of dollars and a great deal of effort into developing this project. But now that he had been re-elected, no one was sure whether this generator would ever give light to Tiburon. Electricite d’Haiti built the grid, but had since abandoned it.

During that trip I encountered many other symptoms of the governmental and market failure we read and hear about most often in the form of statistics like these: 800,000 children and 500,000 women die worldwide each year from respiratory disease caused by indoor air pollution from dirty biomass cooking fuel; in 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne killed 3,000 people in Haiti; in 2008, Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike tore paths of destruction through Haiti, causing untold property damage and killing at least 800; each year 30,000,000 trees are cut down in Haiti, which now has just 1% of its land under forest cover.

These symptoms are inequitable for the obvious reason that they disproportionately affect the poor, the oppressed and the disenfranchised. InterIntel and many other organizations operate on the conviction that solutions for many of the root causes of symptoms like illness, disasters and poverty are readily available. Further, we believe that solutions can go one step further than economic development; they can foster social justice.

However, time and again, the “solutions” pandered to the governments and people of least developed countries by the IMF, World Bank and USAID not only failed, but in many cases made situations worse. This is hardly surprising, though. What little participation countries receiving aid from these organizations have is controlled by their finance ministers, who represent the interests of the business elite – not the people.

That is why InterIntel takes a community-based, participatory approach to its projects. We use surveys to discover the needs, constraints and desires of residents, and depend on facts, not ideologies, to guide our work. In order to truly solve the root problems so ubiquitous in the developing world, we must engage in empowering, self-sustaining activities that put people to work, prevent capital flight, and transfer knowledge.

For example, InterIntel discovered through its surveys of 265 residents in the community of Les Anglais that the payback period on a $20US solar-powered LED lamp could be as little as three months, and typically at most fifteen months, based on the amount presently spent on kerosene and candle-based lighting. If such lamps were available, residents would have the option to use a light source that is better for their health and their budget. Our solution is to build a clean energy retail store to stock appropriate energy technologies like solar lamps, solar home systems, and efficient charcoal stoves. We have introduced three key features of this project – cooperation, training and microfinance – to ensure that it has the greatest possible impact.

I encourage you to read more about this and our other projects on our website, www.interintel.org.  In order to make these projects a reality though, InterIntel needs to raise a minimum of $20,000.  We estimate our total costs for the year to be $80,000.  Since receiving our 501(c)(3) status in mid-January of 2009, we have raised over $2,500 from individual donors and greatly appreciate donations of any size – even $25 is enough to purchase and ship two solar LED lamps to Les Anglais. Donations can be securely made through PayPal on our website: www.interintel.org. If you are interested in volunteering, please visit our website to learn more about us and send an email. You can also support our cause by sending our website to friends, family and colleagues, or by becoming a “fan” of InterIntel on our facebook page.
-Daniel Schnitzer

This is our first post from guest blogger Daniel Schnitzer. If you’re interested in blogging for us, send an email to dorothee@see3.net.

Cleaner Air Has Added 5 Months to US Life Span

Average life expectancy in the United States has increased by five months thanks to cleaner air over the past two decades, according to a federally funded study. Americans’ average life span increased almost three years to 77 between 1978 and 2001. It’s the first study to show that air quality as an effect of life expectancy.

From The Huffington Post:

For the study, scientists used government data to track particulate pollution levels over two decades in 51 U.S. cities. They compared these changes to life expectancies calculated from death records and census data. They adjusted the results to take into account other things that might affect life expectancy, such as smoking habits, income, education and migration.

On average, particulate matter levels fell from 21 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 14 micrograms per cubic meter in the cities studied. At the same time, Americans lived an average 2.72 years longer.

“We saw that communities that had larger reductions in air pollution on average had larger increases in life expectancies,” said the study’s lead author, C. Arden Pope III, a Brigham Young epidemiologist.

It seems pretty obvious that this would the the result of such a study – is it really surprising that we’re all healthier and can expect to live longer when we’re not inhaling grit particles from air pollution on a daily basis? What’s nice about this study, though, is that now that there’s a number on the increase in life span that people can expect from cleaner air, more clean air laws might get pushed through.

Link [The Huffington Post]
Photo credit: Flickr user Clinton Steeds

To Curb Pollution, China Paying Drivers to Give Up Their Cars

China’s efforts to curb air pollution by restricting driving within Beijing city limits was quite a success, so government officials sought to extend the benefits by continuing the traffic limits. Some citizens aren’t too happy with that idea, however, because of the inconvenience of finding alternative transportation. So the Chinese government has taken to offering up to $3,600 to give up heavily polluting vehicles, and even giving drivers more money to purchase cleaner cars.

From Treehugger:

The scheme by the environmental protection bureau is only one part of a massive plan to get Beijing’s more than 350,000 high-polluting vehicles out of the city during 2009. China’s capital has already banned cars from the roads on one of five weekdays based on their license plate number as part of a six-month trial that follows broader anti-traffic restrictions during the 2008 Olympic Games. The pay-off, say officials, is a 7 percent rise in blue sky days this year (although as we’ve mentioned, that statistic remains suspicious).

The initiative would take about 10 percent of the city’s 3.5-million registered cars off the roads — an amount that is estimated to account for 50 percent of the city’s notorious vehicle pollution.

Under the new rules, anyone caught driving vehicles that don’t meet Beijing’s lowest emissions standard within the city’s Fifth Ring Road or within a radius of 10-15km from the city center will be fined 100 yuan (about $12) after a three-month grace period.

The amount of compensation given to drivers giving up heavily polluted vehicles depends on the size, type and age of the vehicle – and payment will be prorated, so the sooner they give up the offending car, the more money they get.

It’s a commendable plan, especially since it will likely raise demand for cleaner cars, giving China’s auto industry a greater incentive to build them. It’s nice to see that after years of very little action – and ever-higher greenhouse gas emissions – China is doing something real to address the problem of air pollution in Beijing. Of course, there’s a long road ahead and China is still struggling to balance environmental concerns with economic progress. Let’s hope that this represents a big step forward.

Link [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Flickr user poeloq

BlueCool: An Eco-Friendly Way to Cool Big Trucks

Anyone who’s ever been at a truck stop even for a few minutes knows how polluting these monster vehicles are, even when the drivers are sleeping.  To keep their air conditioning running so their cabs stay cool, drivers keep their engines running at all times. That makes for an awful lot of exhaust fumes. So, a company called Webasto Products began working on a solution, which has been described as ‘high-tech ice’.

From CNN:

Webasto calls the system BlueCool. The heart of the system is a 300-pound black box that’s mounted on the truck’s frame rail. As the trucker drives, the system sends refrigerant through a matrix of graphite and a water/glycol mixture inside the box, creating blocks of ice.

When the truck is stopped, the driver turns on an air handler that circulates coolant around the ice and blows cold air from the unit into the bunk area of the cab. The fan and circulation pump use only 3.5 to 10 amps from the truck’s battery — which means there’s no danger of draining the battery, Webasto says.

“When it’s running it doesn’t have any emissions or use any fuel,” said Thomas. He said BlueCool can maintain a comfortable bunk temperature for up to ten hours.

The EPA has estimated that idling trucks consume nearly a gallon of fuel per hour, while emitting nitrogen oxides and particulates, which contribute to smog.  This problem incited Webasto to launch a campaign to raise awareness of the issue, called Make a Leap.  As part of the campaign, a trucker took a BlueCool-equipped truck on a summer-long publicity tour of truck stops across the nation.  Truckers are excited about the prospect of using less diesel, and the system would pay for itself within a year.

Link [CNN]

Beijing is Even Smoggy on Google Maps

There’s no hiding this kind of nasty funk in the air.  Beijing authorities might try to tell everyone it’s ‘mist’, but take a gander at the dirty lookin’ air hovering above the city on Google Maps.  Yuck.  How’d you like to breathe that in every day? Olympic athletes only have to deal with it during the games; Chinese citizens have to deal with it for life.

Link [Google Maps]