Tuesday marked the first day that Beijing initiated an emergency red alert for toxic smog. The move shuttered schools across the city, ground construction to a halt and left the Chinese capital’s roads unusually quiet, with half the city’s cars ordered off the streets.Let's see here. The air in China is so toxic that people are being forced to stay indoors, inert, like some bad, 1970's, dystopian science fiction movie, but the real threat is a 0.2 degree increase in temperature at some unspecified date in the future which will bring about nothing but calamities, none of which have shown up yet. Right.
Still, that didn’t stop pollution from spiking as high as 367 on the air quality index as of Tuesday afternoon, according to a monitor maintained by the U.S. Embassy. China’s air-quality index has a maximum reading of 500, with the government describing anything above 300 as “severely polluted.”
This is one more example of living in the religious fantasy world of our academics, politicians and media. According to them, we should be handing over power and money to stop slight warming while people just like them in China totally wreck their environment. Brilliant.
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| Like the US Navy, China is haze gray and under way! Err, well, maybe not completely under way. Most people should stay home. But they are haze gray! |
So, the Chinese are having their noses forcefully rubbed in the fact that the smoke from burning coal without scrubbers is going to smother them in their sleep one of these days, and they'd better clean up their act if they want to survive to a ripe old age. And the most direct route to achieve this is to burn less coal.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the people worried about globabl warming want them to burn less coal to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
Either way, the obvious thing for them to do is to burn less coal. So where's the conflict?
The Chinese model, like the one the progressives here in the US want, is one where a small number of people make nearly all the decisions for everyone. The Chinese environment as it is right now is proof positive that the small number of elite aren't maximizing the greater good. Instead, they're behaving in a perfectly predictable way and maximizing good for themselves. It's pretty typical for a society where power is concentrated in a few hands.
ReplyDeleteOne more data point: Al Gore, the King of Global Warming, err, Climate Change pollutes way beyond his allotted quota and lives high on the hog. The difference between him and China's overlords is one of degree and makes you wonder just how far he'd go if he possessed their power.
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