Above we see the haze over Beijing on July 21, one day after two months of special air pollution controls were imposed in advance of the Olympics, August 8-24, 2008, and the Paralympics, September 6-17, 2008. Except for taxis and Olympic vehicles, automobiles have been banned on alternate days (based on their licence plate numbers). Most construction has been halted in Beijing, and factories shut down in Beijing and nearby Tianjin and Tangshan. The government hopes to reduce emissions by 60 percent, giving incoming hordes of athletes a better chance of huffing and puffing their way through the Beijing Olympiad.
Do democracy and "green" -- which is to say, good governmental environmental protections and sustainability policies -- go together like bread and butter? Or can a heavy-handed top-down response more effectively implement strong environmental rules, and get faster and better results?
This last is "khaki green" -- a future in which massive environmental damage, a destabilized climate, and spiking human population bring on health crises, food and resource shortages, and other chaotic evil severe enough to produce military enforcement of strict environmental and resource policies.
Did I say future? No need to wait: the present is giving us a real time opportunity to gauge whether a totalitarian government can be equally or more effective in clearing pollution from the air than the enviro-protection policies and agencies of the world's democracies.
"Compared to conditions in eastern China the previous month, the haze in this image appears relatively light," according to NASA Earth Observatory, the source of this satellite photograph. "Several factors, however, can affect how much haze collects in a region, including weather patterns and transport of pollutants from other areas. The thick haze over the Beijing region in early June 2008, for instance, might have resulted partly from smoke produced by Russian wildfires."
A family emergency has consumed much of the past few days. All is now well. Apartment Ecology's regular linking and snarking will resume next week.
[Update, 12:59 pm: Made a few small edits to this post, to make my point more clearly.]
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