
A Blue Sky in Beijing? It’s Not a Fluke, Says Greenpeace - fspeech
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/asia/pollution-beijing-declines.html
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ajdlinux
Pro tip: if you're going to visit Beijing, do what I did and accidentally
schedule your trip over the same dates as a major diplomatic summit.

It was blue sky all week during APEC 2014, then on the last day before I
headed for Seoul, it was wheels-up for Air Force One and right back to smog...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APEC_blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APEC_blue)

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derda
Can confirm with own anecdotal evidence, was there in 2007 and they told me
there is some kind of communist party summit (and thus increased security in
parts of the city). The sky was blue and Beijing was kind of beautiful. Sure
enough 1 or 2 days after that summit was over you could barely see the other
side of the street.

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tristanj
A lot of the smog in Beijing comes from burning coal. Over the past few years,
Beijing has ordered dozens of heavily polluting factories & power plants to
shut down and move away from the city. I think Shanghai has done something
similar. Combined with the push to discourage using coal for home heating,
which is brought up in the article, air quality has improved in Beijing.

It is a shame though Beijing is mostly exporting their pollution elsewhere.
China as a whole is still building more of those polluting coal fired power
plants. China plans to increase their coal-fired generation capacity by nearly
20% over the next few years. Coal usage (and coal CO2 pollution) will increase
and is projected to remain flat through 2030. Though the pollution will be out
of sight from major cities. Guess they can't get enough of that cheap coal
electricity.

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Already__Taken
Is it possible to ban the export of coal power? If your country needs it then
go forth. You just can't resell that power stations output internationally.

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lmm
Electricity is fungible, so such a ban would make no difference in practice.
China has enough non-coal plants that they could just say all the power they
were exporting came from them.

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Already__Taken
It would effectively take the form that if a country or maybe provider is
generating coal power, they are unable to export any power.

I'm not arguing this would fix everything, just adding direct negative to
using coal. If you need coal to make your own country function, fine go ahead
that's still a problem that exists.

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dreen
Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe:
[http://airindex.eea.europa.eu](http://airindex.eea.europa.eu)

I am from southern Poland, where in winter time some regions experience
visibility range of less than 200m due to smog.

This is due to many factors, including people burning trash to heat their
homes, industrial pollution, building over natural green corridors, as well as
simply local geography (lots of valleys and basins)

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spodek
> pollution levels fell less precipitously or rose elsewhere, suggesting that
> a concerted effort last fall to shift heating to natural gas from coal may
> have simply shifted the harmful effects to regions far from the capital

It looks like they've learned from the West.

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simula67
Moments like this is when I wish the Indian government acted a bit more like
China :
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smog_in_Delhi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smog_in_Delhi)

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vinni2
I haven’t seen a blue sky in Indian cities for ages now. I was in Goa recently
and I could never see the sun set all the way in the horizon due to thick
haze. It was the same case in Puri in east of India always hazy. Whole country
seems polluted:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_brown_cloud](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_brown_cloud)

