BEIJING — With Beijing’s air pollution soaring to seemingly new, awful records this weekend, the classic parenting dilemma of “What shall we do with the kids?” had a grimly obvious answer: Slap on the antipollution face masks and go shopping for another air purifier.
That’s what we did on Saturday, as the Air Quality Index run by the United States Embassy in Beijing, which uses standards set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, hit a “jaw-dropping” 755 at 8 p.m., as my colleague Edward Wong wrote. “All of Beijing looked like an airport smokers’ lounge,” Ed wrote.
According to the index, anything above 300 is “Hazardous” and above 500 is “Beyond Index.” This weekend, the readings were Beyond Index for 16 straight hours.
Even the Chinese government’s monitors, which recently have grown more accurate but still tend to measure the pollution as lower than the embassy’s, were recording scary levels of around 500.
Furious, Chinese netizens wrote on their microblog accounts that the pollution had “exploded the index,” or “baobiao.”
They reached for strong adjectives: “postapocalyptic,” “terrifying” and “beyond belief,” Ed wrote.
So it was ironic that on Sunday there was a sense of relief as the index dropped to 319 (still “Hazardous”) then down to 286: a measly “Very Unhealthy.” By Sunday afternoon, it was “Hazardous” again though, at 373.
Ordinary Chinese are appalled. And increasingly, they can say so in public, as the state appears to be relaxing its censorship of reporting on the pollution that everyone can see and smell.
Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported on Jan. 1 that the environmental authorities were now releasing real-time air quality data from 74 cities in China, at www.cnemc.cn.
On its Weibo, or microblog, feed, CCTV, the state broadcaster, warned early Sunday that “the main air quality monitoring stations in eight city districts will be around 500, which is grade six, heavy pollution, with PM 2.5 and PM 10 the main pollutants,” referring to fine particulates and bigger particulates.
Of course, the problem wasn’t limited to Beijing. As this photograph from NASA appeared to show, pollution was severe across much of eastern China (Beijing is within the blue circle).
And on state media’s lists of the most polluted cities in China on Saturday, Beijing wasn’t even in the top 10. That honor went to Shijiazhuang and other places.
The People’s Daily online was frank, asking in a full-page spread, “What is Going on with our Air?” (Handily cached here by Sinocism, the Beijing-based newsletter.)
The scale of the problem is, quite frankly, overwhelming. A very revealing chart by Edgar, the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, from the European Commission, estimates that in 2011 China produced 9.7 million kilotons of carbon dioxide, nearly double United States’ 5.42 million kilotons.
Indeed, were the Chinese cement industry a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, producing 820,000 kilotons in 2011, slightly ahead of Germany’s total carbon dioxide emissions that year of 810,000 kilotons, according to Edgar. Germany was the sixth most polluting nation in the world, with the United States the second and China the first, according to the chart.
But something else stands out here: China’s population of more than 1.3 billion is about 4.5 times that of the United States’ approximately 300 million. So though it leads the world in carbon dioxide emissions, it is still, per capita, far less polluting than the United States.
Unfortunately, that may change. China’s economy may overtake the U.S. economy sometime within the next decade or two, meaning that we may be facing a truly astonishing problem. As Ma Jun, the director of the Chinese Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post: “It is no secret that our way of development is not sustainable and the total pollution emissions in the region have far exceeded the maximum ecological capacity.”
How does a family justify living in this? For most people in China’s cities there is no practical alternative to life in the smog, though the appalling environment is a reason cited by most who emigrate (in a recent post I noted how emigration numbers were rising all the time).
To control the risk, we have family rules: above 100, and the air purifiers – all four of them – go on. Above 200, we wear face masks outdoors. Above 300 and no one exercises or plays outside, even with a face mask on. Above 500 and we try not to go out at all. That’s hard, especially for the children.
So this weekend, we breathed at home. Watched a movie. Read. And talked. Told the kids how their generation is going to have to clean up the environmental mess caused by all the previous generations. And watched the incredulity grow on their faces as they contemplated the stupidity of adults.
