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Fixing smog problem calls for change of growth mode
By Wan Lixin |
January 19, 2013, Saturday
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WHEN I started writing this review on Wednesday afternoon, I looked out of the window, and found the city remained shrouded in a pall of fog or smog. It had been like this since the morning.
As we have just experienced one of the most serious and extensive smog blanket across middle and east China - in an area bounded by Hebei Province in the north, Shanghai in the east, Guizhou Province in the south, and Sichuan Province to the west -- I had the sense to check online reports, and was persuaded the air pollution that day was "serious."
The Air Quality Index climbed to 254 at 7pm on Wednesday, a record since the index was introduced last year.
Thank heavens: A cold snap will soon blow away the lingering smog.
One colleague of mine, a veteran car owner who proclaimed himself "a sinner," said that only a more lasting smog might jolt the policy makers into adopting desperate remedies. A few day of smog will result in some inconvenience, and then quickly be forgotten.
Even while the smog lasted, some academics, riding on the hubris of growth, are seriously debating the pros and cons (mainly pros) of providing central heating to residents in southern China, in view of the unusual cold this winter. Heating and auto emissions are chief culprits for the smog.
And a look at the front page headline of a national newspaper: "Pollution may make economy splutter." That headline clearly shows how the stifling smog is perceived by those who are obsessed with GDP. The underlying message is that the smog is compromising our economy, and there's the rub.
Few have realized the real debate is: "What do we want, breathtaking growth or taking a breath amid choking air?" ("Both government and people at fault for smog," January 16, Shanghai Daily)
Given how the orthodoxy of consumption and growth are dictating our national policy, the sinners are not the big-spenders, but the likes of me, who do not drive and do not use air-conditioners.
Adding to the distraction provided by those academics debating central heating is the doubt sown by scientists in the service of their political and corporate masters, according to "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming," by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
For decades, a group of scientists has worked aggressively to subvert scientific fact, fuel skepticism and delay a consensus on the dangers of tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion and global warming.
Among the small group of men with scientific bona fides and deep political connection are physicists Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer.
Over the decades they have successfully disseminated disinformation about a broad spectrum of public issues.
Industrial interests and political organizations underwrote their sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and the news media came to treat these campaigns as genuine scientific debates.
By repeatedly asserting bogus claims, they succeed in derailing the public debate.
This kind of strategy works particularly well in the cyber age, for the Internet has created an information hall of mirrors, where any claim, no matter how ludicrous, can be multiplied indefinitely, the authors say.
How they undercut the acid rain consensus gives a hint of how they go about their job. In the early 1980s in the Reagan administration, a scientific panel found that most of acid rain's acidity was due to dissolved sulfates and the rest mostly to dissolved nitrates, the by-products of burning coal and oil.
The administration rejected that panel's findings as well as the National Academy of Sciences' 1981 conclusion that the US should reduce industrial pollution by 50 percent. President Reagan turned to William (Bill) Nierenberg, who hated environmentalists, to chair the administration's own panel of experts, which met in 1983. Therefore, details about acid rain's long-term damage appeared in the panel's earliest reports but not in later versions.
As we have repeatedly noted on this page, an expert or scientist not guided by a moral compass is much more dangerous and destructive than the common run of thugs and scoundrels.
The only hope of properly addressing the issue lies in the hands of those who are, first of all, decent people, such as Shen Jianhua, who wrote in a commentary titled "What the smog warns us against" (January 15, Wenhui Daily) that we are running out of the technological options in dealing with the pervading haze.
The answers, he believes, lie in putting an end to the destructive mode of growth.
As a matter of fact, to describe destructive growth as "growth" is blasphemous, and probably that falsehood lies at the root of all our confusion.
As we have just experienced one of the most serious and extensive smog blanket across middle and east China - in an area bounded by Hebei Province in the north, Shanghai in the east, Guizhou Province in the south, and Sichuan Province to the west -- I had the sense to check online reports, and was persuaded the air pollution that day was "serious."
The Air Quality Index climbed to 254 at 7pm on Wednesday, a record since the index was introduced last year.
Thank heavens: A cold snap will soon blow away the lingering smog.
One colleague of mine, a veteran car owner who proclaimed himself "a sinner," said that only a more lasting smog might jolt the policy makers into adopting desperate remedies. A few day of smog will result in some inconvenience, and then quickly be forgotten.
Even while the smog lasted, some academics, riding on the hubris of growth, are seriously debating the pros and cons (mainly pros) of providing central heating to residents in southern China, in view of the unusual cold this winter. Heating and auto emissions are chief culprits for the smog.
And a look at the front page headline of a national newspaper: "Pollution may make economy splutter." That headline clearly shows how the stifling smog is perceived by those who are obsessed with GDP. The underlying message is that the smog is compromising our economy, and there's the rub.
Few have realized the real debate is: "What do we want, breathtaking growth or taking a breath amid choking air?" ("Both government and people at fault for smog," January 16, Shanghai Daily)
Given how the orthodoxy of consumption and growth are dictating our national policy, the sinners are not the big-spenders, but the likes of me, who do not drive and do not use air-conditioners.
Adding to the distraction provided by those academics debating central heating is the doubt sown by scientists in the service of their political and corporate masters, according to "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming," by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
For decades, a group of scientists has worked aggressively to subvert scientific fact, fuel skepticism and delay a consensus on the dangers of tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion and global warming.
Among the small group of men with scientific bona fides and deep political connection are physicists Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer.
Over the decades they have successfully disseminated disinformation about a broad spectrum of public issues.
Industrial interests and political organizations underwrote their sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and the news media came to treat these campaigns as genuine scientific debates.
By repeatedly asserting bogus claims, they succeed in derailing the public debate.
This kind of strategy works particularly well in the cyber age, for the Internet has created an information hall of mirrors, where any claim, no matter how ludicrous, can be multiplied indefinitely, the authors say.
How they undercut the acid rain consensus gives a hint of how they go about their job. In the early 1980s in the Reagan administration, a scientific panel found that most of acid rain's acidity was due to dissolved sulfates and the rest mostly to dissolved nitrates, the by-products of burning coal and oil.
The administration rejected that panel's findings as well as the National Academy of Sciences' 1981 conclusion that the US should reduce industrial pollution by 50 percent. President Reagan turned to William (Bill) Nierenberg, who hated environmentalists, to chair the administration's own panel of experts, which met in 1983. Therefore, details about acid rain's long-term damage appeared in the panel's earliest reports but not in later versions.
As we have repeatedly noted on this page, an expert or scientist not guided by a moral compass is much more dangerous and destructive than the common run of thugs and scoundrels.
The only hope of properly addressing the issue lies in the hands of those who are, first of all, decent people, such as Shen Jianhua, who wrote in a commentary titled "What the smog warns us against" (January 15, Wenhui Daily) that we are running out of the technological options in dealing with the pervading haze.
The answers, he believes, lie in putting an end to the destructive mode of growth.
As a matter of fact, to describe destructive growth as "growth" is blasphemous, and probably that falsehood lies at the root of all our confusion.
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