As I read this article I began to think about my own life here on the Northern California coast. I have a reverse osmosis filter and tippet on my kitchen sink that I don't use for drinking much unless it is boiled first for tea in a tea kettle. My wife is the same even when she makes coffee. I usually prefer to drink bottled water from the High Sierras or when I'm traveling Fiji water sometimes but mostly Arrowhead water or local Mt. Shasta water. I buy organic foods as much as possible so I don't have to take into my body any pesticides or herbicides that cannot be removed from foods like Potatoes, carrots, and apples because they go into the meat of the veggie or fruit. (There are others by the way). So, even though the air in Beijing is one of the worst quality airs in the world still New Delhi in India, and many cities in Pakistan and Iran are even worse. But, even just in China 1.1 million of the over 7 million worldwide that die of air pollution yearly now are dying in China which is the largest number dying in any single country from air pollution. And all these places aon earth are only getting worse and worse and worse. (At least so far.)
Drive into any city in the U.S. of 1.1 million or even 7 million people and imagine every person you see there dead. This is how many are dying of air pollution every year now on earth.
Begin quote from:
Beijing's smog: A tale of two cities - CNN - CNN.com
www.cnn.com/2017/01/15/health/china-beijing-smog-tale-of-two-cities/index.html
Jan 16, 2017 - Beijing's smog: A tale of two cities. Beijing
(CNN) The first thing Jiang Wang does when she wakes up in the morning
is check on her daughter to make sure she's breathing clean air.
A tale of two cities: smog leaves Beijing a city divided | South China ...
www.scmp.com › News › China › Policies & Politics
Pollution-proofing your life 01:45
Beijing's smog: A tale of two cities
Updated 2:02 PM ET, Mon January 16, 2017
Beijing (CNN)The
first thing Jiang Wang does when she wakes up in the morning is check
on her daughter to make sure she's breathing clean air.
Next, it's time to start making breakfast. She's already made sure all the groceries come from an organic farm.
She'll wash her produce with tap water filtered through a separate treatment system under her sink.
But that water isn't for drinking -- there's imported bottled water for that.
This is how Wang typically starts her day, trying to minimize the effects of the toxic environment in Beijing.
"From
the moment you open your eyes till the moment, you rest in the
evening," she says, "you have to pay really (close) attention, to the
air, to the water, to the food you eat."
Jiang Wang, her husband Ludovic Bodin and her two daughters, 6-year-old Mia and 3-month-old Anna.
Wang and her family are part of a growing number of Beijingers who are trying to pollution-proof their lives.
And money is no cost.
It's "very expensive," she says. "But think about the health. There is nothing to trade off."
But for Beijing's rising middle class and poorer residents, this high-end home equipment is financially out of reach.
That's turning pollution into both a health issue and a class issue -- and it's killing off those left behind.
Research
by Nanjing University's School of the Environment has linked smog with
nearly one-third of all deaths in China, positioning it on a par with
smoking as a threat to public health.
Published
in November last year, the study analyzed over 3 million deaths across
74 cities throughout China in 2013. The findings revealed that as many
as 31.8% of all recorded deaths could be linked to pollution, with major
cities in Hebei, the province that encircles Beijing, ranked among the
worst.
"Air pollution exacerbates
inequality between the rich and poor in urban China," Matthew Kahn, a
professor of economics at the University of Southern California, told
CNN in an email.
"The rich live in
cleaner parts of the city and on more polluted days they can drive to
work, work inside, access better doctors, have second homes in the
countryside and have expensive and effective air filters."
Beijing risks becoming a tale of two cities, a place where the rich and poor don't even breathe the same air.
It adds up
The Wang family recently installed a fresh air filtering system, which cost them about $4,300.
It works like a ventilation system, cleaning outside air and pumping it into their home.
They
also have an air purifier in each room, eight in all, to filter out
carbon dioxide and take care of any dirty air that may leak in. Those
add up to about $7,200.
And the purifiers need to be changed about once a month -- which rings in at $430.
Water filters for sinks run about $300 and shower filters can cost upwards of $1,000 on JD, a popular Chinese e-commerce site.
For
the super wealthy, companies such as Environment Assured, an indoor air
quality and water filtration consultancy, will assess the toxicity of
living and office spaces.
The
company offers a top-of-the-line package that comes in at just under
$15,000, according to Alex Cukor, the vice president of enterprise
solutions at Environment Assured.
Real estate prices can swing based on technology and proximity to pollution, too.
A
two-bedroom apartment in Beijing's MOMA complex -- where the units come
equipped with air filtration systems -- cost far in excess of $3
million, according to the Lianjia real estate listings.
That's almost six times the cost of a similarly-sized apartment on the city's dusty fringes.
And these costs aren't reserved to homes.
The International School of Beijing, where tuition is north of $37,000 a year, built a pressurized dome for kids to play in during the smog. It cost $5 million. (Some public schools have also built domes recently.)
Some people will get organic produce shipped directly to their homes. A yearly membership to Tony's Farm costs $3,400. That will get you two weekly deliveries of produce, three kilograms (about 6.6 pounds) each.
And then there's the more outlandish products.
You can buy canned air from Britain for $115 a bottle. Anti-pollution creams can top $100 (the jury's still out on how well these work) and there are also expensive "pollution-catching" amulets.
The
typical Beijinger likely can't afford any of that -- the average
individual salary is a little less than $17,000 year, according to a
report from Peking University. And that's the highest in China.
But
even though China's economic boom has delivered material wealth to
millions, growing numbers are becoming frustrated that China's elite and
ultra-wealthy -- many of whom got rich off the country's rapid
industrialization that caused the pollution problem -- can protect
themselves, but they can't.
"It
really has reached a point where concern over air pollution throughout
the country is threatening China's social stability," Barbara Finamore
of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said in a
question and answer session in May.
A recent environmental protest in the southwest city of Chengdu was quickly quashed by authorities.
Baby steps
China
is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, and it's costly --
the country's economy lost roughly $535 billion due to pollution in
2012, according to the RAND corporation.
The government knows air quality is a pressing problem and publicly declared a "war on pollution" in 2014.
With
their newfound wealth, China's upper and middles classes have been able
to travel abroad and see more of the world -- and in turn learn about
the dangers of pollution and how to avoid it.
But
on the street during a red alert it is still commonplace to see
ordinary people wearing a scarf over their mouth and nose, rather than a
protective mask.
Even state media has said the government needs to better study and understand the effects of pollution.
Still,
China had some success in recent years, both locally -- 663 localities
in Beijing's city limits replaced coal with clean energy, state-run Xinhua news reported -- and internationally, with the signing of the Paris climate accords.
And China actually leads the world in wind and solar power, according CSIS' Finamore.
Such measures though have done little to dispel the view that Beijing is becoming increasingly unlivable. "Under the Dome," a Chinese documentary on
the negative effects of pollution, took the country by storm when it
debuted in 2015. The film drew millions of views online, before
government censors stepped in and removed it from Chinese video sharing
websites.
A growing industry
Where the government sees a problem, entrepreneurs see an opportunity.
A
lucrative industry is cropping up around pollution-proofing the lives
of people like Wang, who wants to protect her 6-year-old and 3-month old
daughters.
"Her
(the younger daughter's) life is just beginning and air she breathes in
and out is of such bad quality. I couldn't sleep, literally, two nights
continuously," Wang said. "Our kids, they are very young. They have
life ahead of them."
Beijing is fertile ground for this new industry -- it's home to more billionaires than any other city in the world.
There were 200,000 air purifiers sold in China in 2010, according to Daxue Consulting.
That number spiked to 2 million four years later. Demand is expected to
reach 4 million annually by 2018, according to Huidian Research, a
Chinese consulting and marketing firm.
Much of the current revenue is coming from high-end products, but that is slowly changing.
Air
purification is becoming more and more accessible, Cukor says. The
Chinese technology company Xiaomi, for example, now offers a relatively
potent air purifier for $360.
Middle-class catch-up
But a lot of the spikes in business are fleeting, coming and going with the thick plumes of smog that roll in.
Activity
at Environment Assured has been nonstop in the past three weeks, since
Beijing's most recent "airpocalypse," Cukor says.
Beijing on January 1 (top) and on December 23 (bottom) Source: Getty Images
Data
from JD, the Chinese online retailer, shows from December 16 to
December 20 -- during the government's most recent red alert pollution
warning -- sales of masks on the site increased by 380% while air
purifiers, rose by 210%
Research
from Kahn, the USC professor, found similar trends when analyzing sales
data from Taobao, another online retailer, in winter 2013, during
another spell of bad air quality.
It's
likely because people with less disposable income don't have the time
or money to think about prevention until the problem has gotten out of
hand.
And they're not always buying effective products -- many cheaper options simply don't do the job.
Some have called foul on false advertising as well; a recent report in the Financial Times
cited claims by concerned mothers who tested the air quality in some
malls promising clean filtered air and found it was not as safe as
advertised.
"This poor versus rich
differential propensity to invest in self protection means that air
pollution exposure exacerbates quality of life inequality in Chinese
cities because the poor are exposed to more risk," Kahn and the paper's
other authors write.
Kahn and and his co-author Zheng Siqi, a professor at Tsinghua University, remain optimistic, pointing to the Kuznets curve.
This
curve posits that as per-capita income rises, so does environmental
degradation -- but only to a point. Once people have enough disposal
income that they aren't living day-to-day, they can afford to worry
about pollution, counteract it and hold their leaders accountable.
And when that day comes, pollution should decrease as per-capita income rises.
For her daughters, Wang hopes that day comes soon.
"For us -- for everybody -- health is number one," she says.
"Without health nothing can be done."
No comments:
Post a Comment