Smog In Beijing Five Times Over Safety Limit

London Times:

Pollution around the Olympic stadium in Beijing could be five times worse than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organisation.

Chinese officials admit they can no longer guarantee that the air quality will match international standards as pollution tests by The Sunday Times revealed the full extent of the challenge facing British athletes.

Read the whole story: London Times

Comments

[sculptor]

It sounds to me like they need to shut down all their factories starting at least a week before the games. However, there is no way this is going to happen. But, if the veiwers in the US can get a good idea of the environmental damage being done by the Chinese then maybe it will have all been worth it after all. The Chinese people deserve better than what is being done to them by their government in name of progress.

[mergina]

Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Yuck! Yeeeeech!

[walk0nwalls]

In other, unrelated news. China has just stated that all of their atheletes intend to compete with gas masks.

They hope to win this year by melting the lungs of all other nation's atheletes.

[trinity]

They better get their act together or they will have the Olympic marathoners dropping like flies along the 26 mile route, as they try to breathe that garbage. I wonder if it will have an effect on the performance of the athletes in general?

[Siren]

Lets look a bit closer to home at a chemical plant in California with toxic waste issues that are killing birds and people.

(07-06) 04:00 PDT Trona, San Bernardino County -- It was the dead birds that set Rita Smith off.

Her husband, Steve, had been ill for years, with oozing sores on his skin, shortness of breath and mental confusion. She suspected that it all was tied to a Mojave Desert chemical plant where they both had worked.

The company, now named Searles Valley Minerals, fiercely denied that working there made Steve Smith gravely ill, and by 2000, Rita Smith's hunt for answers had turned up little, despite all her letters and calls to regulators.

That was before she learned of the largely unpublicized deaths of thousands of migratory birds that landed on a lake created by the plant's discharges at its desolate site northeast of Los Angeles.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/06/MN3JVU4N2.DTL

[paulbikes]

Yummy.

I would think something that offensive would have been shut down...

[ohiomark]

And to think that the enviro-weenies want blame the United States for the "man made" global warming hoax. China has 3 times the population and now 5 times the smog and guess what, they don't care. They open a new coal-fired power plant every 3 days.

I like to see them try and shut down the Chinese economy like they are trying to do here.

By the way, India is not far behind in the pollution derby.

[MajorKong]

I'm sure Cathay Pacific would be happy to fly you to China if you find their environmental laws and business climate more to your liking.

Plus they have government eavesdropping, harsh prisons, no laws against police brutality, and a death penalty that makes Texas look like a bunch of liberal panty-waists. It's a conservatives dream come true!

[ohiomark]

I think you have confused ideologies. They are Communists and the last time I checked they are at the other end of the spectrum from conservatives.

That was good projection though, nice try.

[KillTheMessenger]

I believe pointing fingers has been deemed unworthy of a human being when you were in kindergarten. Looks like that lesson never sunk in.

Oh well, we just have to accept that we have to do this thing without you. Or even against you, if necessary.

[rivrgrrl]

Isn't one of the top runners in the world not participating because of the smog issue?

I don't know how many bad omens people need before they start to question the wisdom of attending these games. When an event pledged to world peace is held in such a place as China, it pretty much discredits the whole endeavor.

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

China is the way it is because we have exported our pollution there. How much of that smog is created making plastic junk for Wall Mart. A hefty pollution tariff would go far to changing the situation.

[craneman]

When ol George returnes from the Olympics, will he say " but I didn't Inhale" ?

[helonias]

Breath, breath in the air

Don't be afraid to care.......

[wadenelson1]

The Republicans are in charge in China. No EPA just make as MUCH MONEY as you can and to hell with the environment. Their rivers are poison.

It's how America would be if it wasn't for us "tree-hugging" libruls. And yet we take endless crap.

[craneman]

GWB to the Chinese: Well you know guy's, If'n it's because of them durned enviros back home that America's Industralists were forced to locate here, and create all this here smog and green stuff and whatnot that's gonna kill a lot of your people. But so what , you have more where they came from nohow.

[KillTheMessenger]

You are both wrong. The Chinese had to do something about their poverty. It is not easy to feed so many people. They did it exactly the same way we did it until the 1950s and 1960s: by exploiting their environment to the extreme. And please don't forget that we (in Europe and the US) are still cleaning up the mess we made until recently.

The Chinese will do the same: expand until they reach their limits, which is about now, and then start cleaning up. And to be honest, I trust them about the cleaning up thing. They managed to slow their population growth, which is a big thing. They will manage this thing, too. And we can help.