Sprol

With the Beijing Olympics in sight, Chinese authorities have long been working feverishly to give the city an extreme health makeover. In a recent test, Beijing’s air failed, again, to meet international health standards and guidelines six out of the seven days tested.

Apparently, it is true that desperate times call for desperate measures. Reportedly, Beijing’s 17 million residents are now under very limited and restrictive driving, manufacturing and constructing guidelines. These restrictions are all being imposed in an attempt to clean up one very polluted city.

It is reported that major construction is to stop, factories are to be shut down and half the automobiles are to be grounded every day until after the Olympics.

While the Beijing Environmental Bureau said that the air “will be safe, everyone can be at ease,” many athletes, environmentalists as well as authorities from numerous countries attending the Olympics have significant concerns.

Chinese officials, however, contend that safety is of the utmost importance. Officials seem to have a lot of confidence that they can effectively control the country’s air pollution problem, even if that means trying to control Mother Nature herself.

By using possibly the world’s most sophisticated computer system, Chinese authorities are not only watching the weather and wind patterns surrounding Beijing, they are prepared to attempt to try to change what Mother Nature dishes out.

By tracking pollution from as far away as India, China is focusing heavily on surrounding provinces and their big pollution sources. At one steel plant located 300 miles from Beijing, the boss is poised to close the plant if high winds start blowing this distant, but dangerous, faraway pollution into or near Beijing where it would likely be trapped by mountains.

Once the pollution is entrapped by the mountains, the only viable solution would be rain. And, according to Chinese authorities, scientists are prepared to try that too. How would they do this? Simple. Artillery shells filled with a chemical thought to trigger rain showers would be shot into the sky with hopes of rain.

No one, however, can adequately control the weather. So, with apparent good reason, regardless if China says it’s a good-air-quality-day or not, there are many doubters in the crowd.

Consider this. Some pollution monitors have been relocated to the suburbs, where cleaner air can twist daily pollution results and make the overall contamination numbers look better than they really are.

Legitimate concerns for the health of the Olympic athletes and visitors, not to mention the Chinese citizens, remain. While the government has recently spent millions to clean up the city, the pollution problem in China simply cannot be fixed with a few quick, and possibly temporary, fixes.

The City of Beijing has undergone numerous improvements for the games. In fact, the government spent approximately $57 million to renovate more than 5,000 public restrooms. Also, thousands of Olympic volunteers are learning English and the ABCs of interacting with foreigners.

Chinese officials have also taken environmental actions aimed at dissipating Beijing’s air pollution before the games by spending more than $15 billion on drastic antipollution measures, including relocating 200 factories and steel mills outside the city limits.

According to a recent Mother Jones article, China has spent $3.6 billion and taken some extreme steps to clean up the capitol before the summer games. One of the changes China has made is building four new subways in order to encourage more public transportation and cut down on traffic. One million vehicles will also be banned during the Olympics.

However, the truth is that no amount of vitamins, regimens or athletic stamina will prepare many of the world-class competitors for the sort of severe air pollution they will face in Beijing. Numerous health and athletic experts have long been concerned whether athletes’ lungs will be able to adjust to all the smog and chemicals that plague the entire Chinese environment.

While these actions are a great step in the right environmental direction, China needs more than a quick-fix for its crippling environmental issues. According to FinancialNirvana.com, many environmental experts believe China’s problems may be attributed to a weak legal system and corruption, poverty, government policies that put job growth ahead of having a healthy environment as well as two decades of double-digit industrial growth.

In addition to this, Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2006 report notes that acidification has spread to approximately 30% of China’s cropland. The Report also states that China has 16 cities with the worst air pollution in the world.

Even more remarkable and astonishing is the fact that China’s Ministry of Science and Technology estimated that roughly 50,000 of the country’s newborn babies die every year due to the unhealthy consequences of air pollution.

Sometimes it’s the little things that say the most

Consider the latest news of a keel-crippling algae bloom that covered about a third of the Olympic sailing course in Qingdao, China. This algae overgrowth resulted in the deployment of a small army of workers, a large fleet of boats and a full brigade of dump trucks and bulldozers that have been desperately trying to clear up this embarrassing, yet expected, component to China’s assertion of hosting a ‘green games’ Olympics.

What this means is that numerous international competitors desperate for practice have been forced to stay in dry dock until this dangerous mess is cleaned up. While this kind of environmental roadblock may be foreign to many Olympic competitors, it is far from atypical in the world’s most polluted nation.

Today, fully 70% of China’s seven major rivers are severely and dangerously polluted. In addition, 80% of its rivers fail to meet standards for fishing and 90% of China’s cities suffer from some degree of significant water pollution. What this means for those who live in China is that over 700 million Chinese drink fetid water of a quality well below World Health Organization’s standards.

Meanwhile, liver and stomach cancers related to water pollution are among the leading causes of death in the Chinese countryside. And, 21 cities along the Yellow River are now characterized by the highest measurable levels of deadly pollution.

As for this particularly extensive algal bloom in Qingdao, the cause is clear — a massive misuse of agricultural fertilizer. A not-so-well-known-fact is that China is the world’s largest fertilizer user, consuming more than 50 million tons each year.

This problem is exacerbated by untrained peasants applying far too much fertilizer to their meager plots with the false hopes and dreams of boosting their already scanty yields. The obvious result has been a new kind of flooding crisis — a flood of excess and unneeded fertilizer runoff that ultimately ends up flooding into neighboring rivers and streams.

With this toxic runoff mixture, fertilizer nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphates have triggered an explosion of algal blooms as part of a broader process of eutrophication. This eutrophication process quite literally sucks the oxygen out of the water and kills all of the plant, fish and aquatic life.

The obvious catastrophic environmental result is an extremely foul-smelling and murky body of water incapable of sustaining life.

Another perfect example of this algal bloom epidemic is the blooms that keep pounding China’s third-largest lake, Lake Tai. This notable lake has long been famous for its classic beauty and is considered a favorite tourist attraction. Lake Tai also supplies water to approximately 30 million people.

The cost of cleaning up of the lake alone is estimated at more than $14 billion. In addition to this expense, many Chinese citizens have been buying bottled water at a feverish pace as a result of Lake Tai’s repeated algal blooms. This increased demand for fresh drinking water has driven up the price of bottled water.

China’s algal bloom epidemic is not restricted to its rivers and lakes. China’s coastal shorelines are also suffering severely from a growing occurrence of red tides, an oceangoing version of eutrophication.

This problem is particularly relentless in the relatively shallow Yellow and Bohai Seas off northern China where Qingdao is located and where there is less tidal exchange. The red tides are rapidly destroying fish and devastating valuable marine life. China has seen an astonishing 40-fold increase in the incidence of red tides in the past few years.

The overall picture being painted by China’s pollution woes is one of a large country choking to death and drowning on a wide variety of deadly pollutants. Because of the country’s toxic environment, many Olympic athletes have chosen to train in adjacent countries, like Japan and South Korea, and will only fly into China for brief stopovers during their specific sporting events.

What that says about today’s China speaks volumes. This country’s need to deal with its very real pollution crisis is obvious and is emerging as one of the most far-reaching and irresponsible environmental disasters the world has ever seen.