Today, a city in Northern China was shut down due to the horrible air pollution they have been facing. Greenpeace is calling for an "urgent policy adjustment" as children could not attend school ("smog day") and airports were closed. They are calling it an "Airpocalypse" in the city of Harbin.
What does this have to do with elephants?
The Chinese government had declared that they were going to tackle the air pollution problem in China. Similarly, they insist that international ivory laws are observed at the ports and in the ivory-carving factories.
One look at these pictures proves that the Chinese government has not made environmental issues a priority. There is no arguing with these facts.
Check out the pictures, videos and the article below!
Winter is coming, that’s for sure. The northeastern city of Harbin today ushered in the season with smog so thick that visibility was reportedly limited to 10 meters in places. Classes were canceled, roads closed, and planes grounded.
State media said the PM 2.5 reading (which measures the level of harmful particulate matter in the air) “exceeded” 500. A Reuters report put the figure at 1000, or 40 times higher than what the World Health Organization deems safe. Photographs from the city show air so murky it would be easy to mistake Monday morning for deep, dark night.
The shutdown in Harbin is sure to worry residents of northern China as the region heads into what promises to be another long, dirty winter. China’s northeast is plagued year-round by air pollution, the result of factory emissions and massive growth in the number of vehicles on the road. Things get worse, however, when the heaters crank up, increasing the amount of coal that gets burned. Harbin’s current smog comes the day after the city turned on its heaters.
It’s not the first time bad air has brought a Chinese city to a halt. Last year, Beijing was gripped by a weeks-long airpocalypse that sent families scrambling for cover and bolstered sales of face masks and air-purifiers. By choking the nation’s capital in its embrace, that haze helped put pollution on the national agenda, with officials finally recognizing, and promising to address, the problem.
But there’s no easy fix. In September, Beijing unveiled a new blueprint for improving the air by 2017. China will need to spend nearly 5 trillion yuan, or $817 billion to fight pollution, said a spokesman for the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection, with $163 billion of that spent in the capital alone. Last week, as the air turned cold and the pollution spiked, officials announced a set of color-coded emergency measures for bad pollution days. A red alert for toxic air? Sure, that could work. If you can see it through the smog.
~Emily Rauhala
TIME
October 21, 2013
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