Contaminación se vuelve un tema de seguridad en China

Publicado: 22 feb 2014 | 4:51 GMT Última actualización: 22 feb 2014 | 4:51 GMT

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Pekín elevó por primera su sistema de alerta de contaminación hasta el nivel naranja, el penúltimo antes del más alto, debido al 'smog' pesado que cubre la ciudad, y se mantendrá así al menos durante los próximos tres días.
El alto nivel de alerta se activó cuando el Índice de la Calidad del Aire (AQI) de Pekín superó los 300 microgramos por metro cúbico este viernes (diez veces más que el nivel seguro establecido por la Organización Mundial de la Salud, OMS), informa Reuters citando a la agencia de noticias china Xinhua.

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La categoría naranja, que es la segunda más alta en el sistema de cuatro colores (azul, amarillo, naranja y rojo), aconseja a las escuelas que cancelen las clases deportivas en exteriores y establece que los niños y los ancianos permanezcan en casa. Las autoridades también han instado a los ciudadanos a no salir de sus casas sin necesidad y si es posible, dejar los coches y utilizar el transporte público.  

El gobierno también ordenó a más de 100 fábricas en Pekín detener o limitar sus actividades tan pronto como la alerta naranja entró en vigor. 36 empresas recibieron la orden de detener la producción por completo, mientras que otras 75 tuvieron que reducirla.

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El índice AQI mide seis contaminantes del aire incluyendo las partículas PM2.5 que tienen un diámetro menor de 2,5 micras y han sido un importante contribuyente a la contaminación que durante los últimos años sumerge periódicamente a gran parte del norte y el este de China en este humo tóxico.

La contaminación del aire en China es tan grave que incluso es visible desde el espacio. Para ser conscientes de su densidad, basta con comparar el nivel actual de China de partículas de 2,5 micras (PM2.5), superior a 1.000, con el nivel más alto jamás registrado  en Nueva York, que fue de 29 microgramos por metro cúbico, mientras que el tope alcanzado en Los Ángeles fue de 43.

Reuters 5 hr ago By Sui-Lee Wee and David Stanway of Reuters

BEIJING - Smog-hit China is set to pass a new law that would give Beijing more powers to shut polluting factories and punish officials, and even place protected regions off-limits to industrial development, scholars with knowledge of the situation said.

Long-awaited amendments to China's 1989 Environmental Protection Law are expected to be finalised later this year, giving the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) greater authority to take on polluters.

While some details of the fourth draft are still under discussion, it has been agreed that the principle of prioritising the environment above the economy will be enshrined in law, according to scholars who have been involved in the process. The fourth draft is due to be completed within weeks.

"(Upholding) environmental protection as the fundamental principle is a huge change, and emphasizes that the environment is a priority," said Cao Mingde, a law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, who was involved in the drafting process.

The first change to the legislation in 25 years will give legal backing to Beijing's newly declared war on pollution and formalize a pledge made last year to abandon a decades-old growth-at-all-costs economic model that has spoiled much of China's water, skies and soil.

Cao cautioned that some of the details of the measures could be removed as a result of bureaucratic horsetrading. The MEP has called for the law to spell out how new powers can be implemented in practice, but the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country's top economic planning agency, prefers broader, more flexible principles.

"There is a usual practice when everyone is unable to come to a complete agreement - we first put an idea into the law and then draw up detailed administrative rules later," Cao said.

Local authorities' dependence on the taxes and employment provided by polluting industries is reflected by the priorities set out in China's growth-focused legal code, said Wang Canfa, an environment law professor who runs the Center for Pollution Victims in China and also took part in the drafting stage.

The environment ministry did not respond to detailed questions on its role in the drafting process and the specific content of the new amendments, but said the legislation was currently in the hands of the Legal Work Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's legislature.

The protracted legal process usually kicks off with a number of drafts from academic institutions, which are then examined by ministries, local governments and industry groups. A new draft then goes to the legal affairs office of the State Council, China's cabinet, before being delivered to the NPC and opened up to members of the public to have their say.

NEW POWERS

In the absence of legally enshrined powers, the environment ministry has often made do with one-off national inspection campaigns to name and shame offenders, as well as ad hoc arrangements with local courts and police authorities to make sure punishments are imposed and repeat offenders shut down. It has also stretched existing laws to its advantage.

Last year, it began to use its powers of approval over environmental impact assessments, which are mandatory for all new industrial projects, to force powerful industrial firms such as Sinopec and the China National Petroleum Corporation to cut emissions at some of their plants, threatening to veto all new approvals until the firms met their targets.

The new law would give the ministry the legal authority to take stronger punitive action.

"The environment ministry could only impose fines and management deadlines," Cao said. "Now we can close and confiscate them. It's an important right."

It will also set up a more comprehensive range of punishments, putting an end to a maximum fine system that allowed enterprises to continue polluting once they had paid a one-off fee normally much lower than the cost of compliance.

Cao said the final draft was also likely to impose an "ecological red line" that will declare certain protected regions off-limits to polluting industry, though detailed definitions are likely to come later.

The legislation also proposes to formalize a system by which local cadres are assessed according to their record on pollution issues, including meeting emissions targets.

Experts have welcomed commitments to improve transparency and compel polluters to provide comprehensive and real-time emissions data. Criminal penalties will also be imposed on those found guilty of trying to evade pollution monitoring systems.

"The provisions on transparency are probably the most positive step forward. These include the requirement that key polluters disclose real-time pollution data," said Alex Wang, expert in Chinese environmental law at UCLA. Wang said he had not seen the later, non-public drafts of the legislation.

FIERCELY CONTESTED

For nearly two years, scholars, ministries, local governments, companies and environment ministry officials have been debating the changes to the environmental protection law.

One of the most fiercely contested parts of the new draft was a clause designed to prevent most environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from filing lawsuits against polluters.

The first draft said lawsuits could only be filed via the government-affiliated All-China Environmental Federation, though subsequent changes allowed other government-registered organizations that have been operating for at least five years to launch legal action.

Polluting industries have lobbied government officials not to relax the restrictions on the rights of NGOs to file suits, said Cao, who has attended numerous meetings with government officials on the new legislation.

UCLA's Wang said the ultimate success of China's war on pollution would be determined not by symbolic new legislation but by specific targets and guidelines that are now being imposed on local governments.

"Many people point to China's laws as a sign of the government's concern about the environment," he said. "But changes in bureaucratic targets are a more direct indication of changing priorities and can tell us whether Beijing means business."

(Additional reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Opinion
How will China deal with growing anger over pollution?
The world's largest producer of carbon emissions finally appears to listen to growing protests over pollution levels.
Last updated: 01 Aug 2014 11:43
Stephen Vines

Stephen Vines

Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist, broadcaster and author of several books. He was a founding editor and publisher of three newspapers and magazines in the Asian region.

Smog contributes to a million premature deaths each year, writes Vines [EPA]

In Hong Kong, where pollution is so bad that the government frequently advises the elderly and very young to stay indoors, there is a bittersweet joke about why millions of visitors come from the Chinese mainland to visit. Ah, say the wags, they come to enjoy the environment.

In fact, Hong Kong's pollution levels are lower than in most parts of China, where less than one percent of the largest cities managed to meet World Health Organization's air quality standards according to a 2012 Asian Development Bank report.

The statistics of environmental degradation in China are remorselessly depressing: 90 percent of underground water in cities and 70 percent of rivers are polluted, indeed a third of these rivers are so toxic that they endanger health; seven of the world's 10 most polluted cities are in China and smog contributes to around a million premature deaths each year. China is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide and choking smog in cities reaches levels that make it hazardous to go outside.

Growing awareness

This level of environmental degradation is not really news, although even Chinese citizens would be alarmed if the state-controlled media permitted the publication of articles that pulled these pollution threats together. Yet the news is getting out and social media is playing an enormous role in conveying this information. Deng Fei, an environmental activist, for example, has some four million followers on Weibo, China's hybrid version of Twitter and Facebook. In February, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, People's Daily reported an opinion poll that cited citizens' environmental concerns as one of their most pressing issues.

This growing awareness has sparked a wave of protests, most of it local and uncoordinated but nevertheless - and this is very unusual in China - protesters are managing to achieve a number of objectives in a country where the end point of most protests is jail or exile.

The latest official State of the Environment report recorded 712 cases of "abrupt environmental incidents" in 2013, up 31 percent from the previous year. Many of these "incidents" are in fact protests, and the level of protest in the current year is, if anything, on the up. Yang Chaofei, the vice-chairman of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences, told members of the powerful Standing Committee of the National People's Congress that environmental protests have been growing 29 percent annually from 1966 to 2011.

Most of the earlier protests were in rural areas; now they have moved to the towns and are harder to ignore.

101 East - China Airpocalypse

In May, a protest against the building of what was billed as Asia's largest waste incinerator plant in Zhejiang province, in eastern China, resulted in a back down when the government declared it would not proceed with construction without "the support of the people". An earlier protest in the Songjiang district of China's biggest city, Shanghai, against the building of a massive lithium battery factory, also resulted in the plans being put on hold. In Ningbo, another major eastern city, protesters managed to block the construction of an $8.9bn petrochemical plant in 2012.

These protests can be dismissed as part of a not-in-my-backyard syndrome. But they are also powerful reminders of public awareness over the environmental impact of manufacturing activity, and the profound consequences of pollution.

However, by far the biggest cause of pollution is coal burning, much of it derived from electricity generation.

The government is vividly aware of this problem, and has now become one of the biggest spenders on renewable energy production. $290bn was committed to these projects in the five years to 2015 but this is dwarfed by even greater investment in nuclear energy - which carries risks of a different kind - yet is far more environmentally friendly than coal power generation.

The government led by President Xi Jinping has shown itself to be far more proactive than that of his predecessor, and makes every effort to demonstrate its understanding of environmental concerns. Last year Premier Li Keqiang pledged "even greater resolve" to tackle the pollution crisis. This is not merely a matter of pacifying public opinion but stems from an awareness of the cost of pollution which World Bank economists put at $242bn per year, based on 2010 figures; clearly the cost has risen since then.

'War on pollution'

In December 2013, the government issued its first nationwide blueprint for tackling climate change, accompanied by a list of objectives to be achieved by 2020. This was followed in January by instructions to 15,000 factories requiring them to report real-time air emission and water-discharge data. Li is now speaking about a "war on pollution".

In April, China's parliament finally got round to legislation providing extensive powers to punish, control and supervise polluters. This comes after a two-and-a-half decade hiatus since the last environmental protection law was enacted.

The length of time it has taken to introduce this legislation is a reflection of the intense battle within China's ruling circles between those who adhere to the idea of economic growth at all costs - and those who believe that these costs are becoming too high.

As ever, internal battles within the Chinese leadership are only spoken of obliquely and it is never quite clear how these discussions are going. Environmentalists in China say that passing laws is one thing, implementing them is quite another. Their scepticism over the leadership's true commitment to tackling these problems will only be assuaged once evidence emerges of decisive action against polluters on a par with, say, the current crackdown on corruption.

Tacit toleration of environmental protests is highly unusual in a nation that regards all protest as a threat to state security. The fact that some of these protests have achieved their objectives is even more significant. The big questions now are whether the current protest trend will continue to escalate - and how the state will respond.

Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist, broadcaster and author of several books. He was a founding editor and publisher of three newspapers and magazines in the Asian region. In London, he worked as an editor for The Observer, and several other publications.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source:
Al Jazeera

Pollution Without Revolution
Why China's Environmental Crisis Won't Bring Down the Regime
By Scott M. Moore
June 10, 2014
A hazy day in downtown Shanghai, December 2013.
A hazy day in downtown Shanghai, December 2013. (Aly Song / Courtesy Reuters)

On a smoggy day this past February, Chinese President Xi Jinping did a remarkable thing: he went for a stroll outside without the face mask that Beijingers often don to protect themselves against the capital’s air pollution. With Xi’s grin on full display, the political message was unmistakable. “In the Midst of Smog, Xi Jinping Tours Beijing," a headline in state-run media declared the next day. "He Breathes the Same Air and Shares the Same Fate.”

To many observers, Xi’s stroll through the smog hinted at Beijing’s concern that environmental issues could drive widespread opposition to the regime. In recent decades, the idea that environmental crises can help drive democratic reforms has gained popular credence. Perhaps most notably, some historians have argued that the Soviet Union’s bungled response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster helped to hasten its demise. Others have documented how environmental issues helped to galvanize new opposition movements in eastern Europe, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Xi is well aware of this history, and he has a plan to prevent it from playing out in the Middle Kingdom. By shifting blame for environmental failures to players outside the central government, he intends to use them to strengthen his own control.

That won’t be easy, of course; China is facing an enormous environmental crisis. According to official reports (which likely underrepresent the problem), pesticides and heavy metals contaminate a fifth of China’s farmland, and a quarter of the country’s water is so polluted that it can’t even be used for industrial purposes. Other challenges will likely prove even more overwhelming in coming years. Parts of central and southern China are experiencing unprecedented droughts, which are thought to be brought on by climate change. Add to these problems declining groundwater tables in the country’s north-central breadbasket region, rapid warming on the Tibetan plateau, and a severe loss of biodiversity nationwide, and it’s clear that environmental issues constitute one of the greatest threats to China’s future development.

This threat is reflected in the growing focus on the environment in domestic politics. The number of nongovernmental organizations focused on the environment is growing, and, according to a 2013 survey, 80 percent of Chinese citizens believe that environmental protection should be a higher priority than economic development. Of particular concern to China’s leadership, the number of pollution-related protests appears to be increasing, and they are occasionally turning violent. During one recent rally in Hangzhou, a major city near Shanghai, dozens of residents and police were reportedly hurt in a scuffle over the planned construction of a waste incinerator.

To be sure, for Beijing, discontent is dangerous, and the growing degree of ambition and sophistication in China’s environmental policy partly reflects that. But outside observers, including the policy and business community in the United States, would be mistaken to believe that popular discontent over the environment will lead to major political or policy changes in China. Beijing is pursuing a deliberate and largely successful strategy of protecting the central government from environmental fallout by skillfully deflecting blame toward protectionist local officials and state-owned enterprises. In the process, the central government is enhancing its own power.

BLAME GAME

China’s environmental protection system resembles a pyramid, in which top leaders and officials in central government ministries develop policies for implementation at provincial and local levels. This division of power is meant to ensure that centrally formulated policies are appropriately applied according to local circumstances. The fact that local officials operate at arm’s length from the central government also helps insulate Beijing from being blamed for local environmental disasters.

Local governments do deserve much of the criticism, but there are so many problems precisely because Beijing encourages such lapses. The party generally evaluates and promotes lower-level officials based on their ability to meet short-term economic growth and development targets, which are often at odds with long-term goals such as decreasing pollution and addressing other environmental concerns. Moreover, the latitude that local officials have to promote economic development in their jurisdictions has incentivized them to maintain incestuous ties to local business interests -- ties that encourage them to shield favored companies from compliance with environmental regulations. In 2009, for example, a chemical company released several tons of industrial acids into a major waterway, disrupting water supplies to some 200,000 people in southern China for days. A government investigation later revealed that the company had been reprimanded several times for illegally discharging waste. But thanks to patrons in the local government, the company had gotten off each time with little more than a warning.

As China’s environmental crisis worsens, Beijing appears to rely on the blame game more and more. One favored tactic has been the use of “name-and-shame” lists, which feature highly polluting cities and municipalities that fail to meet Beijing’s environmental protection benchmarks. More recently, the central government has begun to target state-owned enterprises for environmental policy failures. A 2013 editorial in the government-run China Daily, for example, lauded a fine that a provincial government levied on the state-owned Sinopec oil company for polluting a city in the eastern province of Anhui. At fault, the editorial argued, was a “combination of power and money.” China’s local governments, the article concluded, must therefore “perform their duties better and consider long-term development instead of short-term interests.” There’s no question that addressing environmental concerns in China requires curbing the excesses of powerful state-owned enterprises. But doing so also serves another purpose for Beijing: it increases the regime’s leverage over increasingly powerful segments of the economy and of society.

GREEN POWER GRAB

Since the liberalization of the Chinese economy in the late 1970s, Beijing’s development model has emphasized economic decentralization. In this context, local governments and enterprises have been given greater leeway to pursue growth. From Beijing’s point of view, an unwelcome side effect of this approach has been the rise of players that are independent of the central government. Local officials routinely approve large real-estate deals that accumulate massive debt and raise the ire of displaced residents. In some mining regions, so-called coal bosses effectively run their own government. And due to their sheer size, state-owned companies have become increasingly difficult for the central government to control. (In 2012, Sinopec, a state-owned oil firm, employed over 370,000 people across China.) Many of Beijing’s proposed environmental reforms, such as the strengthening of local environmental performance targets and the phasing out of ageing, inefficient power stations, could rein in such players -- and thereby help contain any threat they might pose to the central government.

The most recent reforms seem to do just that, prioritizing central control over other environmental goals. In 2011, for example, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, historically weak and ineffectual, advocated revising the country’s environmental protection law that would allow citizens’ groups to help monitor polluting enterprises and raise fines on noncompliant local governments. When the measure finally passed this year, however, the participation provisions had been stripped out but the fines had been left alone, centralizing power but depriving the ministry of the power to leverage growing public concern to increase its monitoring and enforcement capabilities. Subsequent reforms have taken a similar tack, providing for closer monitoring of local officials’ environmental performance and giving environmental groups in some areas standing to sue state-run enterprises.

Beijing’s South-North Water Transfer Project, which aims to correct a regional imbalance in water availability, provides another striking example of this dynamic. The project consists of three canals, including one that crosses the Tibetan Plateau, and will eventually pump some 45 billion cubic meters of water from southern to northern China each year. Construction has already displaced over 300,000 people, and Chinese scientists have raised grave concerns about the project’s effect on the region’s fragile ecosystems. Moreover, water pollution has been so acute during the project’s first phase that Beijing has had to construct over 400 sewage treatment plants along the route to meet and maintain minimum water quality standards. Despite the scale of the damage, the central government has pushed ahead, claiming that the canals will ultimately serve the environment by providing much-needed water to the parched Yellow River. In reality, one of the project’s primary goals is to strengthen support for the central government in areas that have fallen behind in China’s headlong economic expansion. According to one Chinese expert on the project, it’s “a good incentive tool for the central government to encourage local governments” to closely follow Beijing’s marching orders.

OUT OF THE HAZE

China’s leaders increasingly portray themselves as guardians of the country’s environment, promising a greener future courtesy of a strong central government committed to environmental protection. At the 2010 Shanghai Exposition, a propaganda-laced tour of Chinese history ended in an exhibition promising a low-carbon future. Recent statements have served to further reinforce the idea that Chinese leaders are devoted to environmental protection. Last year, in his final major address as premier, Wen Jiabao vowed to “construct an ecological civilization.” More recently, current Premier Li Keqiang pledged to wage a “war on pollution” as part of the next phase of the country’s economic development strategy, which emphasizes a cleaner, higher-value-added growth model.

Although it’s difficult to gauge public opinion on the matter, China’s green activists and other concerned citizens appear to support the central government’s increasing power over environmental regulations and enforcement. In 2012, Reuters quoted the resident of a heavily polluted city as saying, “If [former Premier] Wen Jiabao or Xi Jinping were to come here now I would certainly tell them what’s going on. But I wouldn’t trust anyone else.” China’s environmental NGOs take a similar tack, issuing unsparing criticism of local governments for permitting pollution, while merely calling for a stronger central role in protecting the environment. These calls are not disingenuous; most environmental activists, along with scholars and analysts, believe that pollution stems largely from weaknesses in local-level enforcement. But the fact is that this approach suits Beijing just fine.

It’s too early to say how far Beijing’s environmental protection efforts will go toward effectively addressing China’s environmental ills. Given the country’s rapidly growing resource demands, the strain on its environment is unlikely to ebb anytime soon. And given the scale of contamination, water scarcity and soil pollution will likely remain vexing challenges in the years to come. What’s more, Western countries’ historical experiences suggest that real environmental reforms come through genuine political opposition, something that Beijing will seek to thwart at all costs. But out of this hazy picture emerges a new set of challenges and opportunities for those both within China and abroad who are affected by Beijing’s environmental policy.

At the broadest level, the central government’s tight embrace of the environmental agenda is likely to complicate the ways in which U.S. companies and nonprofits engage with China. For the business community, access to China’s environmental protection industry is and will continue to be a rich prize -- government investment in clean technology has continually risen, and the green sector is expected to be worth several hundred billion U.S. dollars by 2015. Yet, for now, foreign enterprises have been largely shut out of this market, and expanding access should be a focus of Washington’s economic diplomacy in Beijing. It may also become more difficult for international environmental NGOs to work in China. U.S.-based organizations have had considerable influence in important areas of environmental policy, such as air pollution control, but Beijing’s expanding role could crowd out these players going forward. International environmental NGOs should therefore be careful about maintaining their relationships with the Chinese policy community.

Given Beijing’s new emphasis on the environment, an even bigger challenge will be addressing the global dimensions of its pollution, the effects of which don’t stop at the water’s edge. China is by far the largest source of air pollution among all Asian countries, including India, and Chinese emissions negatively affect air quality in a host of neighboring countries, particularly Japan. Chinese air pollution is even degrading air quality in the United States. According to a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Chinese air pollution accounts for somewhere between 12 and 24 percent of sulfate pollution in the western United States.

The international community’s challenge going forward will be to use Beijing’s strong domestic political interest in alleviating pollution to prod it to take substantive steps to reduce the burdens of such pollution on other countries. Looking ahead, one of the more promising areas of cooperation is regional initiatives to combat air pollution, which remains China’s largest environmental liability.

This past May, environment ministers from China, Japan, and South Korea met to discuss air pollution. Given poor relations among the three countries involved, it was notable that the ministers pledged to “continue cooperating in the fight against cross-border air pollution, despite strained relations.” There is already a wide range of existing intergovernmental agreements among northeast Asian countries concerning air pollution, but most are severely limited in scope. The long-term aim should therefore be to win Asian participation in the UN’s Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, which commits parties to reducing air pollutants but, for now, includes only European and North American countries. Such a goal is ambitious; it would require an unprecedented political commitment on Beijing’s part to reduce pollutants -- not just for its own sake but for the sake of regional cooperation, as well.

In the meantime, China’s environmental crisis, severe as it is, won’t bring down the Chinese regime -- its leaders are too clever to let that happen. Instead, they have carefully co-opted China’s growing environmental movement as their own. But there’s another side to this dark picture: if Beijing plays its strong hand deftly, it can also achieve some real progress in clearing the haze that hangs over its cities -- and the region as a whole.

Nightmare in Beijing: Pollution so bad, Chinese government tells schools to keep children indoors
By Waking Science | January 9, 2017

Submitted by JD Heyes via Natural News,

Environmental groups like to portray the West and, in particular the United States, as the world’s biggest polluter. But that’s because many of those folks have never been to China, where—thanks to rapid industrialization and lack of government oversight—the rapid, irreversible poisoning of the country’s natural resources is occurring.

That includes the poisoning of future generations of Chinese. As reported by the state-run China Post, authorities in Beijing have warned in recent days that the pollution hanging over the city will remain heavy for days to come and is so bad that they are urging the suspension of outdoor school activities and construction projects.

The Post noted that the government’s warning comes in the form of an “orange alert,” which is the second-highest in a four-stage system. Officials said the alert means there will be at least three consecutive days of heavy smog, which will fill the air with dangerous levels of toxins. A red alert means that heavy air pollution is expected to persist for more than three days.

Local authorities in China’s capital city advised kindergartens, primary and middle schools to keep all kids inside and not let them play out of doors. There was no mention of the city’s high schools, which the Post said focus mostly on indoor preparations for testing.
China is the world’s largest operator of coal-fired power plants

Building sites all over the always-expanding city were also being targeted by authorities because their equipment only adds to the toxic exhaust, dust and other pollutants looming in the air.

The warning system was launched three years ago in response to worsening—and chronically bad—air pollution throughout Beijing, amid rising public concern over air quality. It is one tool authorities are using to address the problem after decades of extreme economic growth and industrialization that led to the construction of hundreds of coal-fired power plants and skyrocketing automobile ownership.

Officials have said they are making progress. In recent days environmental officials in Beijing said that a key indicator of bad air quality—the density of particulate matter PM2.5—fell during the first 10 months of 2016.

In addition, global environmental organization Greenpeace East Asia said that levels oftoxic heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium and led in the PM2.5 in Beijing has been declining rapidly since 2013. The organization said the drop was tied to the closing of a number of coal-fired power plants in and around Beijing.

That said, the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center acknowledged that air quality in the megatropolis was only going to get worse in the near term as the coal-powered winter heating system activates across northern China. And it’s unclear how many Chinese have their own air filtration systems in their homes.

Plus, just because a state-run newspaper says things are getting better in Beijing, pollution-wise, doesn’t make it so. The country’s hyper-economic growth has brought with it new wealth, for certain, living millions of Chinese out of poverty. But it has all come at a heavy environmental cost; China, like neighboring India, is causing permanent damage to its citizenry through its industrialized toxification of its air, water and soil.
Why Chinese food products cannot be truly “organic” if grown in the open air

As we have reported, China and India have more coal-fired power plants than the rest of the world combined, and China has built more of them than India, which is also struggling to adjust to skyrocketing economic growth. The pollution being generated by China is so bad, in fact, that Japanese scientists have complained that the peaks on the nearly 13,000-foot Mt. Fuji are coated with toxic mercury.

Also, as we have noted, China’s environmental damage is so pervasive that it is impossible for the country’s so-called “organic” food growers to make that claim. Writing in 2013 Natural News founder/editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported that when it comes to foods and nutritional supplements from China, the organic food market is largely a hoax because there are no limits to how much heavy metals like arsenic and lead and mercury are permitted in “organic” products.

On that issue, in October we reported that such contaminated foods were nevertheless entering the United States marked as organic, when in fact they were cultivated and grown in contaminated soil using contaminated water.
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In fact, U.S. Customs personnel often turn away food shipments from China because they contain unsavory additives and drug residues, are mislabeled, or are just generally filthy. Some Chinese food exporters have responded by labeling their products “organic,” though they are far from it, we reported.