Overcast with 50% chance of acid rain

As many of you have heard, Beijing is disgustingly polluted. There are many ways that the government has been trying to fix this: They've closed most polluting factories within Xthousand miles from the capital. They have banned certain numbered cars from the streets on certain days (for instance, cars having license plates ending in even numbers can't drive on the roads on X days and cars with odd numbers can't on Y days). Regardless of this, the city skies still seem pretty bad. Below is a picture from our back window...


Now look on the right of the tall building...yep, those are buildings back there and they are probably only 8 blocks away.



And this is what it looks like on a clear day. Puts things into perspective, huh?


Here is picture from our front window...look between the high rises and you can see another set of buildings about 6-8 blocks from where we are.




And here is the clear day perspective....


Needless to say, this is pretty f-ing disgusting. The pollution isn't brown, and it doesn't smell too bad and to the uneducated, it just looks like a foggy morning. Although cars are a big contributer to pollution (they say that Beijingers adds another 1000 new cars to the roads a month), its mostly coal pollution. Many families living in hutongs still use coal to light their woks and heat their homes. Additionally, the Chinese economy is very dependent on coal power. It is much cheaper to build coal burning power plants, much cheaper/easier to fuel them too. And when the gov't must provide fuel/energy to the 16 million residents of Beijing alone, cheap and easy is important.

The interesting dichotomy is that Beijing has banned most forms of disposable plastic bag, due to environmental concerns. Grocery stores and other businesses must carry thicker plastic or paper bags and must charge customers for them, in order to encourage customers to buy reusable bags (think the kind you can now buy at whole foods or giant). If you must buy a plastic bag, it costs 2mao, which is only a couple cents, and a reusable cloth bag is 3 RMB, or about 40 cents. In retrospect, can you imagine the enviromental footprint of 16 million people going to the grocery store? And...culturally, the chinese don't take one big trip per week, they buy fresh food for dinner everyday, or at least every other day. Its pretty staggering when you think about it and more amazing that the Beijing gov't had the grapes to implement something like this.

On a related note, if there is a silver lining to the pollution cloud (pun intented), its that when you do outdoor activities , you don't have the sun beating down on your brow. Cliff and I went to Ritan park today and bought a pass for the Ritan Park climbing wall. It was a pretty neat experience and we will definately return.


The wall was pretty tall and it seemed like Cliff enjoyed himself. I didn't hop on because I don't have my harness and shoes here right now, but maybe next time.


There are some pretty nice climbing places in China, and eventually Cliff and I would like to climb the Karst mountains in Guilin. For those who are not familiar, those are the famous peaks down south in the river valleys that often photographed--for now, we'll have to be happy with the man-made stuff.