Beijing May Miss Air-Quality Target {WSJ]
By SHAI OSTER
June 23, 2007; Page A4
BEIJING -- A Beijing official said the city might miss its air-quality target this year, dealing the Chinese capital an embarrassing setback as it prepares to host the summer Olympics in little more than a year.
A month of heavy pollution could make it difficult for Beijing to reach a target of 245 days with good air quality this year, as measured against government-set benchmarks, an official at Beijing's environmental watchdog said Friday.
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The pollution issue is sensitive for Beijing because it pledged to stage environmentally friendly "green games" next August. Air quality this month has been particularly bad, with the city blanketed by a thick layer of smog that environmental officials say is the result of farmers burning their fields after harvest as they prepare for a second planting in the summer. A spell of dry, windless weather has exacerbated the problem, trapping the pollution over Beijing. Air quality for 13 of the first 22 days of June didn't reach national standards for clean air, according to the government.
Last year, Beijing reported 241 "blue sky days," or those that had pollution levels below official benchmarks. Nearly halfway through this year, the city has had well under half of its goal of 245 such days for 2007.
"We still need to have 142 blue days this year to reach our target," an official at Beijing's Environmental Protection Agency said. "On average, in the second half of this year, we would have to realize 23 blue days each month." Based on the experience of many past years, achieving that goal will be "difficult," the official said.
Ahead of the Summer Games, which will take place in August next year, Beijing has been waging a major cleanup campaign, closing thousands of coal-fired furnaces and relocating coal-fired power plants to suburbs. A giant steel mill has been moved away from downtown at a cost of billions of dollars. Thousands of buses are being upgraded to burn cleaner fuels, and fueling stations are being modified to release less fuel gasoline into the air.
But at the same time, a car-buying binge by increasingly affluent Beijing residents in recent years has been adding about 1,000 cars a day to the city's streets. Beijing now has three million automobiles, a major new source of pollution. City leaders acknowledge the growing problem, but car ownership has become an important symbol of China's increasing wealth and the auto industry is an important force in the local economy.
Starting this year, Beijing will implement tougher auto emissions standards similar to the so-called Euro IV standard, imposed in European countries in 2005. That will require upgrades in automobile engines and exhaust systems as well as cleaner, lower-sulfur fuels.
Pollution from farmers burning off their fields is always a problem this time of year -- last year's smoke was so bad, parts of nearby highways had to be temporarily closed. And the Beijing official held out hope that the city might still meet its goals, noting that the tally of 103 blue-sky days so far this year is actually three ahead of the pace of the same period last year. |
