Gaming the Environment

Gee, what a shock this is.

Pollution around the Olympic stadium in Beijing could be five times worse than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organisation.

Chinese officials admit they can no longer guarantee that the air quality will match international standards as pollution tests by The Sunday Times revealed the full extent of the challenge facing British athletes.

With just five weeks to go before the start of the Beijing Games, tests conducted outside the national stadium — known as the Bird’s Nest — and at Tiananmen Square, the starting point of the marathon, showed the air is thick with particulate pollution.

Even the Chinese government’s official air pollution index — which monitors a range of pollutants, including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide — is running at double the level recommended by the WHO.

I hate to point this out to anyone who might not be aware, but this is the air quality here every single day.  The government was faced with two choices.  On the one hand they could implement some common-sense methods of reducing air pollution years ago, much like cities like Los Angeles did, and this would have yielded results.  On the other, by doing so they would have severely limited China’s (and particularly Beinjing’s) ability to grow at the economic rate commanded.  So they tried for a compromise, which would allow them to continue building and polluting as much as they like, then hope for a miracle through inducing rain to try and clear away the filth just as soon as the tourists arrive,

Sorry, China.  Not gonna work.

So, as you watch the games on TV and lament the fact that these poor athletes have to compete in this filthy air and water, keep in mind that there are few hundred thousand expats who live in China who have to put up with this shit every single day.  We only half-jokingly state that if you choose to live here you have to accept the fact that just by virtue of doing so you’ll end up losing five or ten years off the end of your life.  God only knows how much bacteria or heavy metals or other pollutants are in the showers we bathe in, or the food we eat (which was cooked in boiling water), or in the ice in our cocktails.  You can’t avoid it.

Oh yeah, the Beijing games are going to turn out to be one of the IOC’s most brilliant decisions to date.