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Pollution Control In China
As the insomnia curing Olympics approach, there has been a lot of interest in the air quality (or lack thereof) in Beijing, China. It’s bad. It is real bad. Over at HotAir.Com, Ed Morrissey has a reminder of air issues for the 1984 Olympics and personal experience dating back to the 60′s.
Just to be clear here (no pun intended), what the Chinese are doing is far worse than what we did to the air back in the 60′s. At the time, there were no technologies for cleaning the air. The United States took a strong stand against smog in the 70′s and then developed technologies to solve the problem.
Compare that to this anecdotal reference.
I met an engineer this spring who sells equipment in China. He loves China. It is a great business opportunity for him and he is amazed with the culture…good and bad. He told me that he was sent to a power plant to help them with replacement parts. Without getting into too much detail, these parts were part of the pollution control components at a coal fired plant. When he got to the plant, the parts that he saw had never been used. They did not even know how to use the equipment.
The Chinese have recently shown a desire to use their pollution control equipment. You have to wonder why. Is it to look good to the international community or to clean up their polluted environment.
The Chinese have a history from the United States that they could learn from. They have technologies that we have developed and sold to them. They just don’t use it. It cost money to run the equipment.
The next time someone tells you that capitalism won’t work because it is based on greed, remind them of the pollution in China. Capitalism corrected air quality in the United States and offered it to communists, who rejected it.
