China's Public Enemy No. 1 (Times 20,000 Per Day)
by Alex Pasternack, Beijing, China on 04.19.07
Drive one day less and look how much carbon monoxide you'll keep out of the air we breathe. (WWF)
If China saw the car the way it increasingly sees, for instance, coal plants, industrial pollution and ungreen buildings -- that is, as dangers to the country's environmental and social stability -- we might have cause to breathe a little bit easier. But as the country races down the road of western-style consumption at the rate of 11% GDP growth per year, it's like the '50s all over again: the car is at the top of everyone's wish list. After giving a lecture to a group of environmental science students in Beijing last year, Lester Brown asked how many hoped to own a car: all hands went up. And China's got a lot of hands.
But whose hands are on the wheel? With at least 20,000 new cars hitting China's roads every day, national and sometimes local governments have been experimenting with ways to address the car problem, which is hurting not only the environment but, due to endless gridlock, crippling the basic productivity of cities like Beijing. (Not to mention that cars are responsible for 100,000 deaths in China a year, more than anywhere else.) As the huge Shanghai Auto Expo opens this week, many challenges remain, not least the dependence of the government on its booming car industry: even as it snarls traffic, causes respiratory problems and ruins the air, the largely state-run auto industry employs 1.7 million workers.
"No car" days, massive public transit improvements and attempts to resuscitate the bicycle will mean nothing without a change in the way China -- and the rest of the world -- sees the car. The stakes are high. Currently, CO2 and NO2 levels are soaring while China desperately pokes around for the oil it needs in in Africa, supporting governments like Sudan's.
Serious restrictions on urban car usage, a la the famous one child policy, would help, but in this era of massive social change, such notions remain politically and logistically infeasible. More realistic are ongoing market-based efforts, like raising taxes on license plates and fuel, in addition to higher fuel economy standards. As environmental minister Pan Yue recently wrote, "Beijing has automotive exhaust standards, but the air keeps getting more polluted because more cars are being introduced." Even more key then is balancing the problems of cars with their economic benefits: the city-owned Beijing Automotive Industry Corp., employed 48,000 workers and paid more than $500 million in local taxes last year. The government must also address the traditional fabric of cities, so that public transit takes priority over new roads.
And then there's the biggest and most crucial challenge of all: altering mindsets. Increasingly, that front is being tackled by China's rising NGOs, like WWF. Their brilliant 20to20 public campaign to get China to realize its goal of 20 percent CO2 reductions by 2020, pictured above, includes a drive against cars and other types of consumption seen as deserved luxuries or necessary evils on the road to prosperity.
Hmm. That's never seemed like a worse metaphor. : : 20to20.org (English)
Beijing Jam, a short film by Lois Xiang about cars, traffic jams and road rage.
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I think the car is still at the top of American's wish lists as well.
It seems like more and more people are being "green" here in the US because of the recent media coverage of all things "Green" as well as certain government mandates, however a majority of the population lives relatively the same wastefull way they were living 2 years ago, before An Inconvenient Truth.
well USA has been a consumerist country form so long and now China is going that way they are getting ticked i sense some hypocrits.
Cars, like good wine, have become the source of China's new inebriation. New roads flow in miles as new cars flow onward almost inevitably on those pavements.
Never mind the congestion, the cost of fuel, the accidents. Freedom, power, and independence rules! A new lilfe for all!
The car, it seems, has come to replace the second child which a family in China is usually not permitted as the traditional face of China grimaces to the automotive upheaval. Fumes? No problem. The air is so full of the 900 million tons of burned coal from the power plants that a few million more cars per year won't make much difference. The sickness of the modern age has met China and China has returned its bow.
Solutions? Yes, there are answers to problems that have now not yet come to maturity. The dance of life is not so simple as to be answered in an adolescent manner but is bound inextricably with the human nature.
China, as other nations, must develop its transport industry but at the same time look to technology other than the internal combustion motor. The electric vehicle must be the medicine sought; there are not many another choices.
Gallon upon gallon and barrel upon barrel of the dark stuff is destined for the exhaust pipe but is, in itself, becoming exhaustible. When the "caverns measureless to man" are deplete of this slippery substance, be it in one century or two hundred of Earth's revolutions, then the Chinese as will all people, may have to resume their traditional way and their more ancient customs.
adrianakau@aol.com
Lets do some math...
(Assuming this is not china, but the US)
Sources: http://www.epa.gov/otaq/consumer/f00013.htm
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/climate/420f05004.htm#step1
Average annual fuel consumption for a passenger car is 581 gallons of gasoline. That equates to about 1.6 gallons per day.
95-100% of greenhouse emissions from a gallon of gasoline is CO2 (hardly any CO, which is a product of incomplete combustion which leads me to believe caption is not translated correctly, but i digress..)
8788g of CO2 is effectively produced from gallon of gasoline. 8788g/44(g/mol)=199.72 mol of CO2. Assuming ideal gas... 199.72mol*22.4L/mol=4473.728L of CO2 per gallon of gasoline. Multiply that by 1.6 divide by .95 (adding estimate in other greenhouse gasses other than CO2) and we get 7534.7L of greenhouse gasses emitted per day for an average vehicle. Converting that to english units we get 266 cubit feet or roughly a 6.5x6.5 ft cube... Looking back at the picture that doesn't seem accurate at all... So either people in china drive a lot more on average than we do in the US (doubtful) or they are taking some artistic license or they are including all of the nitrogen that was not part of the internal combustion reaction.
Exaggeration and pseudoscience ftw, as long as it feels good right?
As a followup... the average human exhales about 1 kg of CO2 a day. This translates into 22.73 moles and about 509 L or 18 cubic feet of CO2 (assuming ideal gas). This is about a 2.6' cube.
Therefore the average American's car produces CO2 at the equivalent rate of about 14.7 people. Interesting facts to keep in mind.
"Therefore the average American's car produces CO2 at the equivalent rate of about 14.7 people. Interesting facts to keep in mind."
Except that humans are (almost completely) carbon neutral, while the carbon that comes out of cars was sequestred into the Earth's crust so it wasn't part of the atmosphere before.
The human analysis was for a comparison of emission. The carbon cycle is another issue entirely.
Hmmm... we love cars. A couple years ago I watch a BBC documentary on how the Italians basically killed themselves to get a car. A car was all about status, anyone could have a Vespa.
I think taking away cars from Americans would be harder then taking away their guns.
That whole hitting people with cars on purpose is just insane. Clearly China has some issues they need to work out. It's like a warning for what road rage would be in the states if we didn't have proper law enforcement.
Enviro Nazis please realize what you are doing before it is too late. People will die because of this environmental religion it is just a matter of time before extermination becomes an excepted solution to a manufactured crisis.