homework4
AAK86
homework_4.docxHomework 4 – Asia
The topic for this homework assignment is pollution in India and China. You will need to read the articles below, look for a couple yourself, and write an essay covering the following:
How bad is pollution in India and China? (Water and air and soil in particular) Explain using statistics/percentages/comparisons to other countries. – be sure and read the article on food imported from China.
How did this happen?
What are the ramifications of this pollution? (to the country and their neighbors and the people who live there?
How are they trying to stop it? Are they? What are some of the things they are doing to improve pollution levels? (see what China is doing during Chinese New Year – you will have to look that one up)
Are they succeeding?
You should follow all the directions given for previous homework assignments.
Possible sources – you will need to find a couple more sources on China in particular – please post the links to your sources at the end of your paper.
India's Smog Destroyed Enough Crops In A Year To Feed 94 Million People: Study
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/06/india-smog-crops-ozone-pollution_n_5777004.html
India River Pollution: 80 Percent of Indian Sewage Flows Untreated Into Country's Rivers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/05/india-river-pollution-sewage_n_2810213.html
India admits Delhi matches Beijing for air pollution threatening public health
Ten of the most polluted places on the planet
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/07/23/3549975.htm
China-India Smog Rivalry a Sign of Global Menace
Frozen berries hepatitis A scare: Pollution poses challenges to Chinese food safety practices
The two below may not be available for you to access directly so I just cut and pasted it for you. They are from the Economist.
Air pollution in India
Breathe uneasy
The air that Indians breathe is dangerously toxic
Feb 7th 2015 | DELHI | From the print edition
IndIndia’s shroud
IN THE early hours of a January morning, all lanes of a motorway into Delhi are crammed with hundreds of rumbling lorries. These are brightly painted, with signs imploring overtaking drivers to “Honk please”. Every night immense convoys like this one snake their way into the Indian capital, belching sulphurous diesel smoke. The sinking winter air presses the resulting smog tight over the city.
The lorries are a chief reason why Delhi’s air is now more toxic than any other city’s on earth. Admittedly Beijing has a worse reputation, with its visible smog from particulates of 10 microns or smaller, known as PM10. Delhi’s grim distinction is that it has even higher levels of PM10, as well as of the smaller particulates, PM2.5, that are more likely to kill because they go deeper into the lungs. Levels of PM2.5 in Delhi are routinely 15 times above levels considered safe by the World Health Organisation. New data suggest that, on this score, Delhi’s air has been 45% more polluted than that of the Chinese capital for the past couple of years.
Last year the WHO assessed 1,622 cities worldwide for PM2.5 and found India home to 13 of the 20 cities with the most polluted air. More cities in India than in China see extremely high levels of such pollution. Especially to blame are low standards for vehicle emissions and fuel. Nor, for different reasons, are rural people better off. Indoor pollution inhaled from dung-fuelled fires, and paraffin stoves and lights, may kill more than 1m Indians a year. The WHO says the vast majority of Indians breathe unsafe air. The human cost is seen in soaring asthma rates, including among children. PM2.5 contributes to cancer and it kills by triggering heart attacks and strokes. Air pollution is likely to cause vastly more deaths as Indians grow older and more obese. Indoor and outdoor pollution combined is the biggest cause of death, claiming over 1.6m lives a year.
Michael Greenstone of Chicago University has led research into pollution-affected lifespans in China that has implications for India. The lives of northern Chinese, he found, are 5.5 years shorter on average because of air pollution. In a forthcoming article, he applies the same methods to assess the 660m Indians most exposed to toxic air. He concludes that they would each live over three years longer, on average, if their air met national standards.
A former UN chief negotiator on climate change, Yvo de Boer, suggests that air pollution costs China the equivalent of a tenth or more of GDP and he warns India to avoid that fate. He urges India to “industrialise in a cleaner way”. And a study of agriculture in India from 1980 to 2010 found soaring levels of ozone and other air pollution, which has led to wheat yields a third lower than would otherwise have been expected.
India’s leaders are starting to act, pressed by anti-smog campaigns such as the one by the Times of India to “let Delhi breathe”. Prakash Javedekar, the environment minister, says that monitors have been installed on thousands of industrial chimneys to gather data on emissions. Now officials have identified the country’s 17 most polluting industries.
In theory, at least, every Indian city is now supposed continuously to measure air quality. But state governments are slow to enforce national orders, while the Central Pollution Control Board, India’s main environmental agency, does little. Mr Javedekar promises “aggressive action” to improve fuel standards, which would cover those belching lorries coming into Delhi. In March the Supreme Court may anyway order standards to be tightened, by reducing sulphur, as well as instructing carmakers to cut vehicle emissions.
Some good initiatives to improve air quality are under way. A research project near Patna in Bihar proposes retrofitting the chimneys of brick kilns in ways that reduce smoke. The scrapping of subsidies on petrol and diesel in recent years has had the welcome effect of raising the costs of running especially noxious generators, which may account for nearly a third of all installed electricity capacity. Given that most people, even in the city, still commute by foot, bus or bicycle—and that only 5% of households own cars—India still has time to set up systems for mass public transport before the car becomes king. Already 14 cities have or are building metros. As for farmers, Sunita Narain, a green activist, says they should be pressed to use modern harvesting machinery that renders it unnecessary to burn stubble in fields, a big cause of air pollution.
One experiment could prove particularly welcome. Three industrialised states—Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu—are about to launch the world’s first market for trading permits in emissions of particulate matter. In the town of Surat, in Gujarat, 300 textile plants, which typically burn coal to produce steam, are likely to be the first to trade such permits. Monitoring equipment has already gathered emissions data from these and other plants.
Factories could quickly cut emissions by a lot once they have incentives to do so. They could, for example, clean their equipment better or burn fuel more efficiently. The market can function once India’s central government gives the order. That is likely to happen, however, only once the law allows financial rather than criminal penalties for owners whose plants breach legal standards. No one knows how long the change will take. Lots of bright ideas exist for tackling air pollution. Their widespread implementation, however, depends to a great degree on how much the public makes a fuss about inaction. As lorry drivers might say, honk please.
Indian winter
Narendra Modi should learn from China’s mistakes before it’s too late
Feb 7th 2015 | From the print edition
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NATIONAL monuments skulk in the smog. Pedestrians and traffic policemen mask their mouths in a vain attempt to keep out the fetid vapours. Children choke in their schoolrooms. Two years ago such scenes would have been set in Beijing, then suffering an “airpocalypse”—alarming levels of airborne pollution which focused public attention on China’s dismal environmental record and forced the government to do more about it. Today they are more likely to feature in India’s capital, Delhi, the most polluted city on Earth.
India’s mission in the next 30 years is to grow as fast as China has in the past 30—but without all the pollution (see article ). The global climate could not bear India following China’s path; and the health of Indians could not stand it. Instead India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, needs to improve India’s environmental laws by drawing lessons from China.
If India were to start belching out as much carbon as China does now, it would be adding an extra America’s-worth of emissions to the atmosphere every year. That is why curbing pollution would benefit everyone. But it would benefit Indians the most. One study calculated that air pollution (from soot, mostly, not carbon dioxide) has reduced the life expectancy of citizens of northern China by about 5.5 years (see article ). The authors of that study have now looked at India, and concluded that air pollution already cuts life expectancy there by about three years for nearly 700m people.
The good news is that India has some advantages over China. When it began its market reforms, China was saddled with monstrously polluting, Soviet-inspired heavy industry. India has fewer smokestacks and a bigger services sector. Its bureaucrats do not have to meet targets for economic growth, which in China encourage local officials to favour output over cleaner water or purer air. And although Indians are sometimes said not to care about the environment, they can look back to an ancient tradition of green law. Ashoka, who united much of the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC, was the first ruler to issue edicts protecting his natural surroundings (“Forests must not be burned in order to kill living things or without any good reason,” said one rule).
All that bodes well. But India still has much to do. Smoke from cooking fires claims about 1m lives a year. Fewer than one in ten coal-fired power stations scrubs its flue gases of sulphur compounds. Too many laws are weak or poorly enforced. The Pollution Control Board controls nothing. Environmental groups have filed a mass of lawsuits against the government’s inaction, with the result that the Supreme Court plays a larger role in environmental protection than its equivalent does in any other big country—an odd way to set policy.
Mr Modi should start with better information. Some Indian cities have begun to monitor particulates in the air. Others should quickly follow—and make the data public, so that independent groups can hold politicians and polluters to account. Cleaner transport is a priority. The fuel in most of India’s cars and lorries is filthy and sulphurous. In March the Supreme Court will decide whether to raise fuel-efficiency and vehicle-emissions standards. It should do both.
Happily, India has plans to clean up. It ended subsidies on diesel last year, so firms have less reason to run inefficient, polluting generators and vehicles. Next to go should be subsidies on paraffin. The dirtiest power plants must close. States should follow the lead of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, which are due to launch the world’s first cap-and-trade schemes for particulates.
India’s leaders need to recognise that the pollution created in the rush to improve people’s lives sets progress back and that emissions can be curbed in ways that do not wreck economic growth. If, for instance, India were to build a reliable electricity grid it would reduce the use of dirty private generators, cut indoor air pollution from cooking fires and boost productivity all at the same time. China waited too long to clean up its act; India should not make the same mistake.
