It’s almost time for the 2008 Olympics, and the Chinese authorities are making sure their coming out party is as green as possible. And what does environmentalism entail? Draconian restrictions, of course. The Communist Party of China can relate to the green penchant for fascist measures to save the rest of us from ourselves.
In a bid to pacify the environmental tyrants of the occident, the communist tyrants of the orient have instituted a ban on cars. Using an odd-even system based on number plates, Beijing residents will be limited to driving only every other day, with the aim of halving the usual 3,3-million cars on the road. Additional restrictions will shut down (and even move out of the city) many major factories.
BEIJING (Reuters) — Beijing will introduce “odd-even” traffic restrictions for two months from July 20 to help ease congestion and reduce pollution during the Olympics and Paralympics, officials said on Friday.
Authorities hope the regulations will take 45% of the city’s 3,29-million cars off the road and reduce emissions from vehicles by 63%, officials told a news conference.
[...] Those affected by the ban will be compensated by not having to pay road or vehicle taxes for three month, costing the city about 1.3 billion yuan ($189 million).
Violators would be punished “according to relevant national and local regulations” and lose the compensation.
Only 70% of government-owned cars will be included in the scheme.
And if you’re sufficiently poor to have an older, high-emissions car (of the kind Britain’s PM, Gordon Brown, unapologetically wants to use as an excuse to super-tax the working class), you don’t get to drive it at all.
Over at the Huffington Post, this measure is considered a mere band-aid. One dreads to think what a real cure would look like.
And while you park your car, and close your factories, and stop smoking, and renounce your right to protest or get drunk, here’s what you shall cheer, the “spiritual civilisation bureau” decrees: “Aoyun! Jia You! Zhongguo! Jia You!”
The offically-approved cheer, complete with “civilised” gestures, is being taugh through official media and school training programmes. Note the faceless face of “civilisation”. Reports the BBC: “Li Ning, president of the Beijing Etiquette Institute, told the Beijing News that the cheer was in line with general international principles for cheering, while at the same time possessing characteristics of Chinese culture.”
Good to know we have international principles for cheering. I’ll confess I’ve been very disturbed by the uncivilised cheering I’ve come across. Granted, this involved anti-social people who even had the temerity to wear individual faces in public. Shameful. Glad they’re cracking down on that sort of thing.
Just when you thought this couldn’t get any funnier, you discover that with beautiful irony, the cheer means, “Olympics! Add oil! China! Add oil!”
Not if you have the misfortune of being a Chinese citizen in Beijing, you don’t.
Our own politicians and 2010 World Cup organisers undoubtedly have luxury box seats at the Beijing Olympics, where they’ll be learning from the masters how to please the world’s eco-fascists.
(First published on my own blog.)
None of these restrictions will cause terrible hardships – people will use liftclubs, and losses of income will be subsidised.
I admire the Chinese for their efficiency. They are becoming better than the Germans. And surely you HAVE noticed how thrilled and keen the ordinary population is about the Olympics? If they don’t think the sacrifice too great – who are we to criticise?
Looks like the instructions on how to gig along to the drum intro to We Will Rock You
Ivo,
Sure, the cheering instructions are amusing to us Westerners, and no doubt to many middle class Chinese too.
Some of the other preparations the Chinese have done, shows some of the thoroughness and detailed planning that Chinese are famous for, for thousands of years.
A pre-Olympic “Good Manners Campaign” promoted courtesy and orderly queuing and frowned on swearing, spitting and littering in public. One of the Beijing government’s slogans, according to state media, was: “Spitting kills even more than an atomic bomb.” Paper spit bags have been passed out. In three weeks here in May and June, I didn’t hear anyone noisily clearing their throat in public — a once common sound.
Beijing authorities have also given English lessons to 400,000 people, state media say. Most taxi drivers, hotel employees and all Olympic volunteers have received etiquette and English training. More than 10,000 police officers received basic work-related “police English” and even some Japanese, Russian and Arabic training.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/getaways/07/09/china.beijing.ap/index.html
Those hand signals are the best laugh I’ve had all day. The problem is of course that I had a fleeting bit of reason pop up halfway through the rolling about in mirth and now something hurts.
I don’t know about efficiency…see, I don’t mind a bit of inefficiency as long it all keeps moving reasonably otherwise but this level of controlling omnipotent micromanaging efficiency is just…wow.
Ivo,
I’m curious to know how you would propose dealing with externalities such as pollution? I find it interesting that you criticize both straight regulation (which i agree with) and a tax on these sorts of externalities (which I’m not so sure about). I know you’re pro-free market but surely the problem with externalities is that no market exists, because those who are polluting impose the costs of pollution on others, rather than bearing it themselves? The cost of pollution then falls outside of the production decision and a socially sub-optimal level of production occurs. The standard response is that government should impose a tax that forces people to ‘internalize’ the full costs of their action, but you seem against that. (or is it something in the specifics of Brown’s proposal that I’m not aware of, that you’re against, rather than taxing externalities per se?)
HOw long did it take you to notice the institutionalisation of the Chinese population and the parochial attitude of the govt?
Or did you forget the masses wearing green uniforms and waving little red books around because Mao told them to?
Or the offical practices of Confuscism and how many feathers you were allowed to wear as what level of Mandarin?
@ Lyndall Beddy: And if they DO think the sacrifice is too great? What are they going to do? Join Björk and other Western critics of China on the offical banning list?
Also, your comparison with German efficiency is (probably unintentionally) apt. The Nazis remain the classic example of fascist efficiency. Likewise, many intellectuals in the free world deeply admired their healthy young people and well-organised production and civic obedience and national pride.
The high-minded intentions and apparent utility of such state control don’t make the imposition on individual freedom any more tolerable. Fascism — or as Kit calls it, “omnipotent micromanaging” — might appear admirable from a distance, but it doesn’t get prettier, close up. On the contrary, it gets very, very ugly and very, very dangerous.
Ivo
The comparison was intentional. However, the author Jerome Jerome who wrote “Three Men in a Boat” in the first decade of the 20th century predicted the German Nazis. He wrote that The Germans, unlike the Brits, ALWAYS obey the law, even if the law is how to use the sidewalk, or not to walk on a lawn. He pointed out that kind of society is great when it has good leaders and law-makers, but that it would be a disaster with a bad leader.
I would rather the Chinese than Idi Amin or Bob Mugabe.
Unhappy clappers? Indoctrination parallels are staggering.
Eco-fascists?
Perhaps a little extreme as a label for people simply trying to reduce pollution to a level acceptable so that top athletes don’t choke and cough up their lungs while competing. Many countries are setting up training camps outside of Beijing for health and performance reasons.
The reality is that the place is so polluted, it is not conducive to sport and it is not environmentalists driving this radical action but the athletes themselves who are refusing to attend for health and performance reasons. Gebrselassie himself is considering not running the longer events because of the air quality, giving up his gold medal chance, not because he is an eco-fascist but because he is asthmatic.
Some stats about Beijing and the air you feel is being unduly targeted:
·BEIJING has the world’s most toxic air – pollution is 12 times the “safe” level set by the World Health Organisation.
·China has the 16 most polluted cities in the world. Some 750,000 people a year die from illnesses related to breathing in their foul, fume-filled air.
·The country is the world’s second biggest producer of carbon dioxide, contributing 16 per cent of total emissions. The only country producing more is the US.
·China burns more than two billion tonnes of “dirty” coal a year for cooking and heating, creating toxic clouds of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
Ivo
The comparison with the Germans WAS intentional. The author of “Three Men in a Boat”, writing in the first decade of the 1900s, also wrote a story about a cycle tour with his friends in Europe and observed that the Germans, unlike the Brits, observed EVERY law, even don’t walk on the grass type laws. He said that was very dangerous – if they ever got a bad leader they would blindly obey. Like Hitler – Like Mao!
Neither Germany, nor China will tolerate dictators again.
Africa still does.
Rather China than Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, or Kibaki who just recently trashed Kenya’s future by rigging an election to keep power.
What use “democracy” if all elections can be rigged?
The problem of pollution is a complicated one. It likely fits the definition, in libertarian economics, of a technical public good — i.e. one that (a) cannot be provided to one person without also providing it to another, and (b) can be consumed or used by one person without reducing its value or utility to another.
Such goods are best supplied on a communal basis, if they are to be provided at all. Even then, they should rather be funded collectively, but provided by private entities in competition with one another, than provided by the communal authority (government, usually) itself.
Whether to provide it is the complicated issue. That depends on a number of things. One is the willingness of people to pay for it. It is notable that the richer a society becomes, the more willing it is to pay for reasonable measures to curb pollution. People value a clean, healthy, productive environment, though they may value it less than a basic ability to sustain themselves or educate their children. Likewise, in a free market there will also be greater competitive pressure on companies to curb pollution. People would rather buy their car or oil or food from a company they know pollutes less, than one that pollutes more. It becomes a part of their subjective value judgement, and companies must either respond, or face loss of custom.
So the solution is complicated, and both over-reaching by power-grabbing bureaucrats and manipulation by private special interests is a real risk. Which is why classifying something as a technical public good should be a last resort.
Banning cars from the road on an arbitrary basis, and ordering that factories shut down, is rather more than reasonable and justifiable action against pollution, even if you do consider it a technical public good that should be publicly funded or provided.
You’re right to think of pollution in terms of a public good (or ‘bad’ in this case). But it’s the very properties that define something as a public good that mean that free markets can’t provide them. It’s because public goods are non-excludable and non-rival (your A and B above) that ‘willingness to pay’ is a useless concept. In a normal market the price mechanism tells us peoples’ willingness to pay. Because public goods are non-rival and non-excludable they are subject to the free-rider problem (for a rational individual the best response is to not reveal their preferences, since they can probably get the service without paying, the net result is either under- or no provision). What is individually rational however is not ‘societally’ optimal. It therefore becomes impossible to tell how much people actually do value these things, because there is no incentive (i.e. price mechanism) to get them to reveal their preferences.
I’m also skeptical about the ability of a free market to produce ‘competitive pressure to pollute less’. Firstly, the informational requirements of these ‘pressures’ are vast and would probably be more of a PR exercise than convey meaningful information. Shell, for example, spends more on advertising/publicizing it’s ‘green campaign’ than they do on the campaign itself. That sort of cynical manipulation probably means that people wouldn’t really be able to tell who is greener than whom. I don’t know now which oil company is the worst, I don’t see why I would under the hypothetical situation that they be left to govern themselves.
But more importantly it doesn’t deal with who it is who bares the cost. Again, the people who don’t care about pollution impose the costs on everyone (even if everyone knows which product has resulted in how much pollution). If, as an individual, you chose to consume goods that are bad for you, that’s fine. But in this case people can choose to consume goods that are bad for everyone. One person’s ‘subjective value judgement’ effectively imposes a very real cost on everyone else, and that’s not fine.
I do however I agree that “over-reaching by power-grabbing bureaucrats” are a huge danger. That’s why I think that taxing pollution is the way to go. It’s the equivalent of government funding but not provision, i.e. it leaves the smallest possible room for the bureaucrats to stuff it up, because it’s the private sector that actually does the provision. In the same way that I think government needs to subsidize positive public goods (like policing, national defense, street lighting etc), I think taxing (a la Gordon Brown’s plan) negative public goods is the only real solution to a complex problem.
Grant W,
How many tons of dirty coal does SA burn per year?
50 000 tons per day for a 3600MW power station.
That means roughly 400 000 tons per day for all SA’s power stations, as most of our energy is from dirty coal (one third of which – by weight – remains as ash after burning).
That’s about 0.15 billion tons of dirty coal per year, for a country with one thirtieth of China’s population!
That’s just for electricity generation. Then we have to add the dirty coal burnt for domestic heating and cooking heating in places like Soweto, Alex, Tembisa etc.
SA is in no position to critisize countries like China or Czech Republic which burn dirty coal, because we are equally dirty in this regard.
Oldfox
That we are one thirtieth the size of China is rather a major point. Also we tend to like to forget that the other half of the equasion is preserving vegitation and trees. Nothing absorbs carbon dioxide beteer than vegetation. What proportion of its land mass has China preserved under vegetation compared to outs?
By the way I wrote a blog this weekend – which you might not disagree with quite as much as you always do. Please read it.
Lyndall,
My point was that PER CAPITA, SA is in the same league if not worse than China as far as coal related pollution goes.
I don’t know what proportion of China’s (or South Africa’s) land surface has been preserved under vegetation.
According to CIA, 14.86% of China’s land is arable, compared to 12.1% of SA’s land. CIA also states that 20% of China’s arable land has been lost since 1949.
According to the book China’s Geography by Zheng Ping (C 1999), China Intercontintal Press, 10% of China’s land surface consists of farmland.
China is, in a way, encouraging urbanization and at the same time, it is encouraging farmers in some areas to farm on less land (by moving to higher value added crops or agri-businesses) and to free up farmland to return to its natural state.
The Chinese know that pollution is a big problem (400 of its 600 rivers are poisoned, and dangerous/lethal to animal life) according to National Geographic. Each year, many thousands of people die from pollution related illnesses in China. Ordinary Chinese citizens, using modern technology like GPS, mobile phones and/or internet, are flagging factories that are bad polluters.
Changing from being a bad polluter, to a very green country is a long and difficult process. Also difficult for Czech Republic, which like SA, exports high grade (less polluting) coal and, like SA, runs power stations designed to use cheap and dirty coal.
Oldfox
The point is WE don’t have to change “from being a very bad polluter to a very green country”
We only have to STAY “a very green country”.
Lydall,
You obviuously have not heard of/read (or you have forgotten) of many the South Africans who suffer from respiratory diseases due to the massive pollution from Eskom power stations burning dirty (i.e. low grade) coal. This is especially so in the Mpumalanga.
50 000 tons of coal burnt by ONE power station in 24 hours is a lot of coal, and this means a lot of sulphur dioxide (forms acid rain when it gets into contact with water vapour and precipitates).
Per capita, we’re probably worse than China, as I stated in a previous post, in terms of burning of low grade coal.
Many mines incl. coal mines in SA also pollute water. Aluminium smelters also generate toxic waste (flouride and cyanide), and another one it set to be built at Coega.
SA is not a “green” country, in terms of low pollution.
Oldfox
South Africa is a “green country” in respect of undeveloped land like the Wild Coast and our National Parks.
Per capita means nothing to me – we have a country of 50 million, China has a population of 1500 million.
It is like comparing apples with pears.
Oldfox
Where did you post those links on the Dogon? I now have ink for my printer and can’t find them?
Lyndall,
So you admit to being mathematically challenged!
Per capita is a ratio of something per person – GDP per capita, no. of physicists per capita, dirty coal burnt per capita per year, arable land per capita etc. Rwanda is a small country with a low population. We know it has a population problem because it has a low arable land per capita figure – without that measure, we would not have an objective measure (i.e. in a single numerical value) to know it is overpopulated.
As for the Wild Coast, you should know that an Australian co. is dying to mine the coastal dunes for titanium, which would permanently scar the landscape (but would not develop the land as such).
China has many green areas too, some uninhabited, like where the giant Pandas live in the wild.
65% of China consists of hilly/mountainous areas or plateaus. Much of the land that people do not inhabit, is very green, as China gets 6 trillion cubic metres of rainfall per year.
Here are the 3 links and the book title.
http://www.crystalinks.com/dogon.html
Various creation myths incl .Dogon
http://www.adelaidegrid.warp0.com/custom3.html
Ethnomathematics and Symbolic
Thought The Culture of the Dogon
http://www.emis.de/journals/ZDM/zdm992a4.pdf
The Science of the Dogon: Decoding the African Mystery Tradition
By Laird Scranton
ISBN-13: 978-1-59477-133-0
Oldfox
Thanks for the references. Actually I am very good at Maths, and even better at admin system creation. Got it from my parents – both of whom were top of their class in Maths.
It is the computer I struggle with. Partly because this is my husband’s preserve – like taking out the rubbish. He keeps changing formats and programmes and then saying I can’t work it! Now I don’t bother to try – call him if anything complicated needs doing! Which is what he wants anyhow!
Oldfox
I don’t care a damn about per capita. I care about keeping areas farmland and nature reserves.
You think like a man, just like my husband! We will go shopping and he will choose a pack of meat on its price per kilo. I will choose a pack of meat, at the same price, but less per kilo, which will make a better meal because it has less bones. We argue about it every time. He hates shopping with me!
Men and women just don’t think the same – which is why EVERY team must have both!
Lyndall,
Female economists also use the “per capita” term extensively as its the only way to normalize things.
Like the more commonly used “percentage or %” per capita is indispensible to making comparisons between different countries.
Oldfox
By the way – my husband is hopeless at maths and figures, and I was top of the class.
This is about preceptions of what is important not about figures!