<story><title>On Scale of 0 to 500, Beijing’s Air Quality Tops ‘Crazy Bad’ at 755 </title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/science/earth/beijing-air-pollution-off-the-charts.html?_r=1&amp;</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fnordfnordfnord</author><text>I lived there in &apos;08 and &apos;09. You cannot believe it until you have seen it. The difference during the Olympics was stark. For example, my apartment in Shijingshan had a view of a mountain (~5 mi) and a comm tower (~1 mi). I lived in that apartment for a month before I ever saw either of them. The &apos;Jing rarely gets full sunlight, rather there is this kind of yellowish lambertian light source in the white-ish gray sky. People who espouse environmental deregulation should go check it out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cryptoz</author><text>&amp;#62; People who espouse environmental deregulation should go check it out.&lt;p&gt;This is a very interesting comment. Right now in Canada, we have a Conservative majority government that is absolutely hell-bent on environmental deregulation. Their supporters almost exclusively bring up China as the primary reason why environmental deregulation is so important to them (&quot;if we kept our existing regulations, our economy would tank since China would make so much more money&quot;).&lt;p&gt;I very much doubt seeing the skies in Beijing would change anything, but I wonder. Perhaps a campaign in Canada to show images of what China is like would make a difference; on the other hand, the supporters of the environmental deregulation are not the type of people to care about air quality. They value a &quot;strong economy&quot; and money above absolutely everything else, and think that Canada needs to pollute more and more, as much as it can in fact, in order to be a reasonable country in the future.</text></comment>
<story><title>On Scale of 0 to 500, Beijing’s Air Quality Tops ‘Crazy Bad’ at 755 </title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/science/earth/beijing-air-pollution-off-the-charts.html?_r=1&amp;</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fnordfnordfnord</author><text>I lived there in &apos;08 and &apos;09. You cannot believe it until you have seen it. The difference during the Olympics was stark. For example, my apartment in Shijingshan had a view of a mountain (~5 mi) and a comm tower (~1 mi). I lived in that apartment for a month before I ever saw either of them. The &apos;Jing rarely gets full sunlight, rather there is this kind of yellowish lambertian light source in the white-ish gray sky. People who espouse environmental deregulation should go check it out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fatbird</author><text>I heard that the change during the Olympics was remarkable.  How come the actions they took to clean up didn&apos;t stick?  You would think that when everyone saw the difference, there&apos;d be a lot of support for fixing the underlying problems.</text></comment>