China Environmental Law

I love it when Chinese officials become dismissively indignant even when they are just flat out, demonstrably wrong. Here’s a classic.

Chinese Minister of Environmental Protection has refuted doubts over the accuracy of the air quality test results in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics and blamed media’s exaggeration of the capital’s pollution.

Zhou Shengxian said during a panel discussion on Friday at the Global Think Tank Summit that an embassy in Beijing had installed its own air quality monitoring equipment for measuring PM 2.5 (particles less than 2.5 microns) and made assumptions that the air quality results for last summer’s Olympic Games were inaccurate, Saturday’s China Daily reported.

Zhou praised Beijing for its efforts in improving air quality.

To my knowledge, the US embassy has said nothing about the accuracy of China’s air monitoring results during the Olympics, and I would be very surprised if it did—why poke at that hornet’s nest?

A much more credible source (which Zhou willfully chose to ignore or was unaware of—neither alternative reflects well on Minister Zhou, but it is possible that his remarks were not accurately reported), with significantly more experience in air monitoring than the US Embassy in Beijing, has recently released findings regarding the air quality during the Olympics. The study, entitled “Atmospheric Particulate Matter Pollution during the 2008 Beijing Olympics,” was jointly conducted by scientific departments of Beijing University and Oregon State University.

This joint effort concluded that its own PM₁₀ concentrations readings during the Olympics were “1.3 times higher than, the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau’s PM₁₀ concentrations at near-by sites,” but this difference was attributed to “differences in the measurement methods used.” I’m too cheap to buy full access to this study so I don’t know if the measurement methods used by Beijing were within international norms.

Ultimately, the China-US researchers concluded:

• Favorable weather had more to do with Beijing’s reduced PM₁₀ concentration levels during the Olympics than did the much touted “source control” efforts.
• The PM₁₀ concentrations in Beijing during the Olympic period were 2.9, 3.5, and 1.9 times higher than those in Atlanta, Sydney, and Athens.
• PM_2.5 and PM₁₀ concentrations during the Olympic period exceeded the WHO 24-h guideline 100% and 81% of the time, respectively.

So, shame on the media for exaggerating Beijing’s pollution!