The Portrait of an Olympic Host: Smog and Mirrors: China's Plan for a
Green Olympics/WIRED

WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 15.08
Science : Planet Earth RSS

Smog and Mirrors: China's Plan for a Green Olympics

Spencer Reiss Email 07.24.07 | 2:00 AM

http://www.wired.com/print/science/planetearth/magazine/15-08/ff_pollution#
Photograph by Tony Law

Double-digit economic growth is something you can actually see in the
capital city of the People's Capitalist Republic of China. Every 24
hours, another thousand new Buicks, cute little homegrown Cherys, and
buff black Audis swarm onto the 10-lane parking lots that ring the city.
Every other belching truck hauls steel or concrete, every other city
block boasts another 50-story investment scheme. Imperial avenues,
bizarchitecture skyscrapers, distant mountains ― all dematerialize in
the stinking haze.

The air isn't always so awful: Sometimes the wind sweeps through,
revealing a blue canopy overhead. But on a bad day ― come August, say,
when temperatures approach 100 degrees ― the atmosphere around Beijing
becomes a photochemical bouillabaisse of coal smog, steel-mill spume,
and tailpipe crud, mingled with concrete dust and baked in the oven
formed by the surrounding hills.

Just the place for the summer Olympics.

China won its bid for the 2008 games in part by vowing to put on a
"Green Olympics" ― a symphony of clean tech and energy efficiency that
would do Greenpeace proud. In the six years since, officials have been
battling to make at least some of that happen. They've shuttered the
worst of Chairman Mao's beloved old blast furnaces, torn up streets to
build subway lines, upgraded sewage treatment plants. They've planted
tens of millions of trees, pulverizing a nearby mountain for fresh soil.

Lovely stuff, long overdue. And, this being the Olympics, there's also
plenty of showboating. The new national stadium ― dubbed the Bird's Nest
― is rigged with an intricate rainwater-capture system to feed the
infield grass. The bubbly blue National Aquatics Center ― better known
as the Water Cube ― is wrapped in a high-efficiency thermal polymer
skin. The Olympic Village is being outfitted with solar-powered showers.
A fleet of electric buses is on the way, along with 3,000 lithium-ion
garbage trucks. Even grim old Tiananmen Square, 5 miles due south, now
boasts energy-efficient streetlights. (No word about the Energy Star
rating of the Great Helmsman himself, still wowing crowds in his
refrigerated glass crypt.)

All of which might count for something had China's economy not chosen
the same moment to go on a skyscraping, steel-milling, coal-fired binge.
With barely 365 days left on Tiananmen Square's digital Olympic
countdown clock, city officials are battling to avoid a spectacularly
public mud bath.

The Olympics are China's coming-out party, payback for smug Westerners
and a victory lap for the Godzilla of the global economy. The stone-cold
suits who run China Inc. don't want the celebration spoiled by
smogged-out skylines or marathoners in face masks.
The Bird's Nest stadium will boast a rainwater-capture system to
irrigate the infield. But that won't improve air quality in the city.
Photograph by Tony Law

Beijing's bad air ― and the rest of what the International Olympic
Committee termed the city's "environmental challenge" ― was on the table
from the start of the city's Olympic bid in 2000. Chinese officials
promised to pour $12.2 billion into cleaning up. They pledged to reduce
atmospheric concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and
carbon monoxide to meet the requirements of the World Health
Organization. Particulate matter ― dust and grit ― would "reach the
level of major cities in developed countries." An official "Olympic
Action Plan," released in 2002, laid out a layer cake of city wide
improvements ― including more than 400 miles of new expressway ―
liberally plastered with green icing: "pollution- free burning,
geothermal-operated pumps, solar energy power generating, solar energy
heating, fuel cells, and nanometer materials." Beijing 2008, the
document proclaimed, would be an "ecological city."

Olympics or not, China's capital ― population 15 million with a bullet ―
clearly needed an environmental overhaul. Officials have been using the
games as a pretext to renovate or replace thousands of Mao-vintage
backyard foundries and coal furnaces. They're retrofitting the city's
big power plants with scrubbers ― standard-issue in the US and Europe
since the 1980s but still a novelty in China. They cajoled the city's
most infamous polluter, the Shougang Group, into closing or relocating
its most noxious steel mills.

But the impact of China's economic eruption couldn't be so neatly
finessed ― especially at ground zero, Beijing. Two million new cars
overwhelmed the city's expressways before the lane paint dried.
Countless new air conditioners kept power plants cranking ― and the
hotter and smoggier the air, the harder they cranked. Neighboring cities
cheerfully rolled out the welcome mat for the capital's filthiest
factories, then spewed record amounts of coal smoke into the region's
skies to keep them humming.

And so, the dream of a green city has quietly given way to a simpler
approach: hitting the Off button. Detailed plans have yet to emerge;
even in a one-party state, politicians can't run roughshod over public
opinion or business interests. One certainty is a ban on excavation at
the city's 3,000-plus non-Olympic construction sites ― the source of up
to one-third of the capital's airborne dust, by local estimates. There's
also talk of closing factories in and around Beijing for as much as two
months before and during the games.

Another likely option: keeping some of those new cars in their garages.
Last November, in what was widely seen as a dry run for 2008, officials
used a three-day summit of African heads of state to test strategies.
They restricted access to certain routes and limited the use of both
private and government vehicles, taking an estimated 800,000 cars and
trucks off the road in and around Beijing. A NASA satellite recorded
nitrogen oxide reductions of up to 40 percent. As the post-Mao leader
Deng Xiaoping might have said: "Who cares whether the cat is green as
long as it catches mice?"

Just one problem: The Olympics are scheduled for August. That's when the
winds change direction, blowing in foul air from the heavily
industrialized Hebei province and trapping it against the surrounding
mountains. A recent study by US and Chinese researchers, using the most
advanced atmospheric models, found that up to 70 percent of Beijing's
summer particulate pollution originates outside the city. In other
words, you could shut down the city, close the highways, turn off the
power, and still have a seriously bad air day.

That message struck a chord with the International Olympic Committee. In
April, a visiting IOC inspection team pointedly asked for further
details on the antipollution campaign. They also requested "contingency
plans" should all efforts fall short by opening day. City officials
referred vaguely to "hard measures" ― reportedly including forced,
last-minute vacations not only for factory workers but also for the
capital's resident army of civil servants. Whether they can strong-arm
upwind provinces ― including much of China's industrial heartland ― into
blowing off a couple weeks' worth of GDP to clear the air over rival
Beijing is an open question.

And there's always the Hail Mary play: cloud seeding. Should air quality
threaten to steal the show, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau promises
to have its fleet of cloud-seeding aircraft warmed up on the runways,
ready to bomb the sky with silver iodide and set off air-scrubbing
showers over competition areas.

And if even these last-ditch efforts fail? "What can you do?" shrugged
Hein Verbruggen, leader of the inspection team. "Let's be open here. We
can't say tomorrow, 'OK, We'll go somewhere else.'"
Photograph by Tony Law

Randy Wilber is an air pollution connoisseur. Senior sport physiologist
for the US Olympic Committee, he has made five trips to Beijing since
March 2006, lugging an air-quality monitor to all 31 Olympic venues. The
city's atmosphere, he says tactfully, is "significantly worse" than that
of Los Angeles, the US standard for big-city pollution. Then there's the
heat. In August, Wilber recorded daytime temperatures consistently in
the 90s, with relative humidity approaching 95 percent. "For endurance
events," he says, "that's borderline hazardous." His overall assessment:
"Not good."

Most researchers focus on pollution's long-term consequences ― heart
disease and cancer. For Wilber and the 600 high- performance humans he
advises, it's the immediate impact that matters. His hit list includes
the full array of Beijing's atmospheric condiments. Colorless and
odorless carbon monoxide is a "biochemical competitor," preventing
oxygen from binding to hemoglobin so it can be carried to muscles.
Nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter cause
exercise-induced asthma and "airway hyper-responsiveness," either of
which can suddenly strike athletes with no history of susceptibility.
Ozone has similar effects and is tricky to predict because its formation
depends on sunlight and heat. Sulfur dioxide burns the eyes, with
implications for sports like shooting and archery. All these effects are
aggravated by high respiration rates.

"Our athletes spend years preparing," he says. "Medals are decided by
hundredths of a second. You bet they take this seriously."

Many of them are getting an early taste, as Beijing hosts a dozen
international sporting events this summer, trial runs for next year's
games. Wilber will be carting around a pneumotachometer ― a breathing
device connected to a laptop computer ― to check his charges for
pollution-induced health problems. And he has extra incentive to find
them. The most common asthma treatments contain so-called beta-2
agonists ― stimulants banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency as
performance enhancers. Their use requires a formal diagnosis, followed
by approval from the IOC; one unauthorized whiff and your hard-earned
medal could vanish. In recent years, Wilber says, about 27 percent of US
Olympic athletes have been officially diagnosed with exercise-induced
respiratory problems. Not surprisingly, he expects that figure to
increase in Beijing.

Either way, Wilber and his team at the USOC's Performance Services
Division are recommending an unusual addition to US athletes' bag of
competitive tricks: activated-charcoal face masks, both on the field and
off. They've also put out a handy booklet of 2008 Olympic survival tips,
such as using over-the-counter ibuprofen or indomethacin to partially
block pollution's lung-searing effects. And they're urging US teams to
find living sites elsewhere in the region ― South Korea, for example ―
and to wait until the last moment before flying into Beijing. American
swimmers and track-and-field athletes followed that strategy before the
2004 Athens Games, setting up bases on Majorca and Crete, respectively,
to avoid dirty urban air. "I don't think it's a coincidence that they
won more medals than other US teams," Wilber says.

Will it work? "We hope for the best," he replies. "And we prepare for
the worst."

Two miles south of the Olympic park, what looks like an industrial moon
base is shoehorned into a dusty old Beijing neighborhood. It's the
Beijing Taiyanggong CCGT Trigeneration Project, a 780-megawatt, natural
gas fired power plant green enough to be worth $100 million in
Kyoto-authorized carbon credits. The twin turbines, GE's latest and
greatest, will keep the lights on at the Bird's Nest and elsewhere,
replacing some 80 old coal furnaces. "Clean energy is the future," says
Ding Haijun, GE's point man in China. "Having this plant here for the
Olympics makes us very proud as Chinese."

Two Chinas are colliding at next year's Olympics ― a gritty GDP machine
and the 21st-century Cinderella it wants to be. The Taiyanggong facility
makes a lovely pumpkin carriage, but it's just one power plant among the
PRC's thousands.

Jiang Kejun works on statistical models at Beijing's Energy Research
Institute, an arm of the powerful National Development and Reform
Commission. Like a lot of people in China, he's more than a little
stunned after a decade of breakneck GDP growth. "Change is happening so
fast," he says. "Our 2000 forecast of energy demand has been completely
transformed. And, of course, everyone wants an American lifestyle. So on
things like air pollution, we have to keep running faster just to stay
in one place." On a cloudless April afternoon, he can't see more than a
mile out of his 14th-floor office window.

Once upon a time, staging the Olympics in Beijing would have been much
easier: Build some big stadiums, fill them with loyal party members,
keep the foreign guests well fed, and declare victory. But successful
cleanups in other developed cities have raised expectations. China wants
to take its place as a world leader, not just the new heavyweight champ
of carbon emissions. Scenes of marathoners in gas masks, beamed around
the world, would be a PR disaster that no amount of glossy Bird's Nest
blimp shots could offset. "Brand China," a report published by London's
Foreign Policy Centre, suggests that the whole idea of using the
Olympics to gild China's image is risky. "The only single events that
remake national images," it notes, "tend to be bad ones."

Back at the Olympic Green, another palpable emblem of the new China
rises from the dust: the four sleek, bladelike buildings of Digital
Beijing, IT hub for the 2008 games. Across the street, an escarpment of
future luxury apartments looms over the Water Cube like some kind of,
well, Great Wall. The city's business elite is buzzing with rumors that
Bill Gates ― a demigod in China ― has reserved a penthouse for the
games. Will he be better off watching them on television? That depends
on which way the wind blows.

Contributing editor Spencer Reiss (spencer@upperroad.net) wrote about
space tourism in issue 15.06.
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