ON January 12th of last year, in an article in the print edition of The Economist, we reported that the public outcry over Beijing’s atrocious air quality was putting pressure on officials to release more data about more kinds of pollutants. We also noted that Chinese authorities had already embarked on a wide range of strategies to improve air quality, and that they probably deserve more credit than either foreign or domestic critics tend to give them. But we concluded with the sad reality that such work takes decades, and that “Beijing residents will need to wait before seeing improvements.”
On January 12th of this year, Beijing residents got an acrid taste of what that wait might be like, as they suffered a day of astonishingly bad air. Pollution readings went, quite literally, off the charts. Saturday evening saw a reading of 755 on the Air Quality Index (AQI).
Se efull Article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2013/01/beijings-air-pollution
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