China: the Pollution Problem

Upon doing research for my trip to China, I encountered arguments that were against the Olympics occurring in Beijing. I am planning on going to Beijing while I'm in China, and hopefully we'll get to see the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube. But I don't think we'll get to go inside them.

Perhaps one of the strongest points to argue against the Olympics in Beijing is the air pollution. Some believe that the athletes should’ve been concerned, but many others just proclaim that it was fog. Some athletes, in fact, had visited neighboring countries, such as South Korea and Japan, prior to the games to avoid Beijing’s poor air conditions for as long as they could. Although these are extreme cases, they are cautious cases.

In any case, two weeks prior to the opening ceremony in Beijing there was a shroud of smog covering the city, which made athletes and coaches very worried. Some environmentalists from Beijing based this off of the lack of air to blow away the pollution from the city, but the more logical reason, brought up by scientists from Greenpeace, is that the pollution is a combination of poor living methods. There are 3.3 million cars in Beijing, and all of these cars partake in the air pollution. So to fix the air pollution, the government took drastic measures, which included pulling half of the cars off the roads, closing down factories around the city that emitted toxic gases and smog, and stopping most construction.

The air pollution is a great problem to this day. It’s polluting the skies in a gray haze. The types of air pollution include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen monoxide, and carbon dioxide. However, although these toxins were in Beijing’s skies, the Olympic board did not say that the Beijing Olympics contributed to the toxins at all as a result of the Olympics using a great deal of solar energy. In the end, the air pollution problem did not stop a great Olympic event that will go down in history books, but on the other hand, anti-pollution encouragements need to be established.