Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Blue Sky Days

2 posts in one day, aren't you all lucky?

I saw on the news recently that Beijing authorities are worried that the city might not meet its quota of 'blue sky days' this year. That is to say, days when you can see the sky, and not smog. The quota seems to be 150something days a year, if memory serves. However, the pollution this year has been pretty bad, and the number of blue skies I've seen here could be counted on my digits.

It seems to me that the overriding factor in having a blue sky day or not here is nothing to do with the number of cars on the road, or chimneys heating centralised hot water, but the wind. Every time the wind blows, the smog clears - as has happened today. So why on earth is this policy in place if it relies solely on the weather? It could well be just another pointless target for the government to crow about how great China is over when reached.

Speaking of pollution, it seems that this Grorious Nation(tm) has again strapped living beings to an ICBM and shot them into space. All hush hush until the morning of the launch here (which I suspect happened a day earlier...), when we were bombarded with 'live' coverage of the blast-off. Now that they're up there, how will they come down? That's not my department...(insert own Tom Lehrer gag here)

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