Trucks Power China’s Economy, at a Suffocating Cost
Reuters
Spewing Soot While Waiting for Fuel Trucks often spend hours idling in fuel lines, like these in Wuhan, sometimes for as little as five gallons of diesel, because of shortages and rationing.

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By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: December 8, 2007
GUANGZHOU, China — Every night, columns of hulking blue and red freight trucks invade China’s major cities with a reverberating roar of engines and dark clouds of diesel exhaust so thick it dims headlights.

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Choking on Growth
This is the seventh in a series of articles and multimedia examining the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China's epic pollution crisis.

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Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
The residents of Guangzhou often wake up to a sooty film on their city.
By daybreak in this sprawling metropolis in southeastern China, residents near thoroughfares who leave their windows open overnight find their faces stiff with a dark layer of diesel soot.

After Mary Leung opens her tiny open-air shop along a major road soon after dawn, she must wipe the soot off her countertops and tables; the tiny yellow-and-olive bird that has kept her company is harder to clean.

Trucks are the mules of this country’s spectacularly expanding economy — ubiquitous and essential, yet highly noxious.

Trucks here burn diesel fuel contaminated with more than 130 times the pollution-causing sulfur that the United States allows in most diesel. While car sales in China are now growing even faster than truck sales, trucks are by far the largest source of street-level pollution.

Tiny particles of sulfur-laden soot penetrate deep into residents’ lungs, interfering with the absorption of oxygen. Nitrogen oxides from truck exhaust, which build all night because cities limit truck traffic by day, bind each morning with gasoline fumes from China’s growing car fleet to form dense smog that inflames lungs and can cause severe coughing and asthma.

The 10 million trucks on Chinese roads, more than a quarter of all vehicles in this country, are a major reason that China accounts for half the world’s annual increase in oil consumption. Sating their thirst helped push the price of oil to nearly $100 a barrel this year, before a recent decline, and has propelled China past the United States as the world’s largest emitter of global-warming gases.

Yet cleaning up truck pollution presents complex problems for China’s leaders.

For instance, regulators have begun raising emissions standards for new trucks, but have left millions of older ones belching black smoke. Forcing businesses and farmers to buy more expensive vehicles could put a drag on the economy, which already faces inflationary pressure from rising food prices and other costs.

That fear of inflation — not to mention political and social unrest — has led Beijing to prevent the country’s mostly state-owned oil companies from increasing diesel prices at the pump in pace with global oil prices. Raising fuel prices for farmers, whose incomes have lagged behind those of city dwellers and who need diesel for their tractors, is one concern. Lower diesel prices also essentially subsidize every manufacturer in China’s elaborate export machine.

But price controls create a vicious circle. Oil giants like Sinopec, losing money on every gallon of diesel they refine because of the low sales prices, upgrade refineries slowly, if at all. And they seek out cheap crude, which has high levels of sulfur, to make diesel, negating the effects of higher emissions standards for new vehicles.

“Sinopec is trying our best to purchase low-quality crudes — much heavier and more sulfur content,” said Evan Jia, a Sinopec spokesman. “We buy those kinds of crudes to lower the purchasing cost.”

Low diesel prices frequently make trucks more cost-effective than trains, which pollute less. Sales of large freight trucks in China outpace those in the United States by a wide margin. Demand for diesel at service stations is so great, and supplies are so tight, that rationing and shortages have become common. Truck drivers idle for hours only to be allowed to buy as little as five gallons of fuel.

Since 2000, sales of heavy-duty trucks have risen sixfold while car sales have risen eightfold. This has created myriad problems, from gridlock that chokes China’s cities to pollution that chokes its citizens, contributing each year to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from heart and lung problems, according to the World Bank.

Working in the Fumes

Ms. Leung, the shopkeeper, is a slender, tidy, 44-year-old woman with a cheery disposition. She used to keep her little bird in a wooden cage over the entrance to the two battered plastic tables where she serves soft drinks and fresh waffles for less than 40 cents each.

All day, trucks, buses and cars grind past. While large trucks are banned in Guangzhou from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., some obtain special permits for daytime access. And many medium-size trucks with diesel engines are allowed in the city during the day if they carry local license plates.

“We had to put out bowls of water in the cage,” Ms. Leung said, so the bird could constantly wash itself. She finally moved the bird, a Pekin robin, to her home on a quieter street.

She tries not to think about what the exhaust fumes are doing to her own health.

“My throat hurts all the time,” she said. “I suck on throat lozenges for it. It’s unbearable.”

International experts say that hundreds of millions of Chinese are exposed every day to the potentially lethal mix of soot particles and smog.

China - Trucks - Transportation - Pollution - New York Times

__________________
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." Hillary Clinton, June 2004.


"If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity; it must be known, that we are at all times ready for war" -- George Washington, Fifth Annual Address to Congress, December 13, 1793

Let me just say that China has surpassed the United states for green house gases. In it is growing at a Amazing rate. The United states green house gas levels have want down over the last few years...If you people are serious you need to work with China to get their standards raised. Because in ten years China could be 5-6 times as much green house gases into the Atmopshere as the United states. Hell China alone by that time could be releasing the same amount if not more then the whole world outside of it self. If you believe in Global warming you have to be nuts to ignore China.

__________________
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." Hillary Clinton, June 2004.


"If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity; it must be known, that we are at all times ready for war" -- George Washington, Fifth Annual Address to Congress, December 13, 1793

China is not a free country. They need to have a revolution, then we can help them. Why they qualified to host the Olympics is anyone's guess.

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"Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states...Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."



~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Politics, Zephyr. We didn't recognize China as a country for a long time. We recognized Taiwan as China. However, Nixon and his advisers saw that we could get more economic benefit from being friends with Red China. China would not agree to trade with us unless we agreed to recognize them as a country and stop recognizing Taiwan, as well as give them a bunch of political benefits.

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An' it harm none, do as ye' will.


Never argue with an idiot. He'll just drag you down to his level of intelligence and beat you with experience.