The Beijing Dystopia

PSI has been terrible the last week - I think 'official' figures put it slightly above 400. The lack of food forced me out a couple of nights ago and I was thinking rather gloomily as I waded through the haze that this is like one of those futuristic sci-fi dystopias that I used to read. Life is lived indoors with filtered air, and the dangerous Outside is ventured only rarely and from necessity in some sort of suit. I can still smell the smoke through the mask, there's blackened stuff coming out from my nose and my lungs when I sneeze and I would buy clean air somewhere if I could, but I can't. And I think, we're very very close. We just don't face up to how close. Life just changes, slowly, gradually, and habits along with it - until unknowingly we reach that point, and discover that previous literature had been right. I don't read dystopian sci-fi here - I find it eerily close to the situation, and a little depressing.

The problem is that many developed cities have followed such a trajectory; London and smog post industrial revolution, Japan in the 1960s, Hong Kong, America (whose continental colonisation also led to the systematic extinction of several large flightless birds and mammals, which we could have domesticated today). We don't have a great track record of improving the human civilisation in general. Just that China, with her sheer population size, multiples everything by several factors. The frightening thing is that this is just the beginning. China had the largest absolute CO2 emissions in 2012 with 7.1 tons per capita and is now responsible for a quarter of the world's emissions. America's emissions on a per capita basis was more than twice that, at 16.4 tons. Even environmentally conscious OECD countries generally have > 10, with the exception of shining Sweden, which holds a sterling example at about 7.9.

China has more than 4 times the population size (of the US), and the brain automatically avoid India, Brazil, and other rising stars of tomorrow. Looking up at the sky and multiplying by, say 8 can give one a slightly more urgent view of the situation. Whatever is to be done, some haste would be nice. Being a frog in a pot is not a great feeling, even with reassurances that the fire would be quenched at some point soonish, after a decision is made soonish, when the frog is only lightly steamed.

And this is my frustration with Singapore and how small I feel when I'm back, and how small minded we are as a collective whole on what we choose to care about. But this blog entry has gone on for long enough and this shall be musing for another time.

Meanwhile back to work! Amazon cloudfront + s3 today, amazon cloud has come to China yay. And I shall live another day to make my own little contribution to environmental pollution.


Readable links:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/11/2012s-carbon-emissions-in-five-graphs/
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/which_nations_have_reduced_car
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2013/jul/16/carbon-emissions-carbon-tax