The rain began yesterday afternoon, turning into ice by the late evening, continuing through the night as snow. And behold, the above picture via BJ Reviewer. Josh Chin is also calling for photos at the hashtag #BeijingSnowWSJ / #BeijingSnowWSJ# (for you Weibo users), so do that if you want to see your picture on Wall Street Journal,... Read more »
Did you know that Tuesday, March, 12, was Arbor Day in China? On Zhi Shu Jie (植树节), literally Plant-A-Tree Day, people celebrated by planting anything they could. As Sina Weibo user @粮仓一鼠 put it, “Although there is no land to plant a tree, we can grow a pea in a flower pot.” Like him, many... Read more »
Seriously, now: forget the jokes, forget about water safety concerns, forget everything until this question is answered: what possibly could have gone through the mind of the homicidal pig farmer who dumped more than 6,000 pigs into the Huangpu River? Did a pig farm explode? Does circovirus cause pigs to go mad and jump in... Read more »
Unsatisfied with “hogwash,” “bay of pigs,” and “bacon” — all perfectly good and scurvy ways of describing the deathcarts of pig carcasses dredged out of the upper regions of Shanghai’s Shuangpu River this week — we now have “pigfestation,” courtesy of Bloomberg Businessweek:
Babe: Pig in the Drinking Water. You've read the story, seen the video (above, if you haven't). Now hear what the Onion, et al., have to say about the thousands of dead pigs in the Huangpu River, a source of "most" of Shanghai's drinking water for its 23 million residents.
People in Shanghai never stop complaining about Beijing, and with sandstorms sweeping into the capital, the people in this country's Second City have been growing quite smug about their marginally healthier air.
Well, now… Shanghai isn't exactly environmentally pristine. This weekend, more than 900 dead pigs were found added to the aquatic ecosystem in the Songjiang section of Huangpu River.
Although the skies were conveniently blue for the first day of the National People’s Congress on March 5, by the next day the AQI was already creeping back above 300. In an interesting twist, a prominent member of the National People’s Congress has criticized the Chinese government for its anti-pollution efforts. In an interview with... Read more »
The environment is everyone's concern, because we all live under the same sky -- in Beijing, often a dark, dirty one, rife with health hazards. It's our collective duty to take care of it, but what can anyone -- an individual, particularly one with power -- do to spur a collective response against man-made threats to our natural world?
What would they do?
For years now, people have claimed that being green is profitable. For even longer, however, companies and countries have engaged in greenwashing, the act of deceptively marketing oneself as environmentally friendly to gain public trust and consumer karma. What exactly is the difference between a truly green institution and one that pretends to be? The... Read more »
After a year of public demands, Beijing’s municipal government has finally agreed to measure air pollution using the Air Quality Index (AQI), which most pollution-watchers should be familiar with thanks to the US Embassy’s air quality monitor. Reports Global Times: Beijing is tossing out its hazy Air Pollution Index and replacing it with a new... Read more »
