Shocking Pollution In Beijing Has Led To Half The City’s Cars Being Banned Via A Number Plate Lottery
Colorful memory against grey days! Amidst #smog netizen poses photos of Beijing's iconic buildings under blue sky pic.twitter.com/rIWWIXv4XZ;— xhnews
It’s fairly safe to say that Beijing isn’t the most pleasant place to be right now. Schools have been closed, many factories ordered to either shut down or scale back operations, and half of all the city’s cars have been taken off the road. And it’s all because of excessive smog, which has forced the first ‘red alert’ since the city - the most polluted in the world - adopted a new four-tier system two years ago.
As far as the cars go, one half will be able to drive one day, and the other half the next. As with similar measures brought in for Paris a couple of years ago, which group you’re in depends upon whether your number plate ends on an odd or even number.
So just how bad is it over there? Well, the levels of particulate matter (or PM2.5) in the air measured at 291 micrograms per cubic metre on Tuesday, and the World Health Organisation’s recommendation is just 25. Yikes.
The red alert measures are expected to last until Thursday.
Source: BBC News
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
Primary cause later to be found out: Volkswagen diesels.
And I thought Los Angeles was bad
Too bad cars doesn’t cause that much polution. The real reason is factories etc. Polution from cars in the world is somewhere around under 1% and this is a fact. Don’t listen to some propaganda by hippies who wants you to cycle to work even tough it’s 50km’s away from your home.
looks like an elecrtric revelution is needed there
The only place in the world where winning the lottery is a bad thing.
Why can’t they just double the taxes? Government may benefit from higher tax revenues (could be spent on improving public transport to compensate for the fact that less people will be able to afford private cars) and others benefit from less pollution?
What a stupid idea it is to make a “lottery”
The main issue is people burning coal to keep warm since electric heating isn’t as common in China. Even the dirtiest diesel cannot compare to burning low quality coal.
Just sounds like an excuse to have two cars to me… One with an even number plate and one with an odd one.
I study this kind of stuff in college. The amount of fossil fuel burning is at a staggering rate and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has greatly surpassed previous measured amount of CO2 in the atmosphere millions of years ago due to anthropogenic events. It’s good to see that the world takes measures like this to reduce our carbon footprint, but we’re gonna need more than that to fix things :/
THEY SHOULD REEEEEEEEALYYYY DO THE SAME SHT IN MEXICO CITY!!!! ASAFP!!! But here, they just wait for the birds to drop dead out of the F**ing sky, before moving a finger…