A Back-up Plan for Olympic Pollution

What if Beijing’s test to push 1 million cars off the road for the Olympics fails to reduce pollution? If it doesn’t effectively clean up the soupy smog that has settled onto the city in recent months and years questions about the viability of the games will quickly emerge. Most of the discussion has been focused on the uniquely Chinese heavy-handedness of “finding volunteers” to give up their cars for the good of the country. Yet the really story may be the results of potential failure.

As numerous reporters have pointed out, when China won the Olympic bid Beijing already had a serious air pollution problem. Seven years later there are nearly twice as many cars on the road and the situation is much worse. Yesterday the air was so bad I started spontaneously coughing while standing still waiting for a friend. Today when I woke up smog obscured so much of the view from my apartment that it inspired me to begin taking a photograph every morning at 8AM in order to document the situation. In a few weeks I will post the results as a slideshow on China Expat and will continue the experiment until the games next year.

All of this brings us back to the question of what will happen if the ‘road test’ doesn’t work. It is hard to imagine that the Olympic Committee would be willing to put the health of the athletes at risk by allowing marathoners and other long distance runners to fill their lungs with soot and smog. For years they have been pressing Beijing to explain an alternative plan to reduce pollution, but the response has been muted at best.

What could China do if the experiment fails? They are already planning on shutting down factories and moving a third of the city’s cars off the road. If things are still this bad five weeks from now, there will be a lot of panicking. One alternative would be to move the particularly strenuous outdoor events to other cities.

Qingdao or Dalian, both on the ocean where pollution gets pushed out quickly could serve as back-ups for the marathon. Several other cities are already hosting various events including Shenyang and Shanghai (soccer), Hong Kong (equestrian) and the aforementioned Qingdao (sailing). Moving one or two events elsewhere could be spun as an attempt to showcase China’s other glorious cities. Anything more than a handful would be a tremendous embarrassment for the country.

In short China has a lot riding on getting next month’s trial right. If it fails there will be an outcry of people second-guessing the wisdom of handing Beijing the games. On the other hand, maybe failure would force China to more seriously tackle the problem of pollution, which despite a lot of attention recently, has seen slow response. The Olympics were given to Beijing both as a coming out party and a chance to examine under the microscope of international scrutiny the problems that exist. If failure next month produces introspection then perhaps that is the best outcome. For the athletes dirty air is only two weeks of their lives, but for the Chinese is may be taking away years.

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