air pollution in China

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Introduction:
China has suffered from pollution issues, such as air and water pollution, for a long time. On Thursday Nov. 5th, 2013, the China’s National Meteorological Center renewed a yellow alert for heavy smog and fog continued to hit many parts of east and north China, causing traffic disruptions and school closures (Mu 2013). This essay will mainly focus on discussing the effectiveness of agencies and policies with respect to the air pollution. It will reveal the main causes of heavy air pollution along with the remedies adopted by the government. Finally it will present practical difficulties to bring the implementation of environmental policies into effect.

Causes of air pollution and major polluters:
In recent decades, China experienced a great economic growth. The active economic performance requires a large amount of usage of energy, and the massive use of energy disturbs the environment in the form of pollution. That is the root cause of China’s air pollution.
There are two major causes of air pollution in China. Firstly, soot and sulfur dioxide caused by coal burning are the two main air pollutants and coal burning occupies 50.2% of total energy consumption in China in 2012 (BP 2013). Industrial production processes consume more than half of China's coal and are the biggest sources of air pollution. Moreover, it is worth mention that the burning of coal for heating in winter in many northern cities of China worsens the air quality. However, this essay will not consider this source due to it is a seasonal effect and is the most efficient way of supplying heat considering the large number of population in China. Another major air pollutant was produced during transportation by consuming oil and gasoline, especially ...

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...ut, beyond a certain point, growths in GDP per capita would result in reductions of environmental damage. Moreover, some scholars estimate that the turning point requires $34,000 GDP per capita, which means China, with $9,233 GDP per capita and highest energy consumption growth rate, still has a long way to go to “climb over the mountain”.

Conclusion:
This essay firstly introduced the urgency of air pollution issue in China, and then identified two main sources of air pollutants: coal burning and automobile emission. It was followed by discussions about policies towards solving this issue. Eventually, the difficulties of setting national emission standard, lack of technical support, interest conflict between central and local governments, and economic growth priority were identified as the four main obstacles that hinder the enforcement of environmental policies.

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