I took this picture a few hours ago as I was leaving work. Yet another beautiful summer day in Beijing. Blue skies, white clouds, low air pollution (currently at 50 AQI).
The Chinese government today announced plans to remove six million vehicles from the road by the end of the year that don’t meet exhaust emission standards (which, if you’ve not seen “An Inconvenient Truth”, are higher than those in the US).
So, instead of taking a picture today, the BBC used this:
You can see the BBC article here.
first, what a beautiful photo with the variation in the sky and on the buildings. secondly, i guess the article needed to make it “dramatic”. would have been good if they had posted your photo next to the other…some days like this, some days like that…and a more balanced perspective. what a huge undertaking (though, perhaps, what seems so huge to us in the u.s.a is not so huge in china. after all, in reference to your photo last week, the chinese did build the great wall). do you know what kind of subsidy is paid for the old cars? that is an interesting statistic about 31% of pollution caused by cars.