Car owners forced off the road to reduce pollution during August’s Beijing Olympics will be compensated.

Beijing plans to take as many as half of its 3.3 million vehicles off the roads during the Games to help cut emissions.

Beijing vice mayor Ji Lin said, ‘Automobiles, excluding taxis, buses and emergency vehicles, are to stay off roads every other day in accordance with the even and odd numbers on the licence plates. The ban is aimed to ensure air quality during the sports events in Beijing.’

Ji Lin said there would be compensation but the exact levels were still being discussed.

Beijing, one of the most polluted cities in the world, held a four-day test of similar restrictions in August last year.

Despite huge efforts to improve the environment over the last decade, air quality remains one of the biggest problems facing organisers in the run-up to the Olympics.

Olympic chief Jacques Rogge said last year that some endurance events would have to be rescheduled if air quality could not be guaranteed.

Plans to reduce pollutants during the Olympics also involve cutting emissions at power plants and factories in Beijing and five surrounding provinces.

Full details of the contingency plans have yet to be announced, but another Beijing vice mayor, Liu Jingmin, said earlier this week that measures should not be too disruptive to the city’s economy of the lives of the people.
Source: The Guardian

Organizers of the 2008 Summer Olympics have said they will try to take control over the most unpredictable element of all — the weather.

Wang Jianjie, a spokeswoman from the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, addressing a news conference at the headquarters of the Beijing organizing committee, said, ‘Our team is trained. Our preparations are complete.’

That does not, however, mean that the team can control the weather. But it can do more than any other comparable scientific establishment.

China is among the world’s leaders in ‘weather modification’ but with more experience creating rain than preventing it. In fact, the techniques are virtually the same.

Cloud-seeding is a relatively well-known practice that involves shooting various substances into clouds, such as silver iodide, salts and dry ice, that bring on the formation of larger raindrops, triggering a downpour. But Chinese scientists believe they have perfected a technique that reduces the size of the raindrops, delaying the rain until the clouds move on.

The weather modification would be used only on a small area, opening what would be in effect a meteorological umbrella over the 91,000-seat Olympic stadium.

Wang Yubin, an engineer from the meteorological bureau said, ‘This is really a very complex process in terms of selecting the place and the time. Probably we will have to decide one day before or very close to the event.’
Source: LA Times

Faced with persistent air pollution despite promises to stage a green Olympics, Beijing is planning to reduce its motor traffic by half during the Games to improve air quality and ease traffic flow.

This according to an article in The Beijing News which said the number of vehicles in the city was expected to reach 3.3 million by August, meaning that roughly 1.65 million cars and trucks would be pulled off roads each day. The city will dedicate lanes to Olympic traffic and increase public transportation with new shuttle buses to accommodate visitors and local residents, the article said.

Beijing officials have not announced Olympic contingency measures, but the newspaper said the traffic plan had been completed.

The city’s air pollution — ranked by some studies as among the worst in the world — is one of the most pressing challenges facing Olympic organizers, with fewer than 200 days until the opening ceremony on Aug. 8.

Many Olympic teams plan to train outside the city to protect athletes.

Besides whatever measures Beijing officials take to reduce pollution, factories throughout north China may face shutdowns during the Games.

Guo Jinlong, the acting mayor of Beijing, said, ‘The task of controlling pollution and traffic congestion is arduous.’

Traffic restrictions have been anticipated for the Olympics since last August, when Beijing conducted a four-day experiment that limited motorists to driving on alternate days, depending on whether the last number on their license plate was odd or even.

That test eliminated more than one million vehicles each day, easing traffic but having a less substantial effect on air pollution. The Beijing News did not specify whether the odd-even system would be used for the Games.
Source: New York Times

Beijing’s biggest steel company has shut down another of its blast furnaces as part of efforts to clean up the city before the Summer Olympics.

The Beijing Shougang Group, one of the capital city’s major polluters, extinguished the fire in the number four blast furnace after 35 years in operation.

The number two furnace will be shut down by March and operations in number three will be suspended during the games according to Li Yan, head of Shougang’s production department.
Source: Belfast Telegraph

Sticking my neck right out I will say the Olympics in Beijing, unless there is an incident of atomic bomb proportions, will be a major success. And China will move on from there.

Yes, there will be protests by all sorts of people who will either have genuine or nutty reasons to protest. (Show me the government that does NOT need to be protested about.) But, barring a massive and catastrophic event which we should pray does not happen and probably will not, the Olympics in Beijing will be a great success and the coming out party of China.

The reason is that China has made the most serious efforts to get it right. Seriously right.

If you can get the Beijing police to smile you have worked a miracle. But it has gone further than that. They have been taught the rudiments of some languages and will smile at you — not easy and they probably finds it hurts — and say ‘hello’.

They have a handbook containing useful phrases in seven languages — including English, French, Russian, German, Japanese, Korean and Arabic. Not only are the police equipped with it but so are all the state-approved volunteers who will assist security service forces.

Ma Zhenchuan, the city’s police chief, said the educational campaigns will help the force offer ‘cordial, civilized, professional and high-quality’ security (that the idea of cordial security is an oxymoron should be ignored) throughout the games.

Earlier this year, Beijing police conducted a month-long survey to find out what the public found most unbearable about the force.

The results weren’t encouraging as people complained about cops using phrases such as: ‘Are you deaf?’ to ‘That’s not my business,’ or ‘I’ll put you behind bars if you continue to make a fuss like this.’ The public also voiced discontent over some officers’ arrogance and their misuse of police vehicles and sirens.

So now the Beijing Public Security Bureau has been reformed and will smile — not easy but they can do it — and will not be rude to you. That is a miracle. Making the rest of the Olympics work is, by comparison, a doddle. The Games will be a great success. Of that I am quite, quite certain. And China will bask in the sunshine of the Olympic smile.
Source: Shanghai Daily