China Smog Blankets Largest Cities

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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China Smog Blankets Largest Cities

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[cnxvideo id=”509736″ placement=”ros”]Air pollution problems in China worsened recently, threatening both the industrial sector and auto industry, most likely. According to the official Xinhua news agency, many of the largest cities are under “yellow alert.”

The agency reported:

China’s meteorological authorities on Sunday issued a yellow alert for a new bout of smog that is expected to hang heavy in large areas of the country.

Parts of Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hunan and Jiangxi will be covered by smog from Sunday to Monday, with some regions seeing heavy pollution, the National Meteorological Center said in an online statement.

A cold front is expected to help disperse the smog on Monday night.

China has a four-tier warning system for severe weather, with red being the most serious, followed by orange, yellow and blue.

Despite government efforts to fight pollution, frequent outbreaks of smog have become increasingly common in the winter season in north China, where cold weather conditions and increasing burning of the dirty coal for heating combined to exacerbate the situation.

Whereas the control of heating from individual homes and small business may be hard to block, partial shutdowns of large factories and restriction of driving in big cities are steps the government can reliably take.

[nativounit]

The last known massive shut down of factories was before the 2008 Olympics, but a more selective use of the same method is likely when air pollution spikes markedly.

Several times a year, large Chinese cities block much auto and truck traffic. The most recent case of this was just days ago.

According to ABC News:

China’s capital and other northern cities have banned half of all vehicles from city streets and ordered factories, schools and construction sites closed in response to a five-day smog red alert.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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