英语优秀作文：health problems

　　Fumes, health problems, action

　　Beijing’s emergency measures come on top of an even more sweeping set of prohibitions called the national action plan on air pollution, introduced in 2013. (China loves national action plans; it has lots.) This imposed a nationwide cap on coal use, as well as provincial caps requiring Beijing, for instance, to reduce coal consumption by 50% over five years and Tianjin to cut it by 19%. The plan banned new coal-burning facilities (though plants already in the works were allowed) and sped up the use of filters and scrubbers.

　　The plan seems to be working. The concentration of pollutants with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less (PM 2.5—the most deadly kind) fell from over 100 micrograms per cubic metre in Beijing in 2012-13, at the time of the city’s notorious “airpocalypse”, to around 75 in 2016. That is comparable to London’s clean-up after the “pea soup” fogs of the 1950s, but quicker. It translated, according to Greenpeace, an environmental pressure group, into 160,000 avoided premature deaths in 2016.

　　But in 2017 the improvement in PM 2.5 concentrations stopped and the level flattened out. This winter has seen welcome episodes of clear skies but also more days than in 2016 of the worst, choking smog, when daily PM 2.5 levels rise above 300. The annual average level remains about 25% above the target set in the national action plan, and well above the levels that pertain in big Western cities—hence the emergency measures.

　　Why did bans work at first, then stumble? There are several reasons. First, the measures were more effective when economic change was making China greener anyway, as it was in 2013-16, when the composition of GDP shifted away from heavy industry and infrastructure towards services. But in 2016 the government grew alarmed about an economic slowdown and allowed infrastructure spending to rise again (infrastructure is pollution-intensivebecause of the amount of cement and steel used in construction). When this happened, the command-and-control measures were unable to do more than stop emissions rising.

　　Second, such measures only change polluters’ behaviour as long as they remain permanently in force. Many Chinese steel mills and coalmines (especially small privately-owned ones) ramped up output in the months before the curbs went into effect and did the same again when controls were eased. The stop-start character of the bans made them less effective.

　　【(公众号：GDUTCEO)】

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