Thread: Asia-Air Pollution Blotting Out the Sun

November 14, 2008
U.N. Reports Pollution Threat in Asia
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

“The imperative to act has never been clearer,â€

This would be a good reason for the US to develop alternative energy products that we could export. We did it in the past with metal agricultural tools, diesel equipment, heavy machinery, etc. Time to get on the next wave. Too bad the Republicans didn't see the opportunity.

So now the Asian people know what it was like to grow up in places like Detroit, where the cogs of industry churned out goods for consumers for 7 decades or more.

Yep, I remember flying along the coast of China from Korea to Hong Kong, all you could see was the smog for thousands of miles. You couldn't see the ground until just before landing.

captainron wrote:

This would be a good reason for the US to develop alternative energy products that we could export.

I think it would a fabulous idea, as long as we would be guaranteed that those products would not be manufactured overseas. We have already exported so much in American expertise to countries that hate us, and we have to buy back the products we invented, all in the name of the major corporations making profits and keeping shareholders happy.