Thank Bieber there’s no Clean Air Act to stifle innovation and entrepreneurship in China:
China will be using a new type of antipollution drone to clear smog from the skies of selected airports later this month. The plan — the latest in a line of technological approaches to reducing dangerous particles from China’s polluted cities — will see unmanned aerial vehicles taking to the air on flexible parasails before spraying chemicals that freeze atmospheric pollutants and cause them to fall to the ground.
The drones will be able to carry more than 1,543 pounds (700 kilograms) of chemicals, and are expected to be able to freeze pollution within a 3.1-mile (5 kilometer) radius. The South China Morning Post says China has used fixed-wing drones to perform a similar process in the past, but the new drones will be cheaper to maintain, easier to control, and carry a wider payload of chemicals. Ma Yongsheng, CEO of the company that developed the drone, said it could also be used for applications such as disaster relief and seed-sowing.
I’m sure the congealed shitballs of pollution plus whatever chemical is used to precipitate it from the skies will have no effect on the humans on the ground.
BGinCHI
Was this invented by the same geniuses who tried to “clean” the Gulf with that chemical that made things worse?
aimai
Good god. Nothing could go wrong with this scenario, I’m sure.
ShadeTail
Yeah, this can’t possibly have a similar effect to the oil dispersants BP used in the Gulf a few years back.
The Ancient Randonneur
Are they going to hire Condoleeza Rice as a spokesperson? She’s got the whole “No one could have predicted …” meme down pretty good.
Poopyman
… and then it enters the water supply and topsoil, gets taken up by food crops, and shipped to the US. So we’ll be paying to import Chinese polution! Those Chinese really ARE wizzes at Capitalism, aren’t they?
Yatsuno
@aimai: What is Chinese for HOOCODANODE???
cleek
they’re going to Febreze their whole city?
i hope they use the unscented kind.
patrick II
@aimai:
Don’t worry, if those chemicals in the air make you sick there will be a drug company to sell you something to make you feel better, and perhaps a mask company for something to put over your face. Those would both raise profits and GDP.
Anything but cutting down pollution in the first place since that would hurt the economic numbers.
Belafon
They are innovative. I don’t even think the Bioshock developers came up with this idea.
Gin & Tonic
@Poopyman: Hate to spoil the joke, but China doesn’t have food for export. They’re having a hard time feeding the people they have with their natural resources, which is (among other factors) why they bought Smithfield (the US pork producer) and why they’re buying or leasing farmland in Ukraine, among other places.
Citizen_X
CHEMTRAILZ, PEOPLE!!! WHOS LAUGHING NOW???
Poopyman
@Gin & Tonic: OTOH, explain that to the folks whose pets died a couple of years back from tainted Chinese food.
Suffern ACE
@cleek: nah. Lavender Vanilla. It’s more relaxing.
SpotWeld
If you ever wanted to know how they’ll go about charging people for the air they breath, this is it.
Once the technology is ready then the goverment will allow a private corporation to take over the atomosphere maitenance.
Then the corporation will get the ability to bill the population of the given area for the cleaning process.
Areas with a higher standard of living will be able to cover the cost, other lower income areas will either get less frequent pick ups or just plain poor service.
LanceThruster
They’ll find a way to mine them for heavy metals.
BGK
@Gin & Tonic:
Considering the exported Chinese gluten that was added to U.S. pet food was doctored with melamine, I think it’s more correct to call it an industrial export.
MomSense
Holy falling death hail Batman!
First the Republicans destroy satire and now the Chinese give credibility to the weather control conspiracy theorists.
BGK
@SpotWeld:
Wasn’t doing just that a recurring theme in some of Heinlein’s books? “TANSTAAFL” and all?
Linda Featheringill
Did it ever occur to them to just stop polluting the air? That society would probably be tolerant of government mandated controls.
SatanicPanic
Partly cloudy with a chance of smogballs
piratedan
and then they take the newly frozen pollution and store it where? Their groundwater? The Ocean? put it in a rocket and launch it to the Moon?
so step 1, recognize the problem
step 2, design a solution
step 3 implement solution
step 4, solve the problem imposed by the solution?
geg6
OT, but Benen links to an old Cole post about the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Apparently the Innocence Project has found the smoking gun that shows an innocent man was executed.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/smoking-pistol-the-willingham-case
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Gin & Tonic: In addition to the pet food that others have pointed out, we also get food intended for human consumption from China.
Eric U.
they do this all the time in Salt Lake City. I’ve never seen the planes, but I guess if you could see the planes they wouldn’t be needed. SLC is engulfed in a cloud of pollution for 4 months a year, it’s obnoxious. I used to have sinus infections the whole time. Best excuse to go skiing I can think of.
Tommy
I feel like typing the phrase “unintended consequences.”
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Linda Featheringill: Used to work there. An fascinating society. The answer, interestingly enough, is no. That thought seriously wouldn’t even occur to most people.
And they’ve got some awful pollution. The air is a horror story, but the untold story is that their water pollution is far worse.
Walker
I am sure they will find something that works eventually. It is just that the population of China is involved in an large-scale experiment that would send an IRB in seizure fits.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: I don’t think you are correct. I read an article quite some time ago about fruits and vegetables that we might assume are grown in america – brand names like dole, for instances – are from china. I recall in particular the warnings about celery and mandarin oranges. I don’t know what article I read at the time so I can’t link it, but a quick google gave me this one:
http://www.bluedeltainvestigations.com/food%20products%20made%20in%20china.htm
Violet
@Gin & Tonic: The last time I looked at frozen edamame in the supermarket they were all from China. Organic and regular.
WaterGirl
@Violet: I don’t really trust organic labels when they come from other countries. Like Mexico wouldn’t “verify” something as organic when it’s not? I try really hard not to buy fruits and vegetables from other countries, but it’s a lot easier in the summer than in the winter!
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
Sure they do, as others have pointed out. It’s quite possible for a country to import one kind of food and export another, or even to import one grade or variety of a particular kind of food while exporting a different grade or variety. Wines are a great example of this, with the US both importing wine from and exporting wine to France. And there’s certainly nothing impossible about a country exporting food while its people are starving; that’s exactly what happened during the Irish Potato Famine.
hoodie
@Linda Featheringill: It doesn’t occur to some Americans, why should Chinese be any different? These are the same asshats that wanted to legislate the rate of sea level rise.
Tommy
@WaterGirl: I often note here I live in a rural area. Heck I live in a place where we grow most of the food we eat in this nation. I don’t have access to something like Whole Foods. I forget the brand name, but Googled it and it was tomatoes grown in Mexico. I went up to the manager of the store and was like “dude, we live in Illinois. It is July. Can’t you find some tomatoes grown here?”
He looked at me like I had a third hand growing out of my forehead.
raven
My buddy just texted me that he got off the plane from a year with the CBA Bejing Ducks. Can’t wait to hear the skinny.
Gin & Tonic
There are, of course, exceptions, and I was talking primarily macro-economically, but the comments made me go back to some sources. The USDA summarizes it basically by saying they are an importer of land-intensive commodities and an exporter of labor-intensive commodities. So while according to World Bank and WTO statistics agricultural exports are a small part of their net economic activity, it explains the things like tilapia (labor-intensive, as it is farmed in ponds.)
raven
@WaterGirl:
Tom Hamill
I wonder if “wind” is a four-letter word in Mandarin, since a 5 km/h wind (~ 3 mph) will waft away their nice clear patch within an hour.
Oh, and the atmosphere does have this little thing called “turbulent mixing” too.
different-church-lady
It’s like that Porky Pig cartoon: “I gotta get me a d-d-d-d-dog!”
Gex
Drones + chemtrails! How does a libertarian handle that? At least there are no pollution regulations bogging down their beloved corporations.
Elie
When you read stuff like this, you do feel like its the end times — like mankind is just headed for the monstrous cataclysm…
Of course its their own people who will be the first guinea pigs in this experiment as all the poison falls to ground and they re-eat and ingest it. Makes you wonder how anyone can think of cleaning the air if it then fouls the earth… that is not a viable solution…
Poopyman
Good thing that thing never happens in the US.
It still took over 20 years before regulations started to clear the air.
WaterGirl
@raven: I can’t wait for spring so I can grow my own hot peppers again.
Tommy
@Elie: Kind of feels like it doesn’t it. I was with my wingnut family members (through a marriage) and they were bitching about how much they spent on bottled water and filters. I was like nice tax you are paying not to have clean water. They didn’t seem to get my point.
Elie
@Tommy:
sigh
so true.. they just block it
Higgs Boson's Mate
Not that it mitigates the problem of what happens when the frozen particles hit the ground, but the Chinese are using mists of liquid nitrogen to freeze the crud out of the atmosphere.
I’m figuring that they’ll build vacuum cleaning vehicles, collect the stuff off of the ground, and press it into flammable briquets that they will then export to us for all of our barbecuing needs.
boatboy_srq
@BGinCHI: @ShadeTail: My thoughts as well. SOOO much better to have airborne pollutants chemically altered, dropped on the ground and allowed to mingle with the soil and water supply, assuming that the “chemicals that freeze atmospheric pollutants” all wind up on the surface with the stuff they’re used to sequester. Not.
THIS is what we get when we blithely assume that technology will solve all our ills.
The part that bothers me most is that this isn’t even a new procedure. If “The South China Morning Post says China has used fixed-wing drones to perform a similar process in the past” and the report is at all accurate, then SatanicPanic’s “partly cloudy with a chance of smogballs” fauxcast (in the running for thread-winning comment BTW) has been a real item for some measurable time: I’d think twice about the shumai in/from any treated city.
OTOH, trying the same procedure on a polluted US city – especially a Red State US city – with chronic smog could be a game-changing event. Imagine the reaction when the AGCC-deniers come face to face with frozen-smogfall.
Tommy
@Elie: You might get a kick out of this. I live in kind of the “liberal” town in my area. Just liberal compared to everyplace else I might add. We clean our own water. Each year I get mailed the EPA report on the quality of our water. I got about as clean of water as you can get. I mentioned that to them, and that yeah we pay a little more in taxes, but I don’t buy bottled water. Again they didn’t seem to compute.
? Martin
How soon before the GOP is demanding we do the same in the US? Free market solution to out-of-control government regulation.
Bubblegum Tate
OT: Holy shit, is it CPAC time already? Gawker is on the scene, and I’m already laughing at some of the panel/event titles. I think my favorite would have to be “Healthcare After ObamaCare: A Practical Guide for Living When No One Has Insurance and America Runs Out of Doctors (Part 1).” Part 1! I bet part 2 is the part where they tell you to bury gold in your backyard. For health.
Trollhattan
Of course, said drones (droooonze) are powered by unicorn farts.
The world’s greatest importer and consumer of coal has yet to concede or, evidently, even imagine that might be a wee issue. When everybody was poor there was nobody to holler but at some point, the enormous Chinese middle class is going to gather and demand something be done. It will be then discovered it’s far, far too late.
In the meantime, we’re scrapping with Canada over who’s going to expand their coal export facilities fastest. The good news is that some of that coal is automagically reimported right back to the West Coast as air pollution. Win!
Lurking Canadian
The most frightening part isn’t that they’re doing it. It’s that, before the end of next week, the freakonomics guy will have an op-Ed in the NYT in which he extols just this kind of innovative outside the box thinking as a preferred alternative to sclerotic regulation.
Villago Delenda Est
@piratedan:
Sounds like the US Nuclear industry, looking for a place to stash their radioactive waste.
Trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
My serrano plant survived our December cold snap so I’ve had those all along.
Another little known food factoid: most of our fresh garlic is from China.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Lurking Canadian:
The anti-regulation crowd will seize on drones as the preferred alternative to any kind of environmental regulation. All we have to do is pay someone and by golly they’ll even come up with drones that will spray away all of those coal-ash dumps, any oil spills at sea and, most importantly, liberals.
Punchy
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: This makes no sense. Liquid N2 to freeze the material? Liquid N2 evaporates back to gaseous almost instantly (take a bucket of it and toss it in the air on a July afternoon….none of it hits the ground). How would this stuff stay frozen long enough to fall from the skies?
Am I missing something?
scav
Speaking of OT technological ideas with possible blowback: 16th century German ‘Rocket Cats!’
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Punchy:
I have no idea how it works. Maybe they’re saying that it’s liquid N2 because telling their people that they’re using PCBs at cryogenic temperatures would upset them. The N2 was mentioned in the linked article.
Your air is too clean. Maybe if you do that in China it rains tiny pieces of frozen god-knows-what.
Mike E
@Bubblegum Tate: My NC local news station had a phone bank of folks giving advice on ACA, and have been doing stories and running a countdown to the employer mandate next New Year as it affects local govt. Stay tuned.
Roger Moore
@Tom Hamill:
The worst air quality happens when the air is dead calm and not mixing much (e.g. during a temperature inversion), when the pollutants stay more or less in one place and have a chance to build up to dangerous levels. If there were enough wind and turbulent mixing to cause a problem with you clearing the air in an area, it would also tend to move the pollution away from its source and create a wider region of less serious pollution.
Villago Delenda Est
Popcorn futures have skyrocketed:
Newsmax to Challenge Fox With TV Network
Interrobang
Completely and totally OT, but this thread could use some humo(u)r: The Canadian broadcast regulator says that two p*rn channels may need more Canadian content. While this is probably strictly true from a legislation perspective, it’s also funny as hell.
Gin & Tonic
@Villago Delenda Est: Didn’t the Farrelly brothers already make a film about this?
Villago Delenda Est
@Interrobang:
SCTV created the McKenzie brothers and “The Great White North” just to tweak those Canadian broadcast regulators about the requirement for “Canadian content”.
WaterGirl
@Trollhattan: Where do you live that your pepper plant survived? I am in central Illinois.
I had no idea it was so easy to freeze peppers – I froze a couple of ziploc bags thinking it couldn’t hurt to try, but that’s awesome. Sadly, I am out of frozen peppers.
I do remember that about garlic, and I knew I was missing one of the big three in my comment. Ick! I buy my garlic at the farmer’s market and sometimes go without during the winter, which is kind of a drag. But I do not trust china at all for safety on anything food related.
Edit: I love serrano peppers, one of my favorites. Have you ever tried Krimson Lee?
? Martin
@Villago Delenda Est: When you’re guaranteed a 27 share, you’re a fool not to take it.
Interrobang
@Villago Delenda Est: Oddly enough, the original SCTV was pretty CanCon compliant by itself. A friend suggested that a Canadian-themed pr0n movie should be called “Strange Screw.” This is a thing that needs to exist.
WaterGirl
@Punchy: The other 10 chemicals they neglected to mention?
Amir Khalid
I’ve tried following the links as far as they go, and have learned nothing about what chemicals are to be used and on which pollutant(s). Or what happens after that. Does the pollutant+chemical really fall out of the sky instead of remaining aloft? If it does, do you sweep it up with a broom, and how do you dispose of it? Could the pollutant+chemical dissolve in rain or ground water and maybe become an entirely new pollutant? If China has this wonderful and presumably profitable technology, why haven’t they sold it for use here in south-east Asia, which has been afflicted by haze from burning forests for decades and itself badly needs such a solution?
Tommy
@WaterGirl: I grow like six kinds of peppers. I had no idea you could freeze them. In the Sunday morning garden thread here I asked what do to with them, outside of just stringing them up and letting them hang in my kitchen. Folks were like you can freeze them. I was like that won’t work. Well I was wrong.
Frankensteinbeck
@Bubblegum Tate:
These titles can’t be real. Either they actually are just trolling (possible, since they have a grade-school bully mentality) or they live in Bizarro World.
Calouste
@Linda Featheringill:
In China it’s also about privatizing the profits and socializing the costs. The state pays for the drones, actually limiting the pollution at source would impact the bottom line of companies that the Communist Party brass has interests in.
Suffern ACE
@Amir Khalid: I’m assuming that it isn’t the best kind of material for general use, since they are using it over the airport, where not a lot of people live or grow food. (Yeah! It’s just workers who are at risk!).
chopper
SKINNER: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
LISA: But isn’t that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we’re overrun by lizards?
SKINNER: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They’ll wipe out the lizards.
LISA: But aren’t the snakes even worse?
SKINNER: Yes, but we’re prepared for that. We’ve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
LISA: But then we’re stuck with gorillas!
SKINNER: No, that’s the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Citizen_X
@Villago Delenda Est:
Talk about a race to the bottom.
Bubblegum Tate
@Frankensteinbeck:
I thought so, too, but the titles are real according to the CPAC website.
Trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
This is just a shiny thing for them to wave at the choking public so they can say, “See, we’re doing something! Now get back to work.”
Emptying the ocean with a spoon would be an apt analogy. Only thing we don’t know is whether this particular spoon has holes in it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bubblegum Tate: My god. I just looked at the list of speakers. I am … just … words fail … call for meteors.
Suffern ACE
@Citizen_X: I thought that is what “the Blaze” was supposed to do.
piratedan
@Citizen_X: its okay by me, let them fight to the death to establish their supremacy over the derp….
Amir Khalid
@Suffern ACE:
The more I hear of such things, the more I suspect that there is nothing to this story — that it’s merely the work of some scientifically illiterate reporters. Or that the government agency that approved this implausible project is the victim of some kind of con. Back in the late 1980s, during a drought, the chief minister of the state of Melaka (Malacca, to you English speakers) paid millions in state money for an American conman’s “rainmaking technology”.
WaterGirl
@Tommy: I know! Very happy discovery.
MomSense
@Omnes Omnibus:
Wishing I could call in tactical meteor strikes. Why should all of DC suffer for these fools?!
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
Various forms of cloud seeding technology have been tried for a very long time. My suspicion is that this is something similar. Anyone who lives in a really polluted area will tell you that precipitation tends to wash pollutants out of the sky, so inducing rain as a way of cleaning up pollution is a natural thing to try.
Flatlander
Weather forecast for Beijing:
A hard rain is gonna fall.
Liberty60
@Villago Delenda Est:
Somehow I never imagined the pron possibilities of “Take off, Hoser!”
drkrick
@Villago Delenda Est:
Not tweaking, fulfilling the requirement. At least that’s the story that was going around at the time.
Amir Khalid
@Roger Moore:
Rain falling through polluted air will wash away soot, yes, we’ve noticed that here with the haze. And it will also dissolve some pollutant gases. The result, of course, is acid rain with soot in it.
drkrick
@Punchy:
Suspension of disbelief.
dmsilev
Speaking of Libertopia, I’m sure everyone will be Shocked!, Shocked! to hear that yet another Bitcoin exchange has been hit by large-scale thieves. And in this case, the management’s reaction includes making every account take a 12% haircut to help cover the losses that the ‘bank’ itself can’t.
Omnes Omnibus
Do you think they would be interested in my monorail project?
Amir Khalid
@dmsilev:
Game over, man! Game over!
burnspbesq
@Poopyman:
Why not? We’ll be paying to import Canadian pollution if we approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Why should China not get to play?
Chyron HR
@dmsilev:
Things nobody has ever said:
“Help! My wallet was hacked and all my US Dollars disappeared!”
burnspbesq
@Interrobang:
Are they offering to annex Chatsworth?
sm*t cl*de
The South China Morning Post says China has used fixed-wing drones to perform a similar process in the past
What’s Mandarin for “placebo”?
Yatsuno
@Interrobang: I will say this: Canadian men are hawt. And I’m not just saying that cause my ex is one. Canadian. And hawt. Sorry what was the question again?
Villago Delenda Est
@dmsilev:
Round up the usual suspects.
Villago Delenda Est
@drkrick:
They were fulfilling the requirement, and being in their face about it.
“You want Canadian content? We’ll give you CANADIAN content. Hosers.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Calouste:
So, same model as the US?
Howard Beale IV
@MomSense: Actually, all of DC has been the problem for quite a while-whether it be neocons or neoliberals, they’re both tainted with the blood of thousands of soliders and the losses of trillions of capital due to non-feasance.
sneezy
@Linda Featheringill:
… she said, snottily.
Of course that has occurred to them. It has also occurred to them that lifting hundreds of millions of people up from abject poverty is a desirable thing to do. They have done that, in what is almost inarguably the greatest poverty-reduction program the world has ever seen.
Let’s not forget at least two things: (1) environmentalism in the US is only about 40 or 50 years old: Silent Spring was published in 1962, the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and environmentalism only came to the US when it was the world’s richest country and not before, and (2) the incessant demand of first-world consumers for ever-lower prices has exported not only much of our light manufacturing to China, but also the associated pollution.
So get off your high horse already.