These days, environmental problem becomes a challenge for the whole world, and especially severe for the development countries. China, with the rapid increasing of economy, the environment encounters a tremendous impact, and air pollution one of the worst situations.
Nowadays, air pollution influences most part of China, especially for some cities that rely on industry, and smog is already became a common phenomenon. There are several reasons that cause the air pollution, to begin with, the low awareness of protecting environment when the government focus on developing industry and urbanization, and the Chinese governments ignore the huge impact of pollution during the early time of the development. In addition, China is too dependent on coal because of the energy-resources structure, and until 2013, China implemented “Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan” to limit the using of coals. Although the Chinese government implemented many policies to get rid of coal energy, China is still a big consumer of coal, which is 60% of its total energy consumption, and in the early time, China mostly used Subcritical Units, which resulted in inefficient coal combustion, which is also one of reason that cause the air pollution. This situation not only happens in industrial aspect, it is also serious in people’s daily life. There are mainly two types of dependence of coals, which is cooking and heat supply, and there are 42% of families use coal to cook and 36% of families for heat supply in 2011, which is an enormous number. Besides those reasons, the tremendous number of drivers is also a reason that cannot be ignored, and in China, there are about three hundred million drivers, that accounted for 45% to 60% of NOX and Carbon Monoxide emission. These are some main reasons to make the air pollutions, and there are also many secondary reasons that contribute to the air pollution, like terrain and so on.
There are many factors that contribute to the air pollution, and the ways to solve the problems becomes a hot topic. On November 2016, the environmental policies that China issued tried to decrease 140 million ton of coal consuming on 2020 and cancelled 103 planned or half-built coal-fired power plants in order to curb the pollution, which improve the air quality a lot. Also, China invest more on the renewable energy sources, like solar energy, wind energy and so on, and it will make coal account less than 40% of the electricity demand on 2040. China also cooperate with USA to develop clean coal technologies, include coal capture, storage, increase the efficiency of coal-fired power plants and so on to help reduce emissions. As a whole, some possible solutions to deal with the pollution is trying to control the scale of coal-fired, enhance the investing and researching of clean energy and improve the technology to reduce the impact of coal emission. Also, the general public should have awareness to the pollution, and act to protect the environment, like stop using plastic bag, try to take public transportations. Protect the environment is not only the responsibility for government, but for all the Chinese people.
Y. Ji
