6/11/13

6/11/13, 9:00pm, The Beijing Center
Today in class we talked about air pollution control in a variety of countries. The UK started to control air pollution in the 1950s. The US created the clean air act in 1970. China started controlling air pollution in 1982. We also discussed the use of lead in gasoline, which was not phased out in China until 2002. A lot of class discussion is focused around policy making and the government. The burning of fossil fuels leads to the creation of ozone which leads to photochemical smog. Because ozone creation is a result of other processes, it is hard for policy to control the amount created because it is not emitted directly. Fossil fuel burning also leads to acid rain and photochemical aerosols. There's always a large barrier to controlling these outputs in general because of the structure of the government.