OPINION> Commentary
More of blue sky
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-12-03 07:41

A total of 256 days with blue sky till the end of last month. That is a pleasant surprise indeed.

That was the quota Beijing fulfilled a month ahead of schedule for the first time in the 11 years since 1998 when the municipal government began to control air pollution.

They were also the highest number of days with blue sky and clean air in the past 11 years since the city's environmental department started keeping the count as a benchmark of what the city has done to improve its air quality.

Still we can hardly gloat over the two records, which have been achieved in no easy manner. We never will until we don't have to count such days and the blue sky is always with us as it should.

Statistics show that such pollutants in the air as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and floating particles have all dropped by more than 20 percent or nearly 20 percent compared with last year.

Would the capital city have made such an achievement without the hosting of the 29th Olympic Games? The answer is definitely in the negative.

See what we've done for the Games - more than half of the motor vehicles were off the road, all construction projects stopped work, factories causing heavy pollution had their production suspended and the rest had their emissions considerably reduced.

Little wonder the air quality reached the required standard during all the 17 days of the Games, and so did the air quality during the days of the Paralympics. All the aforementioned pollutants dropped by about 50 percent during the Games compared with the same period of last year.

But the fact that the number of such nice days has steadily increased year by year in the past 11 years from 100 in 1998 to 246 in 2007 speaks volumes for the great efforts the municipal government has made in this regard.

Without the cumulative achievement that had been made in the past 10 years, it would have been impossible for Beijing to turn the sky that blue and the air that clean during the Games.

Whether air pollution will rebound in the coming years remains a great concern not only for the government, but also for local residents.

Will the government learn from what it did during the Games to further push air pollution controls? The residents are looking on and hope it will because they don't want the nice weather in August to be just a memory.

Motor vehicles with exhaust emission not reaching emission standards will be prohibited from entering the fifth ring road next year. In addition, 60,000 households in bungalows still burning coal for heating will use electricity instead. All these are what the Beijing municipal government has promised to do in the coming years.

These done, we can look forward to more days with blue sky and clean air. And we can hope that environmental protection will truly become one of the important legacies of the Olympic Games.

(China Daily 12/03/2008 page8)