Dear fellow readers,

Happy New Year! I hope the New Year finds you well.

I am well but as New Year is a time of new beginnings, I am serving notice I will drastically reducing my blogging here due to lack of time from recent changes in my life. I am not completely stopping to blog, but I will only post entries which come with a report now, containing vast amounts of information each time, rather than just an article with each entry and environmental statistic of impact. Those reports are the real solid resources, not the daily articles with some statistics here or there that often need more explaining than not, which was the main reason I blogged since otherwise, this would just have been a duplicate information blog.

I will keep this blog, the URL and space holding all the reports in the Reports tab until at least 2009 because even without a lot of entries, this blog still serves a useful purpose to supply information that can be searched on-line. The data here isn’t that old so it will still be useful for at least another year. However, if you want to stay posted of new entries with minimal efforts, I would suggest you click on one of those feeds links on the left and get updates that way, to your newsreader or email. There won’t be that many so you won’t be bothered that much, I will guarantee you that because while I will continue to learn and stay up-to-date environmentally, I will just learn it for myself for the most part rather than blog it out to share due to lack of time. If past records show anything, there aren’t that many reports to share frequently. Otherwise, please check back at your own convenience.

So with that, I would like to say thank you to all of you for reading, many for supporting it with Stumbles, advice, comments, pingbacks, etc., especially Shea Gunther, Cindy Wang and Tracy Stokes. I hope you have enjoyed the blog and that you will still find what information there is to come of use.

I wish all of you a happy, healthy and prosperous green 2008 in many ways.

Sincerely,

Minh Tan
Envirostats! author

I don’t know how many kebab vendors there are in Beijing, but I’ll bet money on the fact they don’t contribute anything worthy of investing resources to curb air pollution when so many other sources could be targeted. I think it was said this was for awareness of the problem, but really, how many people do you think breathing in Beijing air doesn’t know? The residents, in general, just don’t seem to care enough to voluntarily do much like opting for sustainable transportation rather than driving all those cars appearing at the rate of about 1,000 new cars per day on Beijing streets. There are even threats now of postponing events if pollution is too bad to allow decent conditions for competition.

Are you kidding me? What kind of host city is that? But more importantly, these athletes train on rigid schedules. You can’t just move the events here or there like that. It also allows the Chinese to cheat, notifying their athletes beforehand to allow better preparation in the final days leading up to the final events. Just the lack of stress wondering if something will go on or be postponed would be an advantage, mentally and physiologically.

The more I hear about these Olympics, the more I’m convinced there’ll be a small conspiracy to get China a few more medals using techniques never used before like with this pollution thing, or supplied food that supposedly avoids potential contamination of various substances. Sure, a few non-Chinese athletes will end up with banned substances and it’ll be there fault, right?

If they’re targeting the kebab vendors in China, I think I have my answer as to why they have pollution problems. They have bad policy makers who either don’t know how to identify the problems or are afraid to tackle them. Regardless, they are ineffective. End of story.

Minh Tan
Envirostats author

This is why air pollution in China is a big concern to the rest of the world, even though the study was for the United States.

This is also why air pollution in the United States is a big concern to the rest of the world, and why everybody’s air pollution should be a concern to everybody else.

A lot of the pollution discussed is particulate matter at 2.5 microns to 10 microns, PM2.5 and PM10, respectively, that can cause visibility problems to asthma and other health impacts.

More from the article excerpt below.

Minh Tan
Envirostats author

It has been a decade since University of Washington scientists first pinpointed specific instances of air pollution, including Gobi Desert dust, traversing the Pacific Ocean and adding to the mix of atmospheric pollution already present along the West Coast of North America.

Now a UW researcher is finding that dust from the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts in China and Mongolia is routinely present in the air over the western United States during spring months…

- Science Daily, Dec 14 2007

I’ll let Bob MacDonald, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) science radio program Quirks & Quarks host, do the commenting, actually, via his blog. I just couldn’t call this a statistic but it isn’t my own commentary, either. However, I’ve alluded to our sad state of a federal political government for environmental purposes before.

Minh Tan
Envirostats author

- Bob MacDonald’s Quirks & Quarks blog entry, Dec 14 2007

This is late news for those in Canada now but for those in the United States who might not have heard, one of Canada’s more prominent retailers, specializing in outdoor and healthy lifestyles, has stopped selling Nalgene bottles out of concern for bisphenol-A used in the bottles’ polycarbonate coatings. They say they are playing it safe, though, and will look to the Canadian federal government for guidance once the Feds come out with some review comments in May 2008 (originally next Nov), as I had commented before in Commentary 033.

I don’t have the time to share what I know on BPA but I’ll just say I affirmingly applaud MEC’s decision and that I’d be willing to bet that even if the Feds say BPA is safe, MEC will probably say it’s not convincing enough and standby this policy. We’ll see in May 2008.

Minh Tan
Envirostats author

Postscript: Several days after the original post, an article came out about Sears stopping sales of products with polyvinyl chloride (PVC). PVC isn’t nearly as controversial in harm, but it’s nice to see retailers stopping the flow of products that aren’t good for people and/or the environment because getting people to boycott or avoid buying certain products is tough to do!

- MEC BPA story via Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) , Dec 7 2007 

- Sears PVC story via Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Dec 12 2007