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

The greatest emissions resulted from flights to and from Indonesia, but extra air conditioning and car travel during two weeks of meetings added significantly to the carbon budget.

While all UN delegates and most European government delegates had their flights offset with financial investments in schemes which buy up greenhouse emissions, it is not known how many other attendees tried to lessen their impact.

The UN spent nearly £50,000 offsetting its emissions from two dozen UN agencies, funds and programmes, as well as the carbon footprint of secretary general Ban Ki-moon and his entourage. “We at the UN climate secretariat are offsetting by buying emission reductions under the Clean Development Mechanism. Then it is up to the individual delegates and journalists. The responsibility lies with them,” said a UN spokesman.

David Adam, the Guardian’s sole correspondent in Bali, had his carbon footprint offset in a scheme by Climate Care, which invests in renewable energy in developing countries. 

- CO2 statistics courtesy of the United Nations while trees planted statistic courtesy of the Indonesian government, both via The Guardian, Dec 15 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

The President’s Quality Award is the “highest award given to Executive Branch agencies for management excellence”, with the most prestigious one of all being the award for overall excellence, which was the one received by the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) recently. However, as its Chief Operating Officer (Deputy Administrator), Marcus Peacock, points out in his remarkably honest and insightful blog, Flow of the River, they haven’t let the award get to their heads and continue to work on improving their work.

Congratulations, well done and kudos to Marcus and the entire organization! [Envirostats author]

- President’s Quality Award blog entry on Dec 4 2007, decision time blog entry on Dec 6 2007, via Flow of the River

As of today, Dec 1 2007, Ontario residents will no longer have to pay the 8% provincial sales tax on bikes $1,000 or less, nor on helmets and safety gear.

There’s little I have to say on that except that I think it’s a great policy, but I do appreciate the hassle they must have gone through to get industry to agree and retailers to reconfigure their cash registers, financing system and such. Trust me, it sounds easy to ask retailers to recalculate a few things, but they still insist it’s a huge pain and lobby to no ends about it. But with all the computing technology available today, I’m still trying to figure out why, although I think they just have “configuration” problems when a fee gets put on rather than taken off. It’s really not that incomprehensible.

Regardless, it’s a big change required for what seems to be a little switch in the law so I thought I give kudos to the work done by the Ontario government on this matter since they only announced it on Nov 9 2007 and managed to get it set in within 3 weeks. For Canadian provincial governments trying to convince businesses to make purchasing changes at the cash register, whether with discounts, taxes, fees or whatever, the next time businesses whine about how difficult it is to make changes at the cash register, come with this story in your arsenal and that should be it for that argument. Ontario is as big as populated provinces get in Canada. Nobody else should have a case!

Minh Tan
Envirostats author

- Original announcement via Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Nov 9 2007