Air pollution in China's major cities is horrible, at times it is more than 25 times worse than what are deemed healthy standards [ht Jack].
The density of PM2.5 was about 350 to 500 micrograms Thursday midmorning, though the air started to clear in the afternoon. It had reached as high as 671 at 4 a.m. at a monitoring post at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. That is about 26 times as high as the 25 micrograms considered safe by the World Health Organization, and was the highest reading since January 2013. ...
In the far northeastern city of Harbin, some monitoring sites reported PM 2.5 rates of up to 1,000 micrograms in October, when the winter heating season kicked off. In December, dirty air gripped the coastal city of Shanghai and its neighbouring provinces for days, with the density of PM 2.5 exceeding 600.
So why the subject line for this post? It comes from an answer Canada's Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, gave when asked which country other than Canada he admires most:
You know, there’s a level of of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest…we need to start investing in solar.’ I mean there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted that I find quite interesting.
Yup, forget about human freedom. Forget about human rights. He most admires a country where leaders can make and enforce quick decisions, even though the evidence, on the very grounds he admires, is that they suck at it.
Talk about hubris, arrogance, and elitist interventionism. And he will likely be Canada's next Prime Minister.