Shanghai studies traffic congestion charge to control pollution

Eco-Business: Shanghai, which inaugurated a free trade zone last month and is targeting to become a global financial center, is studying whether to impose a traffic congestion charge as part of a broader plan to fight pollution.

A congestion charge is one of the measures being considered as part of a white paper on transportation, Gao Yiyi, an official with the Shanghai Municipal Transport and Port Authority, said today at a joint departmental briefing. The city also pledged to cut levels of PM2.5 — the most damaging particulate matter — by 20 percent by 2017 from last year’s levels, according to the environmental protection bureau.

“Vehicles are a big reason behind the increase in PM2.5 and pollution levels and this is an area of a lot of public concern,” Gao said. “Heavy polluting vehicles is an area where we will strongly control.”

If implemented, Shanghai would be the first in China to adopt road pricing for motorists, following Singapore and London, which charge drivers more for traveling into the city center at peak hours. Shanghai was the first in China to put a cap on the number of new vehicles, distributing the license plates by auction. Other cities have also mooted imposing a congestion charge.

Shanghai’s plan follows a move by Beijing, which this week announced rules that will sharply reduce the number of government and private vehicles on the roads and shut schools when there are forecasts of serious pollution for three consecutive days. Premier Li Keqiang has pledged a cleanup that includes cutting coal consumption, shutting steel plants and controlling the number of cars...

Traffic in the Huangpu District, Shanghai, shot by BrokenSphere, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Home cooking, traffic are sources of key air pollutants from China

American Chemical Society News: Almost 80 percent of air pollution involving soot that spreads from China over large areas of East Asia — impacting human health and fostering global warming — comes from city traffic and other forms of fossil-fuel combustion, such as home cooking with coal briquettes. That’s the conclusion of a study in ACS’ journal Environmental Science & Technology, which resolves long-standing questions about sources of air pollution responsible for Asia’s infamous atmospheric brown clouds.

Örjan Gustafsson and colleagues from China, South Korea and the United States point out in their study that nobody has been certain about the exact sources of soot, or “black carbon,” air pollution from the People’s Republic of China. People can inhale these tiny particles deep into the lungs, and estimates implicate soot with 500,000 premature deaths annually in China alone. Black carbon in the atmosphere also absorbs sunlight, and scientists think it is second only to carbon dioxide as a factor in global warming. Gustafsson and his team set out to identify the exact sources of black carbon in China.

They describe using a powerful carbon-14 identification method to trace fully four-fifths of the black carbon emitted in China to incomplete combustion of fossil fuel such as coal briquettes used in home cookstoves and automobile and truck exhaust. “To mitigate near-term climate effects and improve air quality in East Asia, activities such as residential coal combustion and city traffic should be targeted,” they conclude...

Smog in Beijing, shot by 螺钉, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license