Shanghaiist recently ran a good piece explaining the basics of air pollution, which is a great segue into my occasional series of posts about Shanghai Air Quality.  People are freaking out about the Air Quality again, which happens periodically.

In early 2011 I gathered some data about Shanghai’s air quality, did some simple math, and made a few graphs, wondering if the Shanghai World Expo had been a period of better air quality.  Now that we’re a healthy term into 2012, I thought it was a good time to evaluate 2011 for air quality, and perhaps play with a few more graphs to see if we can make sense of Shanghai’s Air Quality in 2011 juxtaposed against the previous 10 years.

For review, Shanghai measures PM10, SO2 and NO2.  Data previous to this set measured API in aggregate and always noted “Total Suspended Particulates” as the chief pollutant.  So, that’s useless and thus excluded.

Also note that these numbers are not raw (otherwise they’d be in Parts Per Million), they are integers derived by the API formula, explained here. I suppose I could have done the math backwards ad derived the core values, but there are PhD candidates on top of that.

I make no claims of any sort about the accuracy of the source data, which was gathered from the Shanghai Environmental Education Center.  The site and the ministry do not go into detail about their methods, testing sites, or any other pertinent details, which ruins the fun.

Here’s the big graph, PM10 for the last 11 years.

Click through to see the SO2 and NO2 graphs, and a much much more!  (also click any graph to biggify)

The above graphs are a lot of data, but the 200pt trend line helps detect differences from year to year — and there aren’t many. It is hard to see in this scale, so let’s look at a different scale!

Year on Year graphs (2011 in WHITE)

Ooh, look at those 500 days.  There were 2 500 API days in 2011, May 2nd and 3rd, 1 in 2011, and 1 in 2007.  None before then.  Beyond that spike, the White line seems to have at least one color above it most of the way through.

This looks pretty promising for a lower SO2 year than years past.

the NO2 data from 2000 is an outlier, I believe they were measuring NOx and not noting it correctly.  Not as convincing as the SO2 charts, but 2011 looks like a pretty decent year, right?  I’ve done some sleuthing and data analysis to create some graphs worth reading.  Tune in Friday for those!

With all the new attention being paid to China-based electronics manufacturing, CNN manages to realize that Foxconn has a plant in Chengdu, and it blew up recently. Then they show up and make a story, which I will now summarize:

FAIL.

Here are some fun thoughts: they managed to interview a worker who left college to take the job, and her worst complaint is it’s boring. She plans to return to college, and hopes to get a great job and buy an iPad. She hasn’t eaten at a restaurant since joining. *GASP*

There are real complaints to be made about the various manufacturing industries that operate in China. There’s plenty of reasons to pick on Foxconn or Apple, but most stories focus on the most superficial problems, the things that might shock an uninformed stay at home dad but are de rigour for most people living in Asia (it’s crowded here). To paraphrase Nick Kristof — it’s hard to side with ‘sweatshops’, but China is not short of people who will trade rural poverty for a foxconn dorm, long hours and tons of overtime.

Then again, this may be shifting; I’ve heard more than a few anecdotes from people in the manufacturing business that these pools of rural poor are drying up, and low cost manufacturing (apparel, widgets) have been moving to other south Asian countries for a few years now. One thing is for certain, however: Obama’s re-shoring plan faces a lot of challenges. There are three parts (2, 3) to that story, and here is a favorite bit:

A decade ago I met with then-UAW President Steve Yokich to urge him to partner with environmentalists and automakers to develop fuel-efficient vehicles that could compete with those from Japan and Germany. Yokich took me to the window of his office in Solidarity House. Pointing outside, he said, “What do you notice about the parking lot?”

“They’re all American vehicles?” I answered.

“Look again. Almost no SUVs. My guys know crap when they make it.”

Yokich understood Detroit’s ruthlessly short-term business model — put lots of cheap sheet metal on an outmoded truck chassis and layer on a gargantuan markup.

It’s been pissing down rain and been pretty darn cold recently here in Shanghai, but nothing like this

Last year was certainly one of the most interesting of my life:

• I got MARRIED (sorry internet, no public photos)
• Techyizu had an amazing year of events (register for Spring Barcamp 2012 here)
• After 2 years of service to the environmental NGO JUCCCE (peep their new website!), I’ve left to freelance and look for new challenges.
• I received a really bad-ass bike as a stag-party gift from my dear friends.  How awesome?  this awesome.
• I studied some Chinese, spent time with amazing people from all around the world, visited Hong Kong, Vietnam, Chengdu, Beijing, Tucson, Portland and San Francisco.

The year of the dragon has begun, and we’ve taken these pseudo-vacation days as opportunities to do some house cleaning, fun cooking and goal setting.  We’re really excited for this year!  Goals for this year include

• Serious Gym and exercise time whenever possible
• Pass the HSK5
• Positive career moves!
• Blog more!
• Travel more and blog about it!
• Eat a proper breakfast every morning.  We got started immediately:

Best of luck in your Dragon year, and thanks for reading!  More articles about life in China, the Energy/Sustainability scene, and random detritus coming soon!

I can only imagine the glee in the LARPing community for this tree-house ewok world just outside of Portland.  This is, however, no joke: the builder/operator is Michael Garnier, a world renowned treehouse constructor.  I want to spend some time in his Costa Rican treehouse. that looks awesome.

This reminds me of an early 90s/crystal pepsi era visit to the Dallas Arboretum for their ‘ultimate treehouse’ competition.  I was young, but it was magical.  There’s something extra special about being up in the trees.  But shower afterwards — sap is sticky.

I can’t mention trees and tree climbing without name dropping my college classmate and tree-climbing extraordinaire WIll Koomjian, his project Ascending the Heights, and their kickstarter funded documentary project Treeverse.

Spotted on nerdapproved, check out FairCompanies for some other cool sustainable architecture projects!

In a country so proud of its global stature, football is a painful national joke. Perhaps because Chinese fans love the sport madly and want desperately for their nation to succeed at it, football is the common reference point by which people understand and measure failure. When, in 2008, milk powder from the Chinese company Sanlu was found to have been tainted with melamine, causing a national scandal, the joke was: “Sanlu milk, the exclusive milk of the Chinese national football team!”

I spent my national holiday working and watching foursquare airport/vacation check-ins scroll by.

I did have a wonderful China moment, thanks to an old Shanghainese man in a Lynyrd Skynyrd Confederate Flag hat.

This guy, Skynyrd hat and all, was painting poetry and the odd revolutionary slogan on the slate tiles around The Center, a major building in the center of Shanghai.  Well, that’s what he said he was writing.  I can barely read signs, let alone proper artistic calligraphy.

I watched him ‘paint’ for a while, but the video I took is pretty boring.

Perhaps this is just the laowai talking, but I sure do like the hobbies and habits of retired Chinese. From the Qi Gong, Taichi and adult jungle gyms in the morning to the calligraphy, fan dancing, and boardgames in the daytime, then the night time ballroom dancing in the parks, there are always a group of retirees enjoying themselves.  It’s fun to see; someday soon my Chinese will be good enough to really engage and understand their stories. It sure is good practice.

Bloomberg carries a few more details about Beijing’s changes to the PPC:

The increase will affect the consumer price index “indirectly” by 0.05 percentage point, China Central Television reported yesterday, citing Liu Shujie, head of economic research at the NDRC. Inflation was 5.3 percent in April and has been above the government’s 2011 target of 4 percent every month this year.

So State TV calculates the power price compromises will effect the CPI, slightly.   They are also in the business of downplaying bad news, though I don’t have any data to contradict them.  Based on Reuters’ quotes from earlier this weekthat suggest the completed increases were outpaced by increases in the price of Coal, I can only imagine that we’ll see the CPI climb more, and not just based on power price increases.

The Catch 22 is obvious, right? The Central Government must control inflation to maintain consumer confidence and economic growth. Both of those roughly add up to “Social Stability”. Two of the biggest contributors to inflation are inter-related and out of their direct control: the price of Thermal Coal, and the ongoing, worsening drought. The effects of drought are obvious, and the worse it gets, the more dependent the Chinese power infrastructure becomes dependent on coal power, and thus coal prices. State Owned Power Producers won these rate concessions, but surely will demand much more.

It’s going to be an interesting summer.