Small collection of NYTimes articles
Aug. 4th, 2005 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Ill Will Rising between China and Japan
Ill Will Rising Between China and Japan
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
and HOWARD W. FRENCH
TOKYO, Aug. 2 - Japanese lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution that plays down this country's militarist policies in World War II, less than two weeks before ceremonies take place across Asia marking the 60th anniversary of the war's end on Aug. 15.
Though expressing "regret" for the wartime past, the resolution omitted the references to "invasion" and "colonial rule" that were in the version passed on the 50th anniversary.
The action will most likely be seen by China and Japan's other Asian neighbors as further proof of growing nationalism here. A right-wing vandal seemed to capture a growing sentiment last week when he tried to scrape off the word "mistake" from a peace memorial in Hiroshima that said of Japan's war efforts: "Let all the souls here rest in peace, as we will never repeat this mistake."
But in the weeks leading to Aug. 15, the leaders of China have been making sure that their view of the war, simply called the Anti-Japanese War there, gets across. China is spending $50 million to renovate a memorial hall for the victims of the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, when Japanese soldiers killed 100,000 to 300,000 civilians, at a time when details of it are disappearing from Japanese school textbooks. Chinese state television is broadcasting hundreds of programs on China's resistance against Imperial Japan.
The two countries find themselves playing out old grievances in a new era of direct rivalry for power and influence. Never before in modern times has East Asia had to contend with a strong China and a strong Japan at the same time, and the prospect feeds suspicion and hostility in both countries.
China has experienced 25 years of extraordinary economic growth, deeply extending its influence throughout Asia. But just when China's moment in the sun seems to be dawning, Japan is asserting itself: seeking a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, transforming its Self-Defense Forces into a real military and revising its war-renouncing Constitution.
Both governments are encouraging nationalism for their own political purposes: China to shore up loyalty as Marxist ideology fades, Japan to overcome long-held taboos against expanding its military. With the impending 60th anniversary, both are trying to forge a future on their version of the past.
In Japan, major newspapers have published articles defending the Class A war criminals convicted by the postwar Tokyo Trials, and a growing number of textbooks whitewash Japan's wartime conduct. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi makes annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where war dead including Class A war criminals are enshrined.
In China, a new television series called "Hero City" tells of how cities across China "fought bravely against Japan under the leadership of the Communist Party." In Beijing on Aug. 13, six former Chinese airmen from the Flying Tigers squadron are to recreate an air duel with Japanese fighters.
"On the one hand we have a victim's mentality, and on the other we don't see this much smaller country as being worthy of comparison with us," said Pang Zhongying, a professor of international relations at Nankai University in the northeastern Chinese city of Tianjin. "The reality is that they must accept the idea of China as a rising military power, and we must accept the idea of Japan becoming a normal nation, whether we like it or not."
To Japanese conservatives, becoming a normal nation amounts to a revision of the American-imposed peace Constitution that they feel castrated - a term they use deliberately and frequently - their country.
Arguing that Japan must draw closer to the United States, Mr. Koizumi's government has reinterpreted the Constitution to allow Japanese troops in Iraq and has reversed a longtime ban on the export of arms to join the American missile defense shield. Recent polls show an increasing percentage of Japanese favoring a revision of the Constitution.
The conservative news media have helped demonize China, as well as North Korea, to soften popular resistance to remilitarization. Sankei Shimbun, the country's most conservative daily, recently ran a series about China called "The Threatening Superpower."
One of the most emotional issues has been the dozen or so Japanese who were abducted by North Korea, mostly in the 1970's. The whereabouts of one woman, Megumi Yokota, remains a particularly sore point.
North Korea said she had died, and late last year gave Japan what it said were her remains. After DNA tests were done, the Japanese government accused North Korea of deliberately handing over someone else's remains, though most independent experts called the tests inconclusive.
Shinzo Abe, 50, the acting secretary general of the governing Liberal Democratic Party and the leading member of a young generation of hawks, immediately called for economic sanctions.
Hiromu Nonaka, 79, who retired as secretary general about a year ago, said the present situation reminded him of prewar Japan, when politicians manipulated public opinion to rouse nationalism through slogans like "Destroy the brute Americans and British."
"Mr. Abe, who has been in the forefront of the abductee issue, turned toward making all of North Korea into the enemy," Mr. Nonaka said.
Mr. Abe is also one of several conservative politicians who defend textbooks that have outraged Chinese and South Korean demonstrators by sanitizing Japan's wartime atrocities. References to the women forced into sexual servitude by Japan's wartime authorities, called comfort women, all but disappeared this year from governmentendorsed junior high school textbooks.
At a recent news conference, Mr. Abe was asked whether politicians had exaggerated the threat from North Korea and China to influence public opinion and ease Japan toward revising its peace Constitution. "Well, there may be such opinions, but I think it's rubbish," he said.
In China and Japan alike, hatred and suspicion of the other are being deliberately fostered, in many cases by the governments themselves.
In Tokyo, 291 teachers have been reprimanded in the last year and many may face dismissal for refusing to stand before the rising-sun flag at school enrollment and graduation ceremonies and sing Japan's national anthem, "Kimigayo," or "His Majesty's Reign," considered symbols of Japanese imperialism by most Asians and some Japanese. Those signals of respect used to be optional, or shunned because of their associations with Japan's past militarism.
Efforts to control how the Japanese, especially the young, view Japan and China have even reached the comics. Late last year, 47 local Japanese politicians from all over the country protested that a comic series called "The Country Is Burning," published in "Young Jump Weekly," had distorted the Rape of Nanjing.
The drawings did not actually depict Japanese soldiers committing atrocities, but showed ditches filled with Chinese cadavers. The magazine's publisher quickly backed down and announced that it would delete or modify the offending passages when the series was reprinted in book form.
Hidekazu Inubushi, a politician and leader of the protest, added that forcing respect of the Japanese national anthem and flag was necessary because postwar Japanese education had focused too much on wartime misdeeds and produced graduates who were not proud of their country.
"To correct the big mistake in our education in the postwar 60 years, we've got to introduce forceful methods," he said.
Today's Chinese have been shaped by an anti-Japanese patriotic education, overseen by a government that is aware that its own domestic credentials depend, in part, on a hard line toward Japan. Having a hated neighbor shores up national solidarity and helps distract people from the failings of the Chinese Communist Party. Besides the party's monopoly on power, few orthodoxies are as untouchable today as hostility toward Japan.
Yu Jie, a Chinese author who spent time in Japan researching a book on the two countries' relations, "Iron and Plough," and went on to write another book about his experiences in Japan, discovered that at his own expense.
The books are nuanced works, built around lengthy conversations with pacifists, right-wing activists, scholars of every stripe and ordinary Japanese. One chapter, "Looking for Japan's Conscience," warned against speaking of Japanese in blanket terms.
"In the 60 years since the war, numerous Chinese and Japanese people have worked for the difficult Sino-Japanese friendship, selflessly emitting a dim yet precious light," he wrote.
The books appeared briefly in stores and then disappeared. In a country where censorship is routine, that is a sure sign, the author said, that officials had put pressure on the publisher or the stores to withdraw them.
Mr. Yu said China's policy toward Japan was unlikely to become more balanced as long as an authoritarian government remained in place, because Japan offered an unrivaled distraction from China's own problems.
"We criticize Yasukuni Shrine, but we have Mao Zedong's shrine in the middle of Beijing, which is our own Yasukuni," he said. "This is a shame to me, because Mao Zedong killed more Chinese than the Japanese did. Until we are able to recognize our own problems, the Japanese won't take us seriously."
One on the "foes of fundamentalist Islam"
Staunch Islam and Its Many Foes (Including Apathy)
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Since coming to power in state elections nearly three years ago, a coalition of radical Islamist parties here in North-West Frontier Province has faced a few stumbling blocks on the road to creating a model Islamic state.
First, they made it illegal to play music on city buses, but that law seemed to fall flat on its face. Caravans of luridly painted buses still cruise the streets of Peshawar, tinny pop music pouring out of their windows.
Then they banned mannequins in shop windows, but shopkeepers shrugged it off. The mannequins quickly returned to the bazaar, displaying stiff smiles.
The Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, as the coalition of religious radicals is called in Urdu, did succeed in closing the two pubs that served alcohol (though only to non-Pakistani foreigners). Some of their foot soldiers went on a free-for-all vandalizing advertising billboards that displayed pictures of women. And the coalition banned musical performances at a government-owned concert hall.
But high unemployment, dysfunctional schools, a dearth of doctors in the countryside, women dying at alarmingly high rates in childbirth - those problems it has been so far unable to tackle.
Now, in the latest tussle over the influence of religious radicals in Pakistani society and politics, the Islamist-led provincial legislature has passed a bill that would empower religious police to ensure that the people of Frontier Province comply with "Islamic values and etiquettes" in everyday life. The authors of the law assure that the hisba police and a government-appointed cleric who would adjudicate cases would use persuasion, not force, though skeptics wonder how voluntary it would be.
The bill has prompted a shrill outcry against what critics call the potential Talibanization of the province. Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, keen to cast himself as a moderate, has spoken against the bill, and his government has appealed to the Supreme Court to decide whether it complies with the federal Constitution. [The Supreme Court heard arguments on Aug. 1 and 2, but has not issued a judgment.]
In Pakistan, Shariah, or Islamic law, already regulates civil matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance. But the federal Constitution guarantees personal freedoms, which, critics say, the hisba law would violate.
The most controversial provision of the "hisba" bill - roughly meaning accountability - is the appointment of a "mohtasib" - roughly meaning ombudsman - in each of the 84 counties and districts in the province. The mohtasib would have authority to regulate a broad spectrum of public and private life, from making sure Muslims offer daily prayers and children obey their parents to stopping bribery of government officials and child labor. It would be up to the mohtasib to interpret Islamic "values" in each locality. He would have a police force at his disposal. There would be no appeal.
"The law is very clear," argued Bushra Gohar, who runs an organization here that promotes women and children's rights. "The mohtasib does have extraordinary powers to be judge, jury and executioner. No one can appeal. No one can question."
Pakistan's attorney general, Makhdoom Ali Khan, said he worried that such a law would allow each ombudsman to interfere in the lives of Pakistani citizens and essentially install a parallel judiciary. From district to district, he argued, the mohtasib's interpretations could be slightly different on a range of issues, from whether women should be allowed to drive to whether mandolins can be played in public.
"These are broad, vague, generalized powers to the ombudsmen to virtually regulate every sphere of human activity," Mr. Khan said.
The state's top politician, Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani, has brushed off detractors, saying the mohtasib would only recommend, not enforce, proper Islamic behavior. Besides, he said on a recent night, as though it would reassure, most of the hisba police force would be drawn from the ranks of existing police.
"Our idea is to give people access to justice," added Mr. Durrani, just back from Washington on a visit to a right-wing Christian organization.
Mr. Durrani, whose political coalition includes those who once openly backed the fundamentalist leadership in neighboring Afghanistan, dismissed comparisons to the Taliban. After all, he said, his government had acted in favor of girls' education. Recently, he added, he had spoken out in favor of women's right to vote.
In fact, local heads of his party had recently signed agreements in four counties of Frontier Province barring women from contesting and voting in coming local government elections; local tradition forbids it, they argued. Dozens of women recently defied their order and filed their nomination papers for the elections. And Pakistan's Central Election Commission vowed to punish those who blocked women's participation. Mr. Durrani said he concurred with the federal agency's judgment.
At the local college radio station here the other evening, the young D.J.'s and newsreaders shrugged off the hype over the hisba bill.
Shazia Irum, manager of Campus Radio FM 107, said that although she opposed the legislation, she did not fear its consequences.
"There are so many provisions of this bill that can't be implemented," she said. "I don't think it will be signed."
The bill, the students here argued, was merely an attempt by the governing party to show that they had made some kind of difference, ahead of elections in 2007. "It's of no concern to anybody," said Behzad Hussain, 24, studying for his master's in business administration. "It's a political thing. There's nothing in it."
For students of politics, the more interesting game to watch is the public tussle over the law. More than ever before, Mr. Musharraf likes to demonstrate his moderate credentials, and it would be hard for him not to speak out against hisba. On the other hand, to crush it in the federal courts could only help the Islamists declare to their constituents that their Islamic ambitions are being hurt by a pro-Western military ruler.
In many ways, observed Atif Ali Khan, a young American-trained lawyer and a supporter of the Islamist coalition, it would have been better for General Musharraf to have allowed Mr. Durrani's government to carry out hisba: It would have very likely proved too difficult on the ground. Even if the Supreme Court rules against it, he suggested, it would be a political victory for the Frontier's ruling party, the M.M.A., as it is known.
"It doesn't matter now," Mr. Khan said, flashing the wry smile of an avid politics fan. "The M.M.A. has already won the round. The federal government has played into their hands."
On pollution in California
California Air Is Cleaner, but Troubles Remain
By FELICITY BARRINGER
TOPANGA STATE PARK, Calif. - On many days, a hiker on the Temescal Ridge trail above the Pacific Ocean, 30 to 50 miles west of the San Gabriel Mountains, can trace the snowy ridges and the thin, brown lines of canyons with the naked eye. Three decades ago, an entire summer could pass before homeowners just five miles from the mountains could see the peaks.
Kyle Eden, a varsity tennis player in Glendora High School below the San Gabriels, has never had a match called for smog, as his father, Rudy, did in the 1970's.
Bob Wyman, a lawyer, no longer pants for air after running as he did in his childhood.
Visitors like Leon Billings, who shaped the Clean Air Act as a senior Senate staff member, do not have to pull off the freeways and wait for their eyes to stop tearing.
"Smog had a palpable impact on our daily lives," Mr. Wyman said. "I'm 51. I'm not sure how conscious most people are of this."
In the last half-century, the urgent need to scrub clean the filthiest air in the country has reshaped the region's politics, turned obscure agencies into regulatory behemoths and made Los Angeles an international leader in its hard-won expertise.
But for all this achievement, success - consistently healthy air for all 16 million Southern Californians - remains out of reach.
The ozone pollution is improving but the region remains, along with Houston and the San Joaquin Valley in Central California, one of the worst three in the nation.
And the authorities have far less power to control another type of air pollution, one just as harmful as ozone, if not more so.
Hidden from hikers in Topanga State Park by the low hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula are the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The hub of a ravenous American appetite for cheap Asian goods, the ports are also a concentrated source of diesel pollutants spewing from the ships, locomotives and lines of idling trucks.
The tiny exhaust particles, just one twenty-eighth the width of the average human hair, get deep inside lungs and have been newly linked to cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Much of what Los Angeles has achieved has been accomplished by strict state regulations in tandem with the federal mandates of the Clean Air Act of 1970. With continuing pressure from the Bush administration for changes in the act, this place whose name was once synonymous with filthy air is perhaps the best place to measure what the Clean Air Act has accomplished - and what remains undone.
The Los Angeles narrative has parallels around the country. In the Ohio River Valley, the steel industry has shriveled, but electric utilities have become a dominant polluter. Along the western shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the chemical industry stands in the forefront. In California, the biggest issue is emissions from cars, trucks, trains and ships.
The four counties usually visible from the ocean-hugging slopes above Santa Monica have been to the clean air struggle what the Deep South was to the civil rights movement.
It was not a folk-song-ready revolution. Its epic figures are biochemists and engineers, known for precision, not charisma. Its battlefields, the insides of engines. Its foot soldiers, bureaucracies with forgettable names but memorable accomplishments, like setting emission standards that put catalytic converters in California cars in 1975, two years ahead of the rest of the nation.
California's problem today, however, is that the state has little clear legal authority at the ports, where cargo volume is projected to triple by 2030. "A great deal of work still needs to be done," said Michael H. Scheible, deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board. "And we don't have another automobile out there, something that has big emissions and that we have full authority to control."
Pollution Fight Begins
In 1955, downtown Los Angeles experienced the nation's worst-ever prolonged ozone pollution: on one day the hourly average levels of choking ozone were six times the maximum allowable rate under current federal standards.
The source had been pinpointed a couple of years earlier, by Arie Haagen-Smit, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology. A plant biologist, Dr. Haagen-Smit had been studying the organic basis of pineapples' scent, using ozone as a tool, when, as his wife later told a Caltech historian, a scientist heading the area's first air pollution control agency asked him to try to figure out where smog came from.
In a study quickly ridiculed by scientists financed by the auto industry, Dr. Haagen-Smit laid out the method by which hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, rising from car tailpipes into Southern California's persistent sunlight, were cooked into photochemical smog. The major component is ozone created through this chemical reaction.
Dr. Haagen-Smit intended to return to his pineapples, but after he heard his work disparaged in a Caltech lecture hall, he devoted himself to pollution science, eventually becoming the first head of the statewide Air Resources Board.
In laying out the formula for what ailed Los Angeles, Dr. Haagen-Smit had fingered its principal sources: cars and oil refineries. And as more became known about these and other causes of pollution, lawmakers began to focus on controlling them.
Fifteen years after Los Angeles's most breathless summer, Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, which took many of its core concepts from California.
The law set standards for air quality, and like California's regulations, it established deadlines for government action. It embraced the idea that if you tell an industry it must reduce emissions, its engineers will figure out how - a route called "technology forcing."
By terms of the 1970 Clean Air Act, California was the only state that retained its freedom to regulate as it saw fit. By the mid-1970's, the state's regulations, which held sway over 10 percent of Detroit's market, forced the installation of catalytic converters in cars, and later eliminated from gasoline the lead that was poisoning the converters. The federal government followed.
Southern Californians "just assume that air pollution is something you can make go away," said Mary Nichols, a former state official and the chief of the air division of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration. "We don't feel we have to settle for it."
Since 1980, Southern California's population has increased by 60 percent and cars are tracing twice as many miles across the region - 337 million a year. But the number of days when ozone levels over an eight-hour period violated the federal standard has dropped to 88 from 186; emissions of nitrogen oxide have dropped by two-thirds and those of carbon monoxide by more than 80 percent.
An expanding bureaucracy, led by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, also took on other sources of pollution; measuring, monitoring and regulating emissions from nearly every corner of daily life, including backyard incinerators, oil-based paints, street sweepers, dry cleaners and barbecue lighter fluid.
"We've always been pushing the limits to find out where we can go," the chairman of the South Coast district, William Burke, said in a recent interview. "Does that aggravate people? Yes. Does it get things done? Yes."
A little after 7 most mornings, Mike Brewer, 53, drives his orange 1988 Kenworth truck, with its 350 horsepower Cummins engine, up to the offices of a freight business in Rancho Dominguez. There he finds out each day what he is picking up at the ports - office chairs? art? fireworks? shoes? cars? - and which warehouse is expecting the cargo. From Rancho Dominguez he gets on the 710 Freeway and heads for one of the ports.
From a dog-walking park above one corner of the Port of Los Angeles, the scale of the industrial landscape is staggering. The cranes and gantries around the 270 ship berths look like dozens of monster erector sets.
The acreage of the two ports would cover Manhattan from the Battery to 34th Street.
Mr. Brewer has been hauling cargo from the twin ports since 1988, making two to four trips a day. Now, he said, "The air is way thicker because you have your older trucks and all the different machinery." The port averages 35,000 truck trips a day, its Web site reports.
From the elevated park, the orange cab of Mr. Brewer's truck comes into view, snaking through containers to the place where a smaller crane, called a heister, picks up a 20- or 40-foot container from a stack three high and swings it onto the chassis that has been given to Mr. Brewer for the trip.
Each trip means separate waits to pick up the chassis and the container; he could wait in as many as four lines. As these lines lengthen during the summer, the pollution builds up.
Last weekend, the two ports began all-night cargo-moving operations as part of an effort to minimize truck lines and accelerate the flow of goods. But it is unclear if the surrounding neighborhoods, where nighttime truck noise is unwelcome at best, will consider this an improvement.
Problem at the Ports
In 2004, some 40 percent of national seaborne imports, 235.7 million metric tons, came through the two ports. In 2001, diesel engines of all types - trucks, ships, locomotives, heisters - that carried them through the Port of Los Angeles alone directly pumped out 2.3 tons of tiny soot a day into the region, a study by port officials showed. Recent scientific studies have linked these particles to cancer and cardiovascular disease, the country's most pervasive killers.
A major study sponsored by the South Coast district in 1998 showed that the cancer risk for residents of Long Beach, to the immediate northeast of the ports, was twice as great as the risk for people in west-central Los Angeles and four times as high as the risk for those near Topanga Canyon. Diesel particulates from trucks, ships and locomotives, the study said, accounted for 70 percent of the risk.
While California has been successful in regulating cars and gasoline, it faces daunting obstacles with trains and container ships. Since 1990, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has had the sole authority to regulate locomotives. Container ships are the province of the International Maritime Organization. Federal rules put into effect in 2000 and last year will reduce sulfur, a building block of the toxic tiny soot, in diesel fuel used in trucks. But the standards apply only to fuel used in new engines, and small-business men like Mr. Brewer keep their trucks, which are a major capital investment, as long as possible.
Last year, the E.P.A. announced a plan to cut the sulfur content of locomotive fuel over five years beginning in 2007. Some California regulators say the limits were too long in coming. But Margo T. Oge, director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the environmental agency, said the agency followed a logical progression, first tackling the most easily achievable emissions cuts, mandating changes in internal engine dynamics in 1997. Then it moved to regulate fuel.
On the container ships, most engines use a so-called bunker fuel that contains as much as 30,000 parts per million of sulfur, 10 times the amount in diesel fuel used in older trucks and 2,000 times as much as American diesel fuel will contain in 2010.
Under an international agreement that took effect in May, countries can create zones where ship fuel can have no more than 15,000 parts per million of sulfur. But it has no effect in the United States because the Senate has not ratified the treaty; it has been preoccupied with another maritime treaty, the Law of the Sea.
The notion that the biggest contributor of toxic soot is so difficult to regulate has incensed community leaders in the San Pedro section of Los Angeles, the ports' nearest neighbor.
"I'd go over these two bridges," said Noel Park, the head of the San Pedro and Peninsula Homeowners United, referring to the bridges that pass over the ports, "and I'd be above the line of old beat-up trucks. I'd wonder how long I could hold my breath."
While neighbors fear the ports' growth, they have also used it as an opening. The Natural Resources Defense Council, acting on homeowners' behalf, sued to block one company, China Shipping, from expanding its terminal at the Port of Los Angeles until the environmental effect could be studied.
China Shipping agreed to a settlement that transformed its docking and unloading operations. Instead of using diesel power to keep equipment running, the ships would plug into electric power offered by the terminal. And the port agreed to contribute $55 million to this and other mitigation measures, including $10 million to help drivers like Mr. Brewer buy new, cleaner rigs.
The success of the suit has spurred Southern Californians in the State Legislature to redouble their efforts to put through legislation controlling the ports. A proposal to require whatever steps necessary to keep port pollution in the South Coast from increasing has passed the Senate and is being considered in the Assembly.
In recent years, shippers and their landlords in the twin ports have made adjustments, though their representatives say they had already been working on cooperative solutions.
Incentive programs, which promote emissions cleanup by, for instance, giving ships with cleaner-burning fuels the right to jump to the head of the line, were under way before the China Shipping settlement, said T. L. Garrett, the vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association in Long Beach.
"It's one thing to be part of the solution when you're doing it for all the right reasons," Mr. Garrett said. "It's another when you're being told: 'You're a bad guy and you have to do this.' "
And Mr. Garrett, a former port official, said shippers were wary of offering voluntary reductions, fearing that "eventually someone is going to turn that into a mandatory requirement."
"In the absence of a regulatory framework," he said, "the industry has stepped forward to reduce emissions beyond what they are required to."
The Cost of Cleaning Up
Though Bob Wyman, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, can remember when it was painful to breathe, he says government edicts on emissions, while "highly successful" in the past, could pose problems in more parlous economic times. Mr. Wyman, a lawyer who represents the Port of Long Beach and several goods-movement companies, says that because of the port's economic importance, regulation has to be leavened with market incentives to keep its costs down.
"We have to get this one right," he said, "so we need to be careful to select control strategies that can deliver air quality objectives at an affordable cost."
The Bush administration has sought to amend the Clean Air Act to give industry more flexibility while still reducing emissions over time. The measure is stalled in Congress, but changes in regulations this year could accomplish much of what the administration wants. They stretch out cleanup deadlines facing refineries, factories and power plants and adopt a market-based approach to cleaning the air by letting plants that exceed pollution limits buy "pollution allowances" from cleaner plants.
The changes are likely to have most impact east of the Mississippi River and a limited effect in California, largely because of the state's regulatory independence.
"We act even if the feds don't exist," said V. John White, who has worked on clean air programs for 30 years and is now a consultant and environmental lobbyist in Sacramento.
But California's progress is not constant. Ozone levels actually rose in 2002 and 2003 before falling again last year. In 2004, a 10-year study of a group of children growing up in the Los Angeles basin showed that the lungs of active children growing up in the areas of the thickest ozone had 10 percent to 20 percent less capacity than those of their counterparts in cleaner areas.
"The statistics would show that you're going to die younger and be more likely to have more heart and lung disease," said John Peters, the professor who headed the study for the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
And port traffic will only increase.
"This is the damage being done now," Professor Peters said. "It doesn't make sense to add more pollution."
On bottled water
Bad to the Last Drop
By TOM STANDAGE
London
IT'S summertime, and odds are that at some point during your day you'll reach for a nice cold bottle of water. But before you do, you might want to consider the results of an experiment I conducted with some friends one summer evening last year. On the table were 10 bottles of water, several rows of glasses and some paper for recording our impressions. We were to evaluate samples from each bottle for appearance, odor, flavor, mouth, feel and aftertaste - and our aim was to identify the interloper among the famous names. One of our bottles had been filled from the tap. Would we spot it?
We worked our way through the samples, writing scores for each one. None of us could detect any odor, even when swilling water around in large wine glasses, but other differences between the waters were instantly apparent. Between sips, we cleansed our palates with wine. (It seemed only fair, since water serves the same function at a wine tasting.)
The variation between waters was wide, yet the water from the tap did not stand out: only one of us correctly identified it. This simple experiment seemed to confirm that most people cannot tell the difference between tap water and bottled water. Yet they buy it anyway - and in enormous quantities.
In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity. Furthermore, consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than that of soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade. This year, Americans will spend around $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today's high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?
It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.
Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.
Admittedly, both kinds of water suffer from occasional contamination problems, but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. New York City tap water, for example, was tested 430,600 times during 2004 alone.
What of the idea that drinking bottled water allows you to avoid the chemicals that are sometimes added to tap water? Alas, some bottled waters contain the same chemicals anyway - and they are, in any case, unavoidable.
Researchers at the University of Texas found that showers and dishwashers liberate trace amounts of chemicals from municipal water supplies into the air. Squirting hot water through a nozzle, to produce a fine spray, increases the surface area of water in contact with the air, liberating dissolved substances in a process known as "stripping." So if you want to avoid those chemicals for some reason, drinking bottled water is not enough. You will also have to wear a gas mask in the shower, and when unloading the dishwasher.
Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.
Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option. For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.
More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world's population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.
Widespread illness also makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. One of the main reasons girls do not go to school in many parts of the developing world is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells.
Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.
I have no objections to people drinking bottled water in the developing world; it is often the only safe supply. But it would surely be better if they had access to safe tap water instead. The logical response, for those of us in the developed world, is to stop spending money on bottled water and to give the money to water charities.
If you don't believe me about the taste, then set up a tasting, and see if you really can tell the difference. A water tasting is fun, and you may be surprised by the results. There is no danger of a hangover. But you may well conclude, as I have, that bottled water has an unacceptably bitter taste.
Ill Will Rising Between China and Japan
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
and HOWARD W. FRENCH
TOKYO, Aug. 2 - Japanese lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution that plays down this country's militarist policies in World War II, less than two weeks before ceremonies take place across Asia marking the 60th anniversary of the war's end on Aug. 15.
Though expressing "regret" for the wartime past, the resolution omitted the references to "invasion" and "colonial rule" that were in the version passed on the 50th anniversary.
The action will most likely be seen by China and Japan's other Asian neighbors as further proof of growing nationalism here. A right-wing vandal seemed to capture a growing sentiment last week when he tried to scrape off the word "mistake" from a peace memorial in Hiroshima that said of Japan's war efforts: "Let all the souls here rest in peace, as we will never repeat this mistake."
But in the weeks leading to Aug. 15, the leaders of China have been making sure that their view of the war, simply called the Anti-Japanese War there, gets across. China is spending $50 million to renovate a memorial hall for the victims of the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, when Japanese soldiers killed 100,000 to 300,000 civilians, at a time when details of it are disappearing from Japanese school textbooks. Chinese state television is broadcasting hundreds of programs on China's resistance against Imperial Japan.
The two countries find themselves playing out old grievances in a new era of direct rivalry for power and influence. Never before in modern times has East Asia had to contend with a strong China and a strong Japan at the same time, and the prospect feeds suspicion and hostility in both countries.
China has experienced 25 years of extraordinary economic growth, deeply extending its influence throughout Asia. But just when China's moment in the sun seems to be dawning, Japan is asserting itself: seeking a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, transforming its Self-Defense Forces into a real military and revising its war-renouncing Constitution.
Both governments are encouraging nationalism for their own political purposes: China to shore up loyalty as Marxist ideology fades, Japan to overcome long-held taboos against expanding its military. With the impending 60th anniversary, both are trying to forge a future on their version of the past.
In Japan, major newspapers have published articles defending the Class A war criminals convicted by the postwar Tokyo Trials, and a growing number of textbooks whitewash Japan's wartime conduct. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi makes annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where war dead including Class A war criminals are enshrined.
In China, a new television series called "Hero City" tells of how cities across China "fought bravely against Japan under the leadership of the Communist Party." In Beijing on Aug. 13, six former Chinese airmen from the Flying Tigers squadron are to recreate an air duel with Japanese fighters.
"On the one hand we have a victim's mentality, and on the other we don't see this much smaller country as being worthy of comparison with us," said Pang Zhongying, a professor of international relations at Nankai University in the northeastern Chinese city of Tianjin. "The reality is that they must accept the idea of China as a rising military power, and we must accept the idea of Japan becoming a normal nation, whether we like it or not."
To Japanese conservatives, becoming a normal nation amounts to a revision of the American-imposed peace Constitution that they feel castrated - a term they use deliberately and frequently - their country.
Arguing that Japan must draw closer to the United States, Mr. Koizumi's government has reinterpreted the Constitution to allow Japanese troops in Iraq and has reversed a longtime ban on the export of arms to join the American missile defense shield. Recent polls show an increasing percentage of Japanese favoring a revision of the Constitution.
The conservative news media have helped demonize China, as well as North Korea, to soften popular resistance to remilitarization. Sankei Shimbun, the country's most conservative daily, recently ran a series about China called "The Threatening Superpower."
One of the most emotional issues has been the dozen or so Japanese who were abducted by North Korea, mostly in the 1970's. The whereabouts of one woman, Megumi Yokota, remains a particularly sore point.
North Korea said she had died, and late last year gave Japan what it said were her remains. After DNA tests were done, the Japanese government accused North Korea of deliberately handing over someone else's remains, though most independent experts called the tests inconclusive.
Shinzo Abe, 50, the acting secretary general of the governing Liberal Democratic Party and the leading member of a young generation of hawks, immediately called for economic sanctions.
Hiromu Nonaka, 79, who retired as secretary general about a year ago, said the present situation reminded him of prewar Japan, when politicians manipulated public opinion to rouse nationalism through slogans like "Destroy the brute Americans and British."
"Mr. Abe, who has been in the forefront of the abductee issue, turned toward making all of North Korea into the enemy," Mr. Nonaka said.
Mr. Abe is also one of several conservative politicians who defend textbooks that have outraged Chinese and South Korean demonstrators by sanitizing Japan's wartime atrocities. References to the women forced into sexual servitude by Japan's wartime authorities, called comfort women, all but disappeared this year from governmentendorsed junior high school textbooks.
At a recent news conference, Mr. Abe was asked whether politicians had exaggerated the threat from North Korea and China to influence public opinion and ease Japan toward revising its peace Constitution. "Well, there may be such opinions, but I think it's rubbish," he said.
In China and Japan alike, hatred and suspicion of the other are being deliberately fostered, in many cases by the governments themselves.
In Tokyo, 291 teachers have been reprimanded in the last year and many may face dismissal for refusing to stand before the rising-sun flag at school enrollment and graduation ceremonies and sing Japan's national anthem, "Kimigayo," or "His Majesty's Reign," considered symbols of Japanese imperialism by most Asians and some Japanese. Those signals of respect used to be optional, or shunned because of their associations with Japan's past militarism.
Efforts to control how the Japanese, especially the young, view Japan and China have even reached the comics. Late last year, 47 local Japanese politicians from all over the country protested that a comic series called "The Country Is Burning," published in "Young Jump Weekly," had distorted the Rape of Nanjing.
The drawings did not actually depict Japanese soldiers committing atrocities, but showed ditches filled with Chinese cadavers. The magazine's publisher quickly backed down and announced that it would delete or modify the offending passages when the series was reprinted in book form.
Hidekazu Inubushi, a politician and leader of the protest, added that forcing respect of the Japanese national anthem and flag was necessary because postwar Japanese education had focused too much on wartime misdeeds and produced graduates who were not proud of their country.
"To correct the big mistake in our education in the postwar 60 years, we've got to introduce forceful methods," he said.
Today's Chinese have been shaped by an anti-Japanese patriotic education, overseen by a government that is aware that its own domestic credentials depend, in part, on a hard line toward Japan. Having a hated neighbor shores up national solidarity and helps distract people from the failings of the Chinese Communist Party. Besides the party's monopoly on power, few orthodoxies are as untouchable today as hostility toward Japan.
Yu Jie, a Chinese author who spent time in Japan researching a book on the two countries' relations, "Iron and Plough," and went on to write another book about his experiences in Japan, discovered that at his own expense.
The books are nuanced works, built around lengthy conversations with pacifists, right-wing activists, scholars of every stripe and ordinary Japanese. One chapter, "Looking for Japan's Conscience," warned against speaking of Japanese in blanket terms.
"In the 60 years since the war, numerous Chinese and Japanese people have worked for the difficult Sino-Japanese friendship, selflessly emitting a dim yet precious light," he wrote.
The books appeared briefly in stores and then disappeared. In a country where censorship is routine, that is a sure sign, the author said, that officials had put pressure on the publisher or the stores to withdraw them.
Mr. Yu said China's policy toward Japan was unlikely to become more balanced as long as an authoritarian government remained in place, because Japan offered an unrivaled distraction from China's own problems.
"We criticize Yasukuni Shrine, but we have Mao Zedong's shrine in the middle of Beijing, which is our own Yasukuni," he said. "This is a shame to me, because Mao Zedong killed more Chinese than the Japanese did. Until we are able to recognize our own problems, the Japanese won't take us seriously."
One on the "foes of fundamentalist Islam"
Staunch Islam and Its Many Foes (Including Apathy)
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Since coming to power in state elections nearly three years ago, a coalition of radical Islamist parties here in North-West Frontier Province has faced a few stumbling blocks on the road to creating a model Islamic state.
First, they made it illegal to play music on city buses, but that law seemed to fall flat on its face. Caravans of luridly painted buses still cruise the streets of Peshawar, tinny pop music pouring out of their windows.
Then they banned mannequins in shop windows, but shopkeepers shrugged it off. The mannequins quickly returned to the bazaar, displaying stiff smiles.
The Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, as the coalition of religious radicals is called in Urdu, did succeed in closing the two pubs that served alcohol (though only to non-Pakistani foreigners). Some of their foot soldiers went on a free-for-all vandalizing advertising billboards that displayed pictures of women. And the coalition banned musical performances at a government-owned concert hall.
But high unemployment, dysfunctional schools, a dearth of doctors in the countryside, women dying at alarmingly high rates in childbirth - those problems it has been so far unable to tackle.
Now, in the latest tussle over the influence of religious radicals in Pakistani society and politics, the Islamist-led provincial legislature has passed a bill that would empower religious police to ensure that the people of Frontier Province comply with "Islamic values and etiquettes" in everyday life. The authors of the law assure that the hisba police and a government-appointed cleric who would adjudicate cases would use persuasion, not force, though skeptics wonder how voluntary it would be.
The bill has prompted a shrill outcry against what critics call the potential Talibanization of the province. Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, keen to cast himself as a moderate, has spoken against the bill, and his government has appealed to the Supreme Court to decide whether it complies with the federal Constitution. [The Supreme Court heard arguments on Aug. 1 and 2, but has not issued a judgment.]
In Pakistan, Shariah, or Islamic law, already regulates civil matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance. But the federal Constitution guarantees personal freedoms, which, critics say, the hisba law would violate.
The most controversial provision of the "hisba" bill - roughly meaning accountability - is the appointment of a "mohtasib" - roughly meaning ombudsman - in each of the 84 counties and districts in the province. The mohtasib would have authority to regulate a broad spectrum of public and private life, from making sure Muslims offer daily prayers and children obey their parents to stopping bribery of government officials and child labor. It would be up to the mohtasib to interpret Islamic "values" in each locality. He would have a police force at his disposal. There would be no appeal.
"The law is very clear," argued Bushra Gohar, who runs an organization here that promotes women and children's rights. "The mohtasib does have extraordinary powers to be judge, jury and executioner. No one can appeal. No one can question."
Pakistan's attorney general, Makhdoom Ali Khan, said he worried that such a law would allow each ombudsman to interfere in the lives of Pakistani citizens and essentially install a parallel judiciary. From district to district, he argued, the mohtasib's interpretations could be slightly different on a range of issues, from whether women should be allowed to drive to whether mandolins can be played in public.
"These are broad, vague, generalized powers to the ombudsmen to virtually regulate every sphere of human activity," Mr. Khan said.
The state's top politician, Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani, has brushed off detractors, saying the mohtasib would only recommend, not enforce, proper Islamic behavior. Besides, he said on a recent night, as though it would reassure, most of the hisba police force would be drawn from the ranks of existing police.
"Our idea is to give people access to justice," added Mr. Durrani, just back from Washington on a visit to a right-wing Christian organization.
Mr. Durrani, whose political coalition includes those who once openly backed the fundamentalist leadership in neighboring Afghanistan, dismissed comparisons to the Taliban. After all, he said, his government had acted in favor of girls' education. Recently, he added, he had spoken out in favor of women's right to vote.
In fact, local heads of his party had recently signed agreements in four counties of Frontier Province barring women from contesting and voting in coming local government elections; local tradition forbids it, they argued. Dozens of women recently defied their order and filed their nomination papers for the elections. And Pakistan's Central Election Commission vowed to punish those who blocked women's participation. Mr. Durrani said he concurred with the federal agency's judgment.
At the local college radio station here the other evening, the young D.J.'s and newsreaders shrugged off the hype over the hisba bill.
Shazia Irum, manager of Campus Radio FM 107, said that although she opposed the legislation, she did not fear its consequences.
"There are so many provisions of this bill that can't be implemented," she said. "I don't think it will be signed."
The bill, the students here argued, was merely an attempt by the governing party to show that they had made some kind of difference, ahead of elections in 2007. "It's of no concern to anybody," said Behzad Hussain, 24, studying for his master's in business administration. "It's a political thing. There's nothing in it."
For students of politics, the more interesting game to watch is the public tussle over the law. More than ever before, Mr. Musharraf likes to demonstrate his moderate credentials, and it would be hard for him not to speak out against hisba. On the other hand, to crush it in the federal courts could only help the Islamists declare to their constituents that their Islamic ambitions are being hurt by a pro-Western military ruler.
In many ways, observed Atif Ali Khan, a young American-trained lawyer and a supporter of the Islamist coalition, it would have been better for General Musharraf to have allowed Mr. Durrani's government to carry out hisba: It would have very likely proved too difficult on the ground. Even if the Supreme Court rules against it, he suggested, it would be a political victory for the Frontier's ruling party, the M.M.A., as it is known.
"It doesn't matter now," Mr. Khan said, flashing the wry smile of an avid politics fan. "The M.M.A. has already won the round. The federal government has played into their hands."
On pollution in California
California Air Is Cleaner, but Troubles Remain
By FELICITY BARRINGER
TOPANGA STATE PARK, Calif. - On many days, a hiker on the Temescal Ridge trail above the Pacific Ocean, 30 to 50 miles west of the San Gabriel Mountains, can trace the snowy ridges and the thin, brown lines of canyons with the naked eye. Three decades ago, an entire summer could pass before homeowners just five miles from the mountains could see the peaks.
Kyle Eden, a varsity tennis player in Glendora High School below the San Gabriels, has never had a match called for smog, as his father, Rudy, did in the 1970's.
Bob Wyman, a lawyer, no longer pants for air after running as he did in his childhood.
Visitors like Leon Billings, who shaped the Clean Air Act as a senior Senate staff member, do not have to pull off the freeways and wait for their eyes to stop tearing.
"Smog had a palpable impact on our daily lives," Mr. Wyman said. "I'm 51. I'm not sure how conscious most people are of this."
In the last half-century, the urgent need to scrub clean the filthiest air in the country has reshaped the region's politics, turned obscure agencies into regulatory behemoths and made Los Angeles an international leader in its hard-won expertise.
But for all this achievement, success - consistently healthy air for all 16 million Southern Californians - remains out of reach.
The ozone pollution is improving but the region remains, along with Houston and the San Joaquin Valley in Central California, one of the worst three in the nation.
And the authorities have far less power to control another type of air pollution, one just as harmful as ozone, if not more so.
Hidden from hikers in Topanga State Park by the low hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula are the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The hub of a ravenous American appetite for cheap Asian goods, the ports are also a concentrated source of diesel pollutants spewing from the ships, locomotives and lines of idling trucks.
The tiny exhaust particles, just one twenty-eighth the width of the average human hair, get deep inside lungs and have been newly linked to cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Much of what Los Angeles has achieved has been accomplished by strict state regulations in tandem with the federal mandates of the Clean Air Act of 1970. With continuing pressure from the Bush administration for changes in the act, this place whose name was once synonymous with filthy air is perhaps the best place to measure what the Clean Air Act has accomplished - and what remains undone.
The Los Angeles narrative has parallels around the country. In the Ohio River Valley, the steel industry has shriveled, but electric utilities have become a dominant polluter. Along the western shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the chemical industry stands in the forefront. In California, the biggest issue is emissions from cars, trucks, trains and ships.
The four counties usually visible from the ocean-hugging slopes above Santa Monica have been to the clean air struggle what the Deep South was to the civil rights movement.
It was not a folk-song-ready revolution. Its epic figures are biochemists and engineers, known for precision, not charisma. Its battlefields, the insides of engines. Its foot soldiers, bureaucracies with forgettable names but memorable accomplishments, like setting emission standards that put catalytic converters in California cars in 1975, two years ahead of the rest of the nation.
California's problem today, however, is that the state has little clear legal authority at the ports, where cargo volume is projected to triple by 2030. "A great deal of work still needs to be done," said Michael H. Scheible, deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board. "And we don't have another automobile out there, something that has big emissions and that we have full authority to control."
Pollution Fight Begins
In 1955, downtown Los Angeles experienced the nation's worst-ever prolonged ozone pollution: on one day the hourly average levels of choking ozone were six times the maximum allowable rate under current federal standards.
The source had been pinpointed a couple of years earlier, by Arie Haagen-Smit, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology. A plant biologist, Dr. Haagen-Smit had been studying the organic basis of pineapples' scent, using ozone as a tool, when, as his wife later told a Caltech historian, a scientist heading the area's first air pollution control agency asked him to try to figure out where smog came from.
In a study quickly ridiculed by scientists financed by the auto industry, Dr. Haagen-Smit laid out the method by which hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, rising from car tailpipes into Southern California's persistent sunlight, were cooked into photochemical smog. The major component is ozone created through this chemical reaction.
Dr. Haagen-Smit intended to return to his pineapples, but after he heard his work disparaged in a Caltech lecture hall, he devoted himself to pollution science, eventually becoming the first head of the statewide Air Resources Board.
In laying out the formula for what ailed Los Angeles, Dr. Haagen-Smit had fingered its principal sources: cars and oil refineries. And as more became known about these and other causes of pollution, lawmakers began to focus on controlling them.
Fifteen years after Los Angeles's most breathless summer, Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, which took many of its core concepts from California.
The law set standards for air quality, and like California's regulations, it established deadlines for government action. It embraced the idea that if you tell an industry it must reduce emissions, its engineers will figure out how - a route called "technology forcing."
By terms of the 1970 Clean Air Act, California was the only state that retained its freedom to regulate as it saw fit. By the mid-1970's, the state's regulations, which held sway over 10 percent of Detroit's market, forced the installation of catalytic converters in cars, and later eliminated from gasoline the lead that was poisoning the converters. The federal government followed.
Southern Californians "just assume that air pollution is something you can make go away," said Mary Nichols, a former state official and the chief of the air division of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration. "We don't feel we have to settle for it."
Since 1980, Southern California's population has increased by 60 percent and cars are tracing twice as many miles across the region - 337 million a year. But the number of days when ozone levels over an eight-hour period violated the federal standard has dropped to 88 from 186; emissions of nitrogen oxide have dropped by two-thirds and those of carbon monoxide by more than 80 percent.
An expanding bureaucracy, led by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, also took on other sources of pollution; measuring, monitoring and regulating emissions from nearly every corner of daily life, including backyard incinerators, oil-based paints, street sweepers, dry cleaners and barbecue lighter fluid.
"We've always been pushing the limits to find out where we can go," the chairman of the South Coast district, William Burke, said in a recent interview. "Does that aggravate people? Yes. Does it get things done? Yes."
A little after 7 most mornings, Mike Brewer, 53, drives his orange 1988 Kenworth truck, with its 350 horsepower Cummins engine, up to the offices of a freight business in Rancho Dominguez. There he finds out each day what he is picking up at the ports - office chairs? art? fireworks? shoes? cars? - and which warehouse is expecting the cargo. From Rancho Dominguez he gets on the 710 Freeway and heads for one of the ports.
From a dog-walking park above one corner of the Port of Los Angeles, the scale of the industrial landscape is staggering. The cranes and gantries around the 270 ship berths look like dozens of monster erector sets.
The acreage of the two ports would cover Manhattan from the Battery to 34th Street.
Mr. Brewer has been hauling cargo from the twin ports since 1988, making two to four trips a day. Now, he said, "The air is way thicker because you have your older trucks and all the different machinery." The port averages 35,000 truck trips a day, its Web site reports.
From the elevated park, the orange cab of Mr. Brewer's truck comes into view, snaking through containers to the place where a smaller crane, called a heister, picks up a 20- or 40-foot container from a stack three high and swings it onto the chassis that has been given to Mr. Brewer for the trip.
Each trip means separate waits to pick up the chassis and the container; he could wait in as many as four lines. As these lines lengthen during the summer, the pollution builds up.
Last weekend, the two ports began all-night cargo-moving operations as part of an effort to minimize truck lines and accelerate the flow of goods. But it is unclear if the surrounding neighborhoods, where nighttime truck noise is unwelcome at best, will consider this an improvement.
Problem at the Ports
In 2004, some 40 percent of national seaborne imports, 235.7 million metric tons, came through the two ports. In 2001, diesel engines of all types - trucks, ships, locomotives, heisters - that carried them through the Port of Los Angeles alone directly pumped out 2.3 tons of tiny soot a day into the region, a study by port officials showed. Recent scientific studies have linked these particles to cancer and cardiovascular disease, the country's most pervasive killers.
A major study sponsored by the South Coast district in 1998 showed that the cancer risk for residents of Long Beach, to the immediate northeast of the ports, was twice as great as the risk for people in west-central Los Angeles and four times as high as the risk for those near Topanga Canyon. Diesel particulates from trucks, ships and locomotives, the study said, accounted for 70 percent of the risk.
While California has been successful in regulating cars and gasoline, it faces daunting obstacles with trains and container ships. Since 1990, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has had the sole authority to regulate locomotives. Container ships are the province of the International Maritime Organization. Federal rules put into effect in 2000 and last year will reduce sulfur, a building block of the toxic tiny soot, in diesel fuel used in trucks. But the standards apply only to fuel used in new engines, and small-business men like Mr. Brewer keep their trucks, which are a major capital investment, as long as possible.
Last year, the E.P.A. announced a plan to cut the sulfur content of locomotive fuel over five years beginning in 2007. Some California regulators say the limits were too long in coming. But Margo T. Oge, director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the environmental agency, said the agency followed a logical progression, first tackling the most easily achievable emissions cuts, mandating changes in internal engine dynamics in 1997. Then it moved to regulate fuel.
On the container ships, most engines use a so-called bunker fuel that contains as much as 30,000 parts per million of sulfur, 10 times the amount in diesel fuel used in older trucks and 2,000 times as much as American diesel fuel will contain in 2010.
Under an international agreement that took effect in May, countries can create zones where ship fuel can have no more than 15,000 parts per million of sulfur. But it has no effect in the United States because the Senate has not ratified the treaty; it has been preoccupied with another maritime treaty, the Law of the Sea.
The notion that the biggest contributor of toxic soot is so difficult to regulate has incensed community leaders in the San Pedro section of Los Angeles, the ports' nearest neighbor.
"I'd go over these two bridges," said Noel Park, the head of the San Pedro and Peninsula Homeowners United, referring to the bridges that pass over the ports, "and I'd be above the line of old beat-up trucks. I'd wonder how long I could hold my breath."
While neighbors fear the ports' growth, they have also used it as an opening. The Natural Resources Defense Council, acting on homeowners' behalf, sued to block one company, China Shipping, from expanding its terminal at the Port of Los Angeles until the environmental effect could be studied.
China Shipping agreed to a settlement that transformed its docking and unloading operations. Instead of using diesel power to keep equipment running, the ships would plug into electric power offered by the terminal. And the port agreed to contribute $55 million to this and other mitigation measures, including $10 million to help drivers like Mr. Brewer buy new, cleaner rigs.
The success of the suit has spurred Southern Californians in the State Legislature to redouble their efforts to put through legislation controlling the ports. A proposal to require whatever steps necessary to keep port pollution in the South Coast from increasing has passed the Senate and is being considered in the Assembly.
In recent years, shippers and their landlords in the twin ports have made adjustments, though their representatives say they had already been working on cooperative solutions.
Incentive programs, which promote emissions cleanup by, for instance, giving ships with cleaner-burning fuels the right to jump to the head of the line, were under way before the China Shipping settlement, said T. L. Garrett, the vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association in Long Beach.
"It's one thing to be part of the solution when you're doing it for all the right reasons," Mr. Garrett said. "It's another when you're being told: 'You're a bad guy and you have to do this.' "
And Mr. Garrett, a former port official, said shippers were wary of offering voluntary reductions, fearing that "eventually someone is going to turn that into a mandatory requirement."
"In the absence of a regulatory framework," he said, "the industry has stepped forward to reduce emissions beyond what they are required to."
The Cost of Cleaning Up
Though Bob Wyman, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, can remember when it was painful to breathe, he says government edicts on emissions, while "highly successful" in the past, could pose problems in more parlous economic times. Mr. Wyman, a lawyer who represents the Port of Long Beach and several goods-movement companies, says that because of the port's economic importance, regulation has to be leavened with market incentives to keep its costs down.
"We have to get this one right," he said, "so we need to be careful to select control strategies that can deliver air quality objectives at an affordable cost."
The Bush administration has sought to amend the Clean Air Act to give industry more flexibility while still reducing emissions over time. The measure is stalled in Congress, but changes in regulations this year could accomplish much of what the administration wants. They stretch out cleanup deadlines facing refineries, factories and power plants and adopt a market-based approach to cleaning the air by letting plants that exceed pollution limits buy "pollution allowances" from cleaner plants.
The changes are likely to have most impact east of the Mississippi River and a limited effect in California, largely because of the state's regulatory independence.
"We act even if the feds don't exist," said V. John White, who has worked on clean air programs for 30 years and is now a consultant and environmental lobbyist in Sacramento.
But California's progress is not constant. Ozone levels actually rose in 2002 and 2003 before falling again last year. In 2004, a 10-year study of a group of children growing up in the Los Angeles basin showed that the lungs of active children growing up in the areas of the thickest ozone had 10 percent to 20 percent less capacity than those of their counterparts in cleaner areas.
"The statistics would show that you're going to die younger and be more likely to have more heart and lung disease," said John Peters, the professor who headed the study for the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
And port traffic will only increase.
"This is the damage being done now," Professor Peters said. "It doesn't make sense to add more pollution."
On bottled water
Bad to the Last Drop
By TOM STANDAGE
London
IT'S summertime, and odds are that at some point during your day you'll reach for a nice cold bottle of water. But before you do, you might want to consider the results of an experiment I conducted with some friends one summer evening last year. On the table were 10 bottles of water, several rows of glasses and some paper for recording our impressions. We were to evaluate samples from each bottle for appearance, odor, flavor, mouth, feel and aftertaste - and our aim was to identify the interloper among the famous names. One of our bottles had been filled from the tap. Would we spot it?
We worked our way through the samples, writing scores for each one. None of us could detect any odor, even when swilling water around in large wine glasses, but other differences between the waters were instantly apparent. Between sips, we cleansed our palates with wine. (It seemed only fair, since water serves the same function at a wine tasting.)
The variation between waters was wide, yet the water from the tap did not stand out: only one of us correctly identified it. This simple experiment seemed to confirm that most people cannot tell the difference between tap water and bottled water. Yet they buy it anyway - and in enormous quantities.
In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity. Furthermore, consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than that of soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade. This year, Americans will spend around $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today's high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?
It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.
Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.
Admittedly, both kinds of water suffer from occasional contamination problems, but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. New York City tap water, for example, was tested 430,600 times during 2004 alone.
What of the idea that drinking bottled water allows you to avoid the chemicals that are sometimes added to tap water? Alas, some bottled waters contain the same chemicals anyway - and they are, in any case, unavoidable.
Researchers at the University of Texas found that showers and dishwashers liberate trace amounts of chemicals from municipal water supplies into the air. Squirting hot water through a nozzle, to produce a fine spray, increases the surface area of water in contact with the air, liberating dissolved substances in a process known as "stripping." So if you want to avoid those chemicals for some reason, drinking bottled water is not enough. You will also have to wear a gas mask in the shower, and when unloading the dishwasher.
Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.
Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option. For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.
More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world's population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.
Widespread illness also makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. One of the main reasons girls do not go to school in many parts of the developing world is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells.
Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.
I have no objections to people drinking bottled water in the developing world; it is often the only safe supply. But it would surely be better if they had access to safe tap water instead. The logical response, for those of us in the developed world, is to stop spending money on bottled water and to give the money to water charities.
If you don't believe me about the taste, then set up a tasting, and see if you really can tell the difference. A water tasting is fun, and you may be surprised by the results. There is no danger of a hangover. But you may well conclude, as I have, that bottled water has an unacceptably bitter taste.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-05 01:34 am (UTC)It leaves rust/lime stains in my tub, sinks and toilet that no amount of CLR and scrubbing will get rid of.
There's an assumption in this article that all tapwater is created equal, and it's simply not true.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-05 09:21 pm (UTC)I buy bottled water sometimes when I'm thirsty and know that it'll be a long time before I'll have access to a sink or a drinking fountain... and then I use the bottle to store tapwater.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-05 01:34 am (UTC)It leaves rust/lime stains in my tub, sinks and toilet that no amount of CLR and scrubbing will get rid of.
There's an assumption in this article that all tapwater is created equal, and it's simply not true.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-05 09:21 pm (UTC)I buy bottled water sometimes when I'm thirsty and know that it'll be a long time before I'll have access to a sink or a drinking fountain... and then I use the bottle to store tapwater.