Hope

Goldie and I just finished watching the 6-hour miniseries adaptation of Angels in America tonight. It’s a bit hard to give a short summary of a 6-hour production, but you could say it is a sort of “State of the (American) Union” address from the perspective of a gay man dying of, and then later living with, AIDS. It begins in the middle of the Reagan-era when the world is worrying about the growing ozone hole, “homosexuals” are still hiding in the closets and shadows, and AIDS is growing to epidemic proportions. Now for the spoilers….it ends with the Berlin wall coming down, the dissolution of the USSR, the life-saving powers of the new AIDS drugs, and hope. Why, goddamn, the audacity of hope.

The thing is, I saw the the play almost a decade ago. I saw the play when Clinton was still in office, I was just beginning my life out on my own, and I was out and proud in a liberal college town. I remember getting goosebumps at the end, I remember feeling a sense of liberation, optimism, invincibility…

Well, in the sevearal years that passed, I naturally forgot some of the details of the story.  Goldie was the one who pulled it out at the video store and got me to watch it again.  This time watching it, I was mesmerized by the characters who are walking between the lines of reality; not sure if they are having delusions or if the angels and ghosts visiting them are actually real.  On the political side of things, I half-heartedly joked with Goldie: “Thank god we weren’t alive in the 80’s, things could be worse.”  Well, irony came to bite me in the ass when I saw the ending again:

“This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all. And the dead will be commemorated, and we’ll struggle on with the living and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward, we will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now, you are fabulous each and every one and I bless you. More life, the great work begins.”

It’s been nearly 10 years since I first saw it, getting close to 20 years since the play came out and  “the time” hasn’t come yet.  The spoiler is that I’ve left the country, am now struggling to make my own life, and biting my tongue in a town where no one dares rock the boat.  We, as in the fabulous gays and lesbians of the U.S., are not citizens.  We’re refugees and political pawns in the illegitimate Bush-era where the world is scared shitless of global warming and war is growing to epidemic proportions.

*deep breath*

(Aye… I promised myself I would try to avoid ending this on a note of utter despair.)

I’ll just share the bit of comfort I found at the end: there is certainly no chance for hope if we don’t hold on, even in the darkest hour just before dawn.

Donald Tsang is a liar

In my last post, I painted a very rosy picture of Hong Kong as an environmental friendly city due to its ultra-high density. Although the U.S. could learn some very valuable lessons from Hong Kong regarding urban design and public transportation, I cannot leave my readers with the impression that Hong Kong does not have some very, very serious environmental problems. In fact, if you have read any world news lately you have surely heard about Hong Kong’s scary air pollution problem. Mind you, it’s not just an election issue. It’s killing the elderly, it’s killing joggers, it’s even starting to kill the children too.

So what does Donald Tsang, the current Chief Executive of Hong Kong, have to say about the air pollution problem? In a recent interview with Anjali Rao on Talk Asia, this is what Tsang said (emphasis mine):

RAO: You vowed that if you are re-elected you will improve the territory’s air and water quality, if you know how to do that then why haven’t you already, the skies here are filthy so many days of the year?

TSANG: No, let’s be very careful in doing this before you use adjectives like that. The sky here now is a lot brighter than it was in 1997. Now, that’s a fact. The air now in terms of quality is much better than it was in 1997. It is not perfect.

Much better? Really? In the last year, we have seen several reports talking about expats leaving Hong Kong due to air pollution, the $21+ billion HKD ($2.7+ billion USD) cost of air pollution to Hong Kong’s economy, the 1,600 deaths that could be prevented with better air quality, and more. Is it really true that the air quality in Hong Kong is getting better, much better? According to some reports, there has been a slight improvement since regulation of high sulphur fuels in 1990 began. But Tsang specifically said that air has improved since 1997. I have been in and out of Hong Kong since 2000 and I can’t say that I have noticed any improvement in the air. In fact, for the last year and half I have been living here it’s seemed almost worse. But intuitive feelings are not enough for me. I want to see the hard numbers. Luckily, the government has a public record of the air pollution measurements back to 1990. So, I have taken the liberty of fact-checking Donald Tsang. And the results are not good…

By the way, I deliberately chose to graph the data from the Central/Western station because it’s where Tsang supposedly works, so he ought to know whether the air is getting better or not. I also need to mention that this station is not a roadside station. Roadside stations are probably more reflective of the pollution that a typical Hong Konger gets exposed to when going outside and doing the daily commute. Of course, roadside stations have dramatically more pollution. But I want to make a point that even a supposedly “good” station is still really, really bad.

So, the above graph is a annual running mean of the major pollutants Hong Kong uses in its air pollution index. The data came straight from the government’s Environmental Protection Department. And I used the free stat program R to make the pretty graph. Anyways, suffice to say the lines don’t seem to indicate that the air quality is “much better.” In fact, ozone is clearly on the rise. The other pollutants have either increased or remained about the same since 1997. In the last 15 years, there is not a bit of evidence that there has been any significant reduction in any one of the major pollutants. Now if anyone has any doubts about my graph, they can check the government’s own most recent report on air pollution trends. The graphs in that report are consistent with this graph.

Now for the really scary part. What do these numbers mean? Are we steadily in a pollution emergency or within safe levels? The Hong Kong government has put out air quality objectives for annual mean concentrations and regularly publishes yearly reports showing that we manage to meet the objectives most of the time. I haven’t yet figured out how the Hong Kong government picked these numbers. Is the objective based on what they can feasibly meet or what is actually proven to be a safe level? I don’t believe it is the latter. Why? Because WHO has also come up with their own guidelines based on thresholds where people’s health begins to be compromised and the numbers don’t match up (note there are objectives for only some of the pollutants):

Pollutant	HK Objectives	WHO Objectives	HK Actual
NO2 (μg/m3)	80	40	41.4-60.2
RSPs (μg/m3)	55	20	40.5 – 61.5
SO2 (μg/m3)	80	20 (daily mean)	0 – 142.2 (daily means) 14.1 – 25.4 (annual means)

The actual mean concentrations of Hong Kong are missing the WHO targets by a long shot (but yet managing to squeak by for most of their own objectives). What does this mean? Simply put, Hong Kong air pollution is significantly over the threshold of levels that are considered safe. Not a big surprise given the news reports I cited earlier about people getting sick and even dying from the pollution here.

So what is the government doing to address the problem? Well, here’s the current policy regarding air pollution that most likely inspired Tsang to claim that air quality is getting better:

“To improve regional air quality, the Hong Kong SAR Government reached a consensus with the Guangdong Provincial Government in April 2002 to reduce, on a best endeavours basis, the emission of four major air pollutants, namely sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), respirable suspended particulates (RSP) and volatile organic compounds (VOC) by 40%, 20%, 55% and 55% respectively in the region by 2010, using 1997 as the base year. ” Progress Report, January 2006

But even though there is a policy in place, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s working. According to the above progress report (which quotes 2004 statistics, strange enough), Hong Kong did reduce nitrogen oxides, respirable suspended particulates, and volatile organic compounds emissions by 16%, 28%, and 23% respectively. However, sulphur dioxide went up by 47%. But while some emissions went down, the air quality is not getting better as we already saw in the above graph. The chart below just reiterates the point. The annual mean concentration of sulphur dioxide has gone up just as emissions went up. And the decreases in other emissions has either had little positive effect (nitrogen oxides) or even a little bit of a negative effect (RSPs) on the annual mean concentrations in the air.

Pollutant	1997 (μg/m3)	2005 (μg/m3)	Change	Target Emissions Change
SO2	17.7	21.6	+21.8	-40%
NOx	99.7	95.2	-4.5%	-20%
RSPs	51.2	54.0	+5.3%	-55%

So in conclusion, no matter how you slice it: Hong Kong air quality is not getting better. If anything, it’s getting worse. That means, Donald, you lied.

The next step is to discuss how in the world could Hong Kong could fix this awful mess. Why is air quality still bad even if Hong Kong is managing to lower some emissions? Perhaps, because Guangdong isn’t holding up their side of the bargain. Moreover, Hong Kong needs to do more in meeting the emissions targets in the first place.

But, of course, to get to those next steps, one first has to admit there is a problem.

Maybe we’re not dense enough to fix the global warming problem…

I have been shifting gears lately from bemoaning my own personal state of affairs to contemplating the state of the world. Global warming is the hot topic of the day, and I having been trying to think of a way to bring fresh air to the discussion. Well, so here’s a question…what if the U.S. lived like Hong Kong? Why make comparisons to Hong Kong? Besides the obvious reasons (i.e. it’s my current home), it is one of the world’s most densely populated cities. And there are a lot of interesting ramifications that come from just this simple difference of density.

First, let’s look at some basic stats:

	U.S.	Hong Kong
Total Density (ppl/sq. km)	31	6,407
Total Area (sq. km)	9,629,091	1,099

This chart shows that Hong Kong is more than 200 times more dense than the U.S. But these numbers are a little skewed because the great size difference between the two places. Plus, a lot of space in Hong Kong is green. It might sound like a contradiction, but Hong Kong is actually made up of mostly green spaces (almost 80%) and very little urban space. Click on the map below if you don’t believe me or visit Google Maps…

So let’s redo the numbers by built up land area instead.

	U.S.	Hong Kong
Built-up Density (ppl/sq. km)	754	30613
Built-up Area (sq. km)	395377	230

That’s more like it, Hong Kong’s density has jumped up nearly five fold.  At an average of 30,000 people per square kilometer, you can imagine that we have no place but to go up in Hong Kong.  The U.S.’s density also increased by these calculations, but Hong Kong is still 40 times denser than the U.S.  So what does all this difference in density mean?

First of all, there are dramatically less cars per person in Hong Kong. In fact, the overwhelming majority of people do not own car. They take the public transport instead. And despite the fact that there are more cars per kilometer of road in Hong Kong, we have far less fatal or injurious accidents. I would speculate that has to do with the fact that we are traveling at slower speeds and the comparative safety of public tranport (e.g professional drivers, bigger vehicles, etc).

	U.S.	Hong Kong
Number of motor vehicles (per 1000 ppl)	806	77
Automobile fatalities (per 1000 ppl)	0.15	0.03
Automobile injuries (per 1000 ppl)	11.56	3.01

Speaking of public transport, Hong Kong has it all: ferries, buses, rapid transit (MTR or KCR), minibuses, tram, taxis, cable cars, and maybe some other things I am forgetting. Most of the transportation charges according to the distance traveled. And nearly all (except taxis) accept the Octopus card: a stored value card. And contrary to the supposed “universal facts” of public transportation believed in the U.S.: Hong Kong public transport turns a profit, it’s fast, it’s safe, and it’s clean. How can it turn a profit when the best systems in the U.S. are lucky to get 50% of costs back through fares? Density. A lot of people need to go a little ways. And these profits help build up a system which is a pleasure to ride because of the cushioned seats, head/feet rests, and plasma TVs. It also leads to more routes and big investments in extending the rapid transit system. And the transportation feeds into other parts of the economy: people pay top dollar for real estate on top of transport stations.

Ah, yes, real estate. Of course, if Hong Kong is so dense, there must be some real sacrifices in personal space. Without a doubt, the notion of a “yard” or “single family house” is completely foreign here. We live in flats, usually in high rise residential buildings. The most extreme is estates like Whampoa Garden which has 88 virtually identical high-rise residential buildings. It is a world unto itself, as Goldie said when we stepped foot in the Whampoa once, “It’s like going to a foreign country.” So what about the flat sizes? Well, unfortunately, I can’t find overall averages for Hong Kong. But Whampoa well-illustrates the usual range of flat sizes throughout the territory: 350 sq. ft. to 1,110 sq. ft. That covers classes A-C of the Hong Kong real estate divisions. The highest class is E which is for flats 1720 sq. ft. and above. Those are otherwise known as luxury flats. In the public housing sector, which comprises 50% of Hong Kong housing there is an average of 130 sq. ft. per person. Compare these numbers to the U.S. where a new single family house is on average 2,349 sq. ft. and luxury houses can soar to 10,000 sq. ft. and above.

So what am I getting at with all this talk of automobiles and houses? Well, the two biggest sources of greenhouse gases are automobiles and power plants. For the average citizen of the U.S. this translates to their car and their house. In Hong Kong, it’s our flat and the collective public transport. But although both regions are considered part of the industrialized world and full of rabid consumers, the average person in Hong Kong spews only 25% of CO2 of the average person in the U.S. This is despite the fact that Hong Kong people generally lack the environmental consciousness that the U.S. has built up in the last few decades. The government is just beginning programs to educate people about the importance of energy conservation. Now you could say that the sub-tropical climate of Hong Kong helps lower heating/cooling costs. That does help, although you can also point out the majority of Americans live in the warm southern locales of California and Texas. Plus, up until last year most Hong Kong people were convinced that we need to set our air-conditioners to 16C all year long.

So imagine, if the U.S. was living like Hong Kong:

• the entire population would fit on less than 10,000 sq km. of land which would mean that 99.9% of the U.S. would be green space
• 90% of the cars would be off the road
• every urban center would have a fast, efficient public transportation system and it would be turning a profit
• the carbon emissions of the U.S. would be 6% of the world’s total instead of 24%

So, maybe, what the world needs is a little more density…

Links

• Consultancy Study to Analyse Broad Land Use Pattern of Hong Kong
• Measuring constraints on land suppy: the case of Hong Kong
• Hong Kong transport statistics at a glance
• Hong Kong Housing Authority statistics
• Behind the ever-expanding American dream house
• Wikipedia: List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions per captia
• Major uses of the land in the United States