G20 Blue – Letter from the Future [electronic resource].

Fall Semester 2016

Open access content

I have a seventeen-month-old son. Since becoming a mother, my day in Shanghai, where we are based, will start with turning on a computer, checking Shanghai’s air quality index and then decide how to continue a day with my kid. On a regular day, the air quality pollution index in Shanghai is usually around 150 PM 2.5 which is not recommended for taking such a small kid outdoors. Since the end of July this year air quality has been noticeably better so that we can actually see the clouds in the sky when we look out of a window. Maybe this sounds bizarre, but clouds are rarely seen in Shanghai. The reason for this is the G20 meeting that was held in Hangzhou in early September, a city that is a one-hour train ride from Shanghai. Hangzhou hosted this meeting of world leaders and due to their arrival over two hundred heavy industry factories in Shanghai and over one hundred of them in Hangzhou’s surroundings have been closed for over one month to lower the pollution level and they actually succeeded. On the Chinese app Wechat (similar to WhatsApp) Shanghai’s blue sky these days is called G20 Blue, their sense of humor reflecting the reality of our basic existence. Some lives are worth saving and others are obviously too expensive to save, for example the lives of us ordinary men and women. China’s rapid climate change is very noticeable and impossible to deny in the last ten years. Heavy summer heats, an air pollution level that during winter time can go as high as 400 on the index chart, more and more people with respiratory problems including kids, to name a few…
https://www.librarystack.org/g20-blue-letter-from-the-future/?ref=unknown

Climatic changes
Economics

Text

Biljana Ciric
Yamilet Ramírez
Andreas Töpfer
Antonia Wright
Marcos Valella
Odalis Valdivieso
Angela Valella
Felice Grodin