preview

The Great Smog Of 1952

Good Essays

In the last century, the Great Smog of 1952 in London killed over 12,000 people in total in that year (Tracton, 2012, para.2). The high-speed development of economy caused the air pollution in someway. The same thing is happening in China now. Some people may say that China is on the same old road that the Great Britain was on. Hu, Zhang & Lin (2014), professors at universities in China, claim that while China’s economy has been developing at a high speed since the Reform and Opening in 1978, China is also facing the dilemma, which is the increasing conflict between economic development, energy and environment (p.38). The results of their investigation show that China’s rapid economic growth has facilitated enormous expansion in energy …show more content…

Indeed, the fast-speed growth in development may be one of the reasons that caused air pollution. The Great Britain and the United States all had serious air pollution after the industrial revolution in the last few centuries, and they used sixty to seventy years to solve this serious problem. As for China, it spent thirty years since the policy of reform and openness in 1979 developing the economy that other countries had spent 100 years. During these 30 years, the gross domestic product (GDP) has developed at a very high speed (Morrison, 2014, p.3). Omoju (2014, para.2), a writer for the website Breaking Energy, states that every developing countries has to make a choice between the economic growth and environmental pollution because keeping the cost low is necessary for high-speed development in economy. Hence, some environmental advocates may argue that the government should sacrifice the speed of the economic development to ensure good environment. However, if the pace of the economic growth slow down, the citizens would not live the life with the good quality as today’s. Actually, there are many other things beside to sacrificing the economic growth, which both the government and the citizens can do to protect the environment together. The combustion of fossil fuels is one of the main reasons that cause the

Get Access