Smog Pollution in Beijing

Smog pollution in Beijing Smog pollution has been around since the start of industrialization, and there are many cities that suffer from its consequences. Among them, Beijing is singled out as the hotspot these days. In the past winter, an unprecedented amount of smog cloaked Beijing, filling the city with noxious air and causing convulsive coughing among the local residents. Not only does smog cause inconvenience in transportation by reducing visibility, but also, according to a study at UC Berkeley, smog has a huge impact on people’s health: “people living in the smoggiest cities were 30 percent more likely to have succumbed to lung diseases such as chronic bronchitis, emphysema and pneumonia.” In his essay, “The Tragedy of The Commons,” Hardin suggests that problems like environmental pollution have no technical solution and that they could be solved effectively through mutual coercion. However, I believe that, besides methods like mutual coercion, technical solutions do exist. In general, technology solves the problems by pushing the limit of the “commons” towards infinity. In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin proposes that the problem of the commons is caused by the conflict between the individual interest of a rational self-interested man and the limit of a commons. His reasoning works in the following way: each individual taking a certain amount of resources from/dumping a certain amount of wastes (let’s call this amount A) into the commons brings an individual gain of G to him or her, and a collective loss of L to the whole commons. If the total population over the commons is P, then his or her individual loss becomes roughly L divided by P, which, in most cases, is smaller than his or her gain, G. Therefore, any rational and self-interested man will keep using resources from/dumping wastes into the commons. However, the total available resources/affordable wastes of a commons are limited and let’s call the limit L. If each person