Under the Tutelage of Lily the First

Promptly at 10:00am our tour guide, Lily, arrived to take Roy, Percy, and I to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall of China. We were lucky, she said, that the air quality that day was so good. China is in the middle of an industrial revolution and with the constant building and demolishing of structures, a heavy reliance on coal, and an explosive increase in car ownership, the air is usually toxic. It has been estimated that more than 400,000 premature deaths in China can be blamed on air pollution each year. The picture below is an image of Eastern China taken from a NASA satellite on June 8, 2006. The clouds are white. The pollution is grey. Makes you want to buy a Prius doesn't it?