China's Pollution Crisis

Guest: Jane Hall, PhD, Professor of Economics at the University of California Fullerton  China’s infamously polluted air poses a challenge to the nation’s leaders, who’ve established aggressive growth plans for the country. Every time a big international event comes to Beijing – the 2008 Summer Olympics, for instance or a summit of world leaders – officials order up blue skies by temporarily shutting down steel mills and coal plants in the area. Profits and output fall temporarily, too. So imagine the costs a longer-term solution might bring – permanent factory closures, limits on automobile traffic and the transition to cleaner, but more expensive fuels.