Shangai Tower Today we’re talking about elevators. This is the Shanghai tower- the second tallest building in the world behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Now, building tall buildings is a bit of a…uhh… rooster measuring contest and nowhere likes flaunting their flightless birds more than China and the UAE. The Shanghai Tower, which cost $2.5 billion to build, stretches to over 2,000 feet or 600 meters and has 127 stories. As a point of comparison, if you put eight 747’s on top of each other, the Shanghai Tower would still be taller mostly because, according to my engineering degree, that’s not a structurally sound building. Also Read: What is the fastest object ever made? Now, part of the difficulty in having buildings this tall is that people, who mostly come from the ground, need to get to the top of the building quickly. If people can’t get to the top of the building easily and quickly, they won’t want to buy property in the building, which I’m told is a pretty imp...
both in population and wealth. Also Read: Space Strike
Now, of course global warming isn’t real and the earth is flat, but in a world where global warming was real and the earth was some other shape, the best thing you could do to combat turning Minneapolis into Miami would be to be poor.
The poorest half of the world’s population only contributes 10% of all carbon emissions. This does make sense as the richest .01% of the world eat their imported truffled wagyu filets on their private jets travelling to Ibiza for the day while the poorest .01% eat their meals by, well, not but the bigger factor is what happens as people get into the upper 10 or 20 or 30% of world wealth.
China, for example, was poor but now it’s somewhat rich which means that its population now eats things like hamburgers which, no joke, are slowly killing the environment as cows fart huge amounts of methane which is a greenhouse gas.
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More importantly, though, more and more people in China own cars. There are now 217 million cars on Chinese roads which, considering there were only 59 million ten years ago, is a lot. That means that in ten years, China has essentially had to triple the capacity of its roads which is basically impossible. Hence, traffic.
Now, National Highway G110 is one of China’s busiest roads. This highway connects inner Mongolia, the part of Mongolia that’s in China, to Beijing, the capital. G110 didn’t, however, used to be so busy.
What happens when your country transforms from being mostly composed of poor rural farmers to relatively rich urban populations is that suddenly you need energy to power everything.
See, here’s a graph that says a thing! China didn’t really go for that hippy wind or solar energy, they went for coal. 70% of their overall energy need is fulfilled by this rock.
Of course this isn’t sustainable for long terms coal isn’t a renewable resource like wind or Batman reboots but for now, it’s a cheap and easy source of energy. That’s helped by the fact that China has about 13% of the world’s coal in its ground while Mongolia, China’s neighbor, has about 10%.
A good amount of China’s coal is in inner Mongolia, the region, and they also import plenty of coal from Mongolia, the country. What China doesn’t have, though, is coal transportation infrastructure… or YouTube, a free press, a market economy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, a freely floated currency, or time zones, but the transportation infrastructure is the important thing it’s missing in this case.
There are, for example, only seven roads that cross the border from Mongolia, the country, to China, the country. What’s worse, there are barely any railways and trains are the primary means of transportation worldwide for coal as it’s really not very dense and trucks can’t carry that much.
This lack of railways means that there are huge amounts of trucks driving from inner Mongolia to Beijing carrying coal each and every day. There are a few routes these trucks can take into Beijing but the most popular one is G110.
That’s because much of the coal coming from inner Mongolia comes from illegal, unlicensed mines and, while the other routes from inner Mongolia have inspection stations to combat illegal mining, G110 does not.
All these factors compounded to create the beginnings of a traffic jam on August 14th, 2010. It was the busy summer season and the highway just couldn’t handle the amount of trucks but the real problem started five days lateras maintenance work began on the highway to fix damage from overuse.
That shut down half the lanes at points and this traffic jam, which had already been going on continuously for five days to a lesser extent, just became a parking lot. At its worst, the congestion lasted for 60 continuous miles and drivers were only able to move as little as 0.6 miles per day.
It took some close to a week to make their way through this stretch of highway—a journey that would normally take an hour. This whole mini-economy sprung up as villagers from near the highway walked or biked up and down selling food and drinks.
Water, which normally sells for 1 yuan, went for 15. Drivers took naps under their trucks, played cards, took walks, there really was no reason to be behind the wheel as nothing was moving. Throughout this all, authorities desperately tried to reduce the traffic by sending trucks on different routes and telling people not to drive.
As the jam entered its second week nothing seemed to be working although, with time, as it gained national and international media attention, people eventually stopped taking the highway and then, finally, after twelve whole days of bumper to bumper traffic, the congestion dissipated and National Highway G110 was back to normal.
China has since built railways, expanded highways,and cracked down on illegal mining which has prevented any more apocalyptic jams but this August 2010 one on G110 is now believed to have been the worst traffic jam in world history.