Your recent coverage of environmental issues clearly indicates that the majority speaks with one voice on the need for urgent and radical action to reduce air pollution. The only meaningful measure of the success of any interventions will be a marked and sustained decline in pollutant concentrations. But there isn't any evidence that the government's current or planned strategies can achieve truly safer air quality within a reasonable period.
We have had some (if not high) hopes that the involvement of the business sector and chambers of commerce might make a difference to political will and the government's attitude on the environment. But last week this involvement included:
A claim in the Financial Times by InvestHK director-general Mike Rowse that pollution was not harming Hong Kong;
A no-show by the American Chamber of Commerce at a consultation meeting with the chief executive, although it seems no one agrees exactly how this came about ('We were left out of chat, chambers say', September 3; and 'Business sector's views valued' and 'AmCham was invited', September 5); and
A serious understatement of the health threat from the chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce, Christopher Page, in an interview on RTHK. Mr Page told RTHK that there might be some people who were asthmatic who were concerned because 'we have pollution from time to time', and that the chief executive had 'quite reasonably pointed out' at his meeting with the international business community that many mainland cities were also polluted.
Continuing denials and misleading rationalisations of the serious and worsening threat to our health are not the way forward. The underpinning of confidence - both locally and overseas - that this environmental mess will be addressed competently, and in a timely fashion, will only come from frankness and intellectual honesty. Hong Kong is not best served by continuing denials of the inconvenient truth that air pollution both impairs our quality of life and causes major economic losses.
ANTHONY J. HEDLEY, department of community medicine, University of Hong Kong
