Air problems caused by people breathing city air

Chinese city-people buying their air

The Gauliter of Mai Chang told reporters yesterday that the poor air quality in the Northern capital was the result of too many people breathing the city air. If people can be encouraged to breathe less, or find their own air, the problem can be solved. Deforestation has nothing to do with it, he explained, the idea that trees produce oxygen is pseudo-scientific nonsense put out by the same crackpots that say the polar ice caps are melting and global temperatures are rising. The municipality will continue to chop down road side trees to build bicycle lanes for recreational cyclists, he continued.

At a press conference in city hall it was announced that Mai Chang will adopt a Chinese style solution to the air quality problem. In China, at weekends, city dwellers go up into the mountains to breathe and buy bags of air to take home. Mai Cheng will do better, and soon, citizens will not need to travel up the mountains for a lungful of air. Under a new scheme, there will be con-men dressed in hill-tribe clothes selling plastic bags of air at the roadside. The air can be collected by Shans when they are doing the annual burn (editors note: the Shans from Burma do all the agricultural work in the mountains, they cut down trees and plant corn for absentee Lanna landlords, who do not actually own the land because with a slope of more than 30 degrees land can not be privately owned)

The new air vendors will be able to set up their stalls in bicycle lanes, which can be found throughout the city and which nobody uses because, with the shade trees cut down, it is too hot. The new business will, however, be closely regulated and every vendor have to pay a license fee to the Mai Chang Clean Air (Cayman Islands) Foundation.

The press conference was brought to an abrupt end when the Gauliter fainted from heat stroke. The air-conditioning in City Hall broke had broken down due to an outside temperature that exceeded anything on record.