China’s Toxic Dust Clouds Drift Across Pacific and Reach U.S.
China’s black gold rush:
[T]he Chinese plan to build no fewer than 500 new coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2,000, most of them unmodernised, that spew smoke, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere …
And its effects on China:
… It is often darkness at noon in Datong, just 160 miles west of Beijing, where vehicles drive in daytime with their headlights on to grope through the miasma.
One of the four filthiest towns in China, it stands at the heart of the nation’s coal belt in Shanxi province, a region that mines more coal every year than Britain, Russia and Germany combined.
Cancer rates are soaring, child health is a time bomb and the population, many of whom are heavy cigarette smokers, are paying the price for China’s breakneck rush to riches and industrialisation — an estimated 400,000 premature deaths nationwide because of pollution every year …
Some Chinese officials acknowledge the problems:
Pan Yue, the outspoken head of the government’s state environmental protection bureau.
“Acid rain falls on one third of China’s land, most of our biggest seven rivers are poisoned, a quarter of our people have no clean drinking water and a third of them breathe polluted air”
In short, it’s a big environmental mess for China.
However, as noted in this Discover Magazine article (Blown Away), it’s also a significant problem for other countries, such as Japan and the United States. Dust clouds created by storms in arid regions of Asia carry the particulates, bacteria, viruses, soot, acids, radioactive isotopes, and pesticides in the air over China across the sea. The contents of the dust clouds then settle on the land of other countries. For example, it’s estimated that:
Roughly half the mercury contamination in the United States comes from Asia; much of it may arrive aboard particles in atmospheric dust clouds.
Here’s a satellite photo of an April 2002 dust cloud extending over Japan:
Thus far, China officials have been unable to slow the growth in pollution:
Beijing has proved unable to compel local leaders to spend money on filters that could cut sulphur emissions from smoke stacks by 95%. Nor will they buy new western technology for power stations, which could operate more cleanly and efficiently.
And, like the U.S., China has not signed the Kyoto Treaty that would limit emissions of climate-changing gases.
Steps will clearly need to be taken to curb the pollution. Otherwise, other countries will experience the negative health effects observed in China — if they haven’t already.
