The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global

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That became clear in April 2001, when a satellite photograph showed a vast, perfectly coiled cyclonic spiral of white clouds intertwined with brown dust plumes centered over Inner Mongolia. Joseph Prospero, a leading atmospheric researcher at the University of Miami, called it "the most remarkable dust-storm image that I have ever seen." Visibility soon dropped close to zero in Beijing and driving was nearly impossible. Satellites tracked the dust as it moved across eastern China, the Yellow Sea, Korea, the Russian coast from Vladivostok to the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Sea of Japan, and Japan itself. In less than a week, it crossed the Pacific Ocean, and produced thick haze as far east as Denver. High concentrations of dust were found as far away as Maine and Georgia and eventually in the Canary Islands off northwest Africa. Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington-Bothell, calculated that only a 20th of the storm's dust reached the United States, but that amount, 50,000 metric tons, was two and a half times as much as all U.S. sources typically produce in a day.

For all that, dust storms are merely the most dramatic example of an array of pollutants that Asian winds deliver to other countries. In 2003, Siberian forest fires covered 73,000 square miles, an area larger than North Dakota, and sent up a smoke plume that drove ozone levels above epa limits in Seattle, 5,000 miles away. The fires are assumed to be the work of arsonists intent on supplying Chinese sawmills with logs. A year later, clouds from Asia carried enough industrial pollutants across the Pacific to produce a sudden spike in measurements of mercury, ozone, and carbon monoxide at a monitoring station at Mt. Bachelor, Oregon. Analysis of the pollutants revealed a chemical signature with what Jaffe calls "a very robust China fingerprint."

Not all Chinese pollution that crosses the Pacific is borne in huge storms. Using high-elevation monitors set up at three California sites, Steven Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California-Davis, has detected what he calls a "persistent Asian plume"—pollutant-laden air that crosses the Pacific on a nearly continuous basis. To be sure, it's a fraction of what is emitted within California's borders, and most of it continues wafting across North America, falling to earth bit by bit. Nevertheless, at Cliff's mountain sites, particulate matter from Asia accounts for 4 to 6 micrograms per cubic meter of air—already approaching half of California's annual average pollution limit of 12 micrograms. "The problem is going to be that the ability to emit any sort of pollution from any industry here in California will be reduced because of federal regulations," Cliff said. "There could be a day when essentially the entire regulatory limit is met" by Asian pollution.

The largest source of that pollution is the billion tons of coal China burns per year, more than virtually all the world's developed nations combined. The International Energy Agency reported in November 2006 that global coal consumption had increased as much in the previous 3 years as in the 23 before that, and that China was responsible for 90 percent of the increase. It operates more than 2,000 coal-fired power plants and puts a new one into operation every four to seven days. Few possess scrubbers that could limit emissions, and those that do tend not to use them, since scrubbers drive up the plants' energy and maintenance costs. China's central government has issued some fairly strict regulations to limit plant emissions, but they are rarely enforced because of corruption and the reluctance of local officials to confront job-generating power companies. Those companies called upon to meet the regulations usually opt for paying an annual $500,000 fee instead. The plants provide 80 percent of China's energy, at the price of emissions devastating to both China and the rest of the world.

Start with sulfur dioxide, "China's number one pollution problem," according to Barbara Finamore, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's China program. Sulfur dioxide causes respiratory illness, aggravates asthma and heart disease, and turns soil, lakes, streams, and oceans acidic. It is the key ingredient in the premature deaths of more than 400,000 Chinese each year from air pollution and has led to the outbreak among Chinese in their 30s of chronic lung diseases usually associated with old people. By 2005, China's sulfur-dioxide emissions were nearly double those of the United States—and they are estimated to have grown by 14 percent since. As a result, acid rain now plagues a third of China, much of Japan and Korea, and even the Pacific Ocean.

Coal has also made China the world's leading producer of human-caused mercury emissions, accounting for 30 percent of the global total and rising. A 2004 peer-reviewed study found that up to 36 percent of man-made mercury emissions settling on America originated in Asia. Mercury impairs neurological development in fetuses, infants, and children, and is highly toxic.

Another coal-derived pollutant, nitrogen oxide, combines with sunlight to produce ozone, whose inhalation induces coughing, wheezing, chest pain, and airway inflammation. Thanks to coal and cars, China's nitrogen-oxide emissions have climbed 48 percent in five years. Add the nitrogen oxide from the Siberian arson fires, and the result is a toxic brew powerful enough to raise ozone levels along the U.S. West Coast more or less continuously.

Even so, the most insidious product of China's coal consumption is carbon dioxide, which, along with CO2 generated by the rest of the world, is destroying China's ecosystems: Already-arid northern China is drying out, the wet south is seeing more and more deluges and floods, and the Himalayan glaciers that feed China's major rivers are melting; according to a June 2007 Greenpeace report, 80 percent could disappear by 2035. Such a development would jeopardize hundreds of millions of people who depend on the rivers for subsistence and livelihood.

Nevertheless, China has steadily maintained that the developed countries bear primary responsibility for global warming and must be the first to counter it. The argument has some merit: After all, the United States alone is responsible for a quarter of the man-made greenhouse gases pumped into the earth's atmosphere over time, while China's cumulative contribution is still less than a third as much. And even today, China's per-capita carbon dioxide emissions are less than a fifth of America's. Yet China's refusal to curb emissions could single-handedly wipe out reductions made elsewhere, crippling the international effort.

IN THE HANDS OF THE HEAVENS

as we drove on, the evidence of land mismanagement accumulated. On one side of the road, we spotted an area fenced off to prevent grazing, where grass was making a comeback, while on the other, still-grazed side of the road, all we saw was sand. First we passed wooden fences, then a desiccated meadow filled with stumps—the trees probably had become the fence.

People, yurts, and farmhouses were few, and structures tended to disappear within the folds of Inner Mongolia's rolling landscape. It was jarring to realize just how few people the region's fragile environment could support and a relief to have escaped intensely populated and polluted Beijing. Breathing Inner Mongolia's reassuring fresh air and seeing its emphatically blue sky felt like guilty pleasures.

It was late afternoon by the time we reached our destination—a home on the edge of the Hunshandake strip, a recently formed, 8,000-square-mile ribbon of sand. Across the two-lane road in front of the house, a wide swath of fenced land was green, reserved for bovine occupation in the coming winter, while the land behind the house, where the owner's cattle grazed, consisted of sand: sand punctured by the cattle's hooves, sand rising into dunes at least 60 feet high—a Sahara in the back yard. Next spring, Mr. Li said, after the cows finish with it, the land across the way will look just as bereft. I clambered up the dune for a view and saw vast fields of sand. "This is not the worst," Mr. Li said. "The worst is inaccessible."

The house looked sturdy, even if its thick clay walls were not exactly perpendicular to the floor, and its ceiling was neatly plastered with pages from a magazine. Inside the main room, the prematurely aged, bloodshot-eyed, slightly dazed owner sat in a chair, while his 21-year-old, ruddy-faced daughter leaned insouciantly on his shoulder. Behind them, the pocked white wall displayed a single picture—of Genghis Khan, the 13th-century founder of Mongolia.

I asked how the family was faring in the face of desertification, and the young woman said the situation was getting worse and worse. What grass their cattle ate was covered with sand, which made the cows constipated. "Our livelihood is totally in the hands of the heavens," she said. "Hopefully, there will be no more wind and much rainfall."

Now confidently sprawled on a thick pillow, Mr. Li said he was sure things would get better, and lit a cigarette.

After saying goodbye, the four of us drove another three hours to the 800-year-old city of Shangdu, population 20,000, where Mr. Li directed us to a clean hotel. For dinner, we had two kinds of mutton and two kinds of beef. I thanked Mr. Li for accompanying us, and asked him what he would have done that day if we hadn't come along. He answered that he would have worked in his office.

"On a Saturday?" I asked.

He looked startled. "Today is Saturday?" Assured that it was, he thought for a moment. "Well, it's a good thing," he told me, "because if it had been another day, my boss would have been mad at me for missing work."

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

nothing mentioned so far—not even China's supplanting the United States as the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter—should make Americans feel smug, for what the Chinese are chiefly guilty of is emulating the American economic model. From the 1980s on, Chinese policymakers went on foreign-study missions to figure out how developed countries fostered economic growth. As Doug Ogden, former director of the Energy Foundation's China Sustainable Energy Program, puts it, "It's not surprising that the lessons the Chinese drew from their international experiences are often based on sprawl development and private automobile ownership and highly energy-consumptive practices," since the economies they studied all possess those features.

One of the Chinese officials' most fateful choices was to promote the automobile industry as a pillar of China's economy. The decision must have seemed obvious. After all, cars are the foundations of the American, Japanese, and South Korean economies, generating jobs and economic activity. To bolster a domestic industry, Chinese officials imposed quotas and high tariffs on imported vehicles and encouraged consumers to buy cars. The quotas succeeded all too well. China's car industry is already the world's third largest, but many of its cities are paralyzed by traffic, the inhabitants are choking on the fumes, and China's foreign policy increasingly revolves around courting outcast nations such as Sudan to obtain oil at premium prices. From an international perspective, the potential impact on climate change is worst of all. Motor vehicles now account for no more than 3 or 4 percent of China's greenhouse gas emissions, but the industry is still nascent. According to one projection, the number of cars on Chinese roads will grow from 33 million to 130 million over the next 12 years.

The only thing likely to slow this explosive growth is the increasing scarcity of the resources needed to make and fuel cars. As numerous commentators have pointed out, if China's income per capita, now less than a 10th of the United States', ever reached the American level, several Earths would be required to provide resources. "Through all of our engagement with China, the U.S. government has aggressively promoted China's adoption of an American-style, high-consumption, high-waste economic model," says Jim Harkness, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and former executive director of the World Wildlife Fund in China. "Combine that with the global trading rules [that downplay environmental and labor standards], the tremendous constraints China faces in terms of its need to generate employment, and the fact that they've got all that coal and no oil—and how surprised can we be that we've ended up with an environmental nightmare?"

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Photography: James Whitlow Delano

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