A Torrent of Darkness

“The air was so thick that I thought I was choking,” she said. “The pollution was just unbelievable. All the locals wore surgical masks, and so did almost everyone in our group. I would get back to the hotel room and I had black lines of soot all over my face. I would cough up black phlegm all evening. I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 1960s and I never saw anything like it before.” The speaker was a close acquaintance who visited China about two months ago.

Out came the photographs from Shanghai and Beijing. There were the usual scenic shots of boats near the wharves of the Huangpu River and the Bund of Shanghai. There were pictures of the visit to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and, of course, the obligatory trek to the Great Wall. Above everything in the photos, however, was the haze.
China has burned coal since prehistoric times. There are references in ancient Chinese literature to “the rock that burns.” Right now, coal makes up about 65% of China’s primary energy consumption, for both electricity production and as boiler fuel in factories and space heating in housing stock, and China is both the largest consumer and producer of coal in the world. China’s coal consumption in 2003 was more than 1.53 billion short tons, or 28% of the world total. Even this figure may be on the low side, because there is much unlicensed, unregulated coal mining and usage in China that is not reported or reflected in national statistics. Thus, the Chinese government has made continuous upward revisions to its published coal production and consumption figures over the past few years.

According to The New York Times , China today burns more coal than the combined consumption of the United States, the European Union, and Japan. China has increased its coal consumption by about 14% in each of the past two years, and will continue to do so. Every 7-10 days, another coal-fired power plant begins to operate somewhere in China, with generating capacity sufficient to serve all of the households in a city the size of Tampa or Seattle.

At the level of basic production, however, China’s coal mine fatalities exceed 5,000 a year (more than 100 per week, or about 15 fatalities per day), giving that nation the dubious distinction of holding the record as the world’s deadliest coal producer. The national government is attempting to reduce the numbers of mining fatalities by cracking down on small, and often illegal, mines in the country. But it is an unfortunate fact of economic life in that vast nation that local authorities in mining districts often collude with mine operators to cover up unlawful and hazardous operations. Many private and state-owned mines have been documented as flagrantly violating China’s rather lax safety regulations.

If China cannot find a way to clean up its coal plant emissions, to include the tens of thousands of factories and millions of housing units that burn coal, air pollution of every sort will accelerate to the point of causing as yet incalculable damages.

Energy Bulletin