The Greatest Environmental Disaster

The news stories from China are horrific. The best estimate is that on average, 4,400 people die every day from air pollution in that country. That’s 1.6 million per year. Every time I hear of some tragedy that makes headlines, such as a landslide in Shenzhen that killed 200 people, I think to myself, “Yes—and today 4,400 people died of air pollution and it didn’t make the news.”

This is not the old eye-burning, throat-irritating air pollution of yesterday. Today’s pollutant is known as PM2.5—particulate matter 2.5 microns and smaller. It is produced by automobiles, by construction, by farm work, but the greatest contributor by far is coal, burned by industry and for electric-power production. PM2.5 wasn’t even listed as a major pollutant by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency until 1997. It was present but just not fully proved to be as deadly as it is.

We now know that on a bad day in Beijing, such pollution hurts people as much as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Bad air triggers strokes, heart attacks, asthma, and lung cancer. Look at the causes of death in China and you’ll see a remarkable excess of such deaths, despite the fact that obesity is uncommon compared with that in the U.S.

We know about the health effects from some remarkable studies. In the U.S., we saw decreases in health problems when factories and coal plants were temporarily shut down (the 1993 “Six Cities Study”). In China, we have the Huai River Study, in which the Chinese policy of giving free coal to households north of the Huai River, but none to the south, resulted in a reduced average lifetime in the north of 5.5 years.

Also remarkable is China’s openness with their air-pollution data. Every hour, they post online more than 1,500 measurements of PM2.5 (as well PM10, SO₂, NO₂, and ozone) all across their country. China may be a closed society in many ways, but they seem to be crying out for help. At Berkeley Earth, we have been downloading all these numbers for the past year and a half, and the patterns of severe pollution are now clear. It is not confined to cities or basins but widespread and virtually inescapable. Ninety-seven percent of China’s population breathes what the EPA deems as “unhealthy air” on average. In contrast, the democracy of India reports few PM2.5 measurements. I suspect they have them but are simply not making them public. They do publish results for Delhi, and virtually every time I look, the pollution there is worse than it is in Beijing.

People suggest a switch from coal to solar, but this is too expensive for China to afford. In 2015, solar power contributed less than 0.2 percent to their energy use, and solar plants are going bankrupt as Chinese subsidies are withdrawn. Wind power is expanding, but wind’s intermittency is a big problem, and the use of energy storage drives up cost. Hydro is hardly an environmental choice; the Three Gorges Dam displaced 1.2 million people (voluntarily, the Chinese tell us) and destroyed 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,350 villages. Their new Mekong River dam is expected to wreak havoc throughout Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The best hopes consist of natural gas, which China has in abundance, and nuclear power, which is under rapid development. PM2.5 from natural gas is reduced by 1/400 compared with coal—and it reduces greenhouse emissions by a factor of 2 to 3. China is desperately attempting to extract its shale gas but is doing miserably; the only true master of that technology is the U.S., where it has triggered an enormous and unexpected drop in the price of both natural gas and oil. Nuclear power, once despised by environmentalists, is gaining traction in the U.S., with many past opponents recognizing that it offers a way to reduce carbon emissions significantly. China is surging ahead in nuclear, with thirty-two new plants planned. Although such plants are reported to be expensive, the Chinese know that the high cost is only in the capital cost—that amortized over twenty-five years, nuclear is as cheap as coal, and much cheaper when you add in the environmental costs.

Air pollution will be a growing story. China also has plans, on paper, to double its coal use in the next fifteen years. They will cancel those if they can, but they also worry that slower economic growth could threaten their form of government. As bad as the pollution has been so far, I worry that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The United States is sharing its nuclear technology, and I expect that in two decades China will be the principal manufacturer of nuclear power plants around the world. But we need to set a better example; we need to show the world that we consider nuclear to be safe. And we need to share our shale-gas technology far more extensively. Too often we read the pollution headlines, shake our heads, perhaps feel a little schadenfreude toward our greatest economic adversary, and then we forget about it.

Someday global warming may become the primary threat. But it is air pollution that is killing people now. Air pollution is the greatest environmental disaster in the world today.