Adventures in China

Before going to China, I thought of pollution as an unseen, invisible, lurking danger. I thought it was something to be concerned about, but it is generally hard to see or taste unless you're driving through Gary, Indiana. Unfortunately, China is so polluted that I could always see it and recognize it. The people in China are so used to the pollution, they barely notice it.

My mother told me that some agricultural experts have estimated that China looses 25% of its produce production potential because of air pollution. After being there, I can believe it. There were constant "clouds" and "fog" where I was in China (I was there during a drought and it hardly ever rained, so I kept hoping it was just a bad year). It was just a thick haze that lay over everything. Even at three in the afternoon, when this picture was taken, looked "misty," but it was really low laying pollution.

When I taught my kids "sunny," "cloudy," "rainy," they kept saying it was sunny when I thought it was cloudy. Then I realized that you need to look straight up. If there is a very small patch of blue there, it is a sunny day. All that other grey stuff was just pollution and not related to what kind of day it was.

The pollution comes from a number of sources. The air that comes into China, especially the area I visited, is already laden with pollutants from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Gobi Desert that haven't had time to fall out over a body of water. I was also in China during a drought, so it was very dusty and particulate matter just filled the air. The river in this picture, below, was usually full and flowing, but was almost dry when I visited it.

However, the most important polluter in China was the use of soft coal. You can buy soft coal bricks on the street from vendors with pushcarts. This was the most common fuel used for cooking and heating. The increased used of coal during the winter made the pollution even worse than usual.

Also, many of the power plants in China burn coal, and with so many energy consumers, there are a lot of power plants. I could occasionally see a coal burning power plant from my apartment, if the air was clear enough.

Besides looking bad and making everything dirty (If I wanted a clean apartment, I would have had to dust every day. It also made laundry look dirty as soon as it finished drying on the line), the pollution also made me sick. Starting in November and continuing through April I had a pollution cough where I just coughed up green mucous all the time. I tried antibiotics and I made sure I didn't have TB, but it appears it was just the pollution because it cleared up as soon as I got back to the States.

The Chinese government has slowly realized that pollution is a problem, but the country really doesn't have the financial resources to put scrubbers on all their power plants, get gas or electric stoves and heaters in every house, and reverse the drought problems. The government has planted trees to the west of Beijing to try and block some of the dust, but even in Beijing, some days it is difficult to see buildings 4 blocks away.

And it is pollution, even if your tour guide tells you it's fog.