Made in China: Our Toxic, Imported Air Pollution

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Mercury, sulfates, ozone, black carbon, flu-laced desert dust. Even as America 
tightens emission standards, the 
fast-growing economies of Asia 
are filling the air with hazardous components that 
circumnavigate the globe. 


by David Kirby

"There is no place called away." It is a statement worthy of 
Gertrude Stein, but University of Washington atmospheric chemist 
Dan Jaffe says it with conviction: None of the contamination we pump into the air just disappears. It might get diluted, blended, or chemically transformed, but it has to go somewhere. And when it comes to pollutants produced by the booming economies of East Asia, that somewhere often means right here, the mainland of the United States.

Jaffe and a new breed of global air detectives are delivering a sobering message to policy makers everywhere: Carbon dioxide, the predominant driver of global warming, is not the only industrial by-product whose effects can be felt around the world. Prevailing winds across the Pacific are pushing thousands of tons of other contaminants—including mercury, sulfates, ozone, black carbon, and desert dust—over the ocean each year. Some of this atmospheric junk settles into the cold waters of the North Pacific, but much of it eventually merges 
with the global air pollution pool that circumnavigates the planet.

These contaminants are implicated in a long list of health problems, including neurodegenerative disease, cancer, emphysema, and perhaps even pandemics like avian flu. And when wind and weather conditions are right, they reach North America within days. Dust, ozone, and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins, and mercury can be pulled to earth through atmospheric sinks that deposit it across large swaths of land.

Pollution and production have gone hand in hand at least since the Industrial Revolution, and it is not unusual for a developing nation to value economic growth over environmental regulation. "Pollute first, clean up later" can be the general attitude, says Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The intensity of the current change is truly new, however.

China in particular stands out because of its sudden role as the world's factory, its enormous population, and the mass migration of that population to urban centers; 350 million people, equivalent to the entire U.S. population, will be moving to its cities over the next 10 years. China now emits more mercury than the United States, India, and Europe combined. "What's different about China is the scale and speed of pollution and environmental degradation," Turner says. "It's like nothing the world has ever seen."

Development there is racing far ahead of environmental regulation. "Standards in the United States have gotten tighter because we've learned that ever-lower levels of air pollution affect health, especially in babies and the elderly," Jaffe says. As pollutants coming from Asia increase, though, it becomes harder to meet the stricter standards that our new laws impose.

The incoming pollution has sparked a fractious international debate. Officials in the United States and Europe have embraced the warnings of the soft-spoken Jaffe, who, with flecks of red and gray in his trim beard, looks every bit the part of a sober environmental watchdog. In China, where economic expansion has run at 8 to 14 percent a year since 2001, the same facts are seen through a different lens.

China's smog-filled cities are ringed with heavy industry, metal smelters, and coal-fired power plants, all crucial to that fast-growing economy even as they spew tons of carbon, metals, gases, and soot into the air. China's highways are crawling with the newly acquired cars of a burgeoning middle class. Still, "it's unfair to put all the blame on China or Asia," says Xinbin Feng of the Institute of Geochemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government-associated research facility. All regions of the world contribute pollutants, he notes. And much of the emissions are generated from making products consumed by the West.

Our economic link with China makes all the headlines, but Jaffe's work shows that we are environmentally bound to the world's fastest-rising nation as well.

Dan Jaffe has been worrying about air pollution since childhood. Growing up near Boston, he liked to fish in local wetlands, where he first learned about acid rain. "I had a great science teacher, and we did a project in the Blue Hills area. We found that the acidity of the lake was rising," he recalls. The fledgling environmental investigator began chatting with fishermen around New England. "All these old-timers kept telling me the lakes had been full of fish that were now gone. That mobilized me to think about when we burn fossil fuels or dump garbage, there is no way it just goes somewhere else."

By 1997 Jaffe was living in Seattle, and his interest had taken a slant: Could pollution reaching his city be blowing in from somewhere else? "We had a hunch that pollutants could be carried across the ocean, and we had satellite imagery to show that," Jaffe says. "And we noticed our upstream neighbors in Asia were developing very rapidly. I asked the question: Could we see those pollutants coming over to the United States?"

Jaffe's colleagues considered it improbable that a concentration of pollutants high enough to significantly impact American air quality could travel thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean; they expected he would find just insignificant traces. Despite their skepticism, Jaffe set out to find the proof. First he gathered the necessary equipment. Devices to measure carbon monoxide, aerosols, sulfur dioxide, and hydrocarbons could all be bought off the shelf. He loaded the equipment into some university trucks and set out for the school's weather observatory at Cheeka Peak. The little mountain was an arduous five-hour drive northwest of Seattle, but it was also known for the cleanest air in the Northern Hemisphere. He reckoned that if he tested this reputedly pristine air when a westerly wind was blowing in from the Pacific, the Asian pollutants might show up.

more...

http://discovermagaz...d-air-pollution

Edited March 30, 2011 by 8TBVBN

[Ban Hammer 13,352]

yet, we're gonna kill our economy with crippling carbon taxes.

[mawilson 2,133]

Polluted air sucks. Can't buy clean air even if you're rich.

[JohnSmith2007 353]

This is why regulating carbon will never work. We can cut our output to zero and the third world would just take up where we left off. The end result would be our economy getting hammered because of higher energy costs while the other countries will move ahead because of cheap energy. If your goal is to kill our economy and allow the third world to catch up at our expense then that is how it is done. The goal of stopping the mythical MMGW will still not be reached though. The very same amount of CO2 will still be emitted, just by someone else. It isn't like we can put a dome over the US and only keep our air in.

[Zero Sum 305]

Just read the entire first post. Well constructed logic that argues far beyond isolationism.

Ignorant isolationism, to add.