(NEW YORK) MintPress – “All of Beijing looked like an airport smokers’ lounge,” wrote a New York Times reporter based in the Chinese capital over the weekend.
Indeed, the city’s air pollution began soaring to new records last Thursday, with the level of dangerous PM2.5 particles at one stage hitting a whopping 993 on the Air Quality Index run by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
According to the index, anything above 300 is “Hazardous,” and anything above 500 is “Beyond Index.” The readings were Beyond Index for 16 straight hours.
By Monday, levels had declined to about 350 micrograms, still way above the level of 25 considered safe by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“The worst I have personally seen in Beijing was in the high 400s, and that day I did not understand how life could proceed any further in such circumstances,” wrote the Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows, who spent several years as a China correspondent.
PM2.5 are tiny matters of pollution less than 2.5 micrometers in size, or about 1/30 the average width of a human hair, and measuring them is considered the most accurate reflection of air quality.
“Because these dust particles are relatively fine, they can be directly absorbed by the lung’s tiny air sacs,” explained Dr. Huang Aiben of the Beijing Shijitan Hospital’s respiratory department.
“The airway’s ability to block the fine dust is relatively weak and so bacteria and viruses carried by the dust can directly enter the airway.”
The hospital received 20 percent more patients than usual, he said. Most patients were coughing and sought treatment for chronic bronchitis, asthma and other respiratory illnesses.
Exposure to such high levels of pollution over the short term can cause bacterial and viral infections, and prolonged exposure can result in tumors.
The World Bank has estimated that some 750,000 of China’s people die prematurely each year just from air pollution.
Cause and effect
The environmental crisis stems largely from China’s rampant and unique economic growth, with the rapid pace of industrialization, the reliance on coal power and the huge growth in car ownership all playing a role.
A chart by the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) from the European Commission estimates that in 2011 China produced 9.7 million kilotons of carbon dioxide, nearly double the U.S.’ 5.42 million kilotons.
If the Chinese cement industry alone was a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, producing 820,00 kilotons, according to EDGAR.
While Beijing has made some progress in recent years in controlling emissions within the city limits, whatever happens in all of the neighboring provinces affects the capital.
These provinces — including Tianjin, Hebei, Inner Mongolia and Shanxi — are still developing rapidly, with more factories, more power pants, more vehicles and more coal burning, and it’s making the government’s efforts to clean up that much harder.
As for the latest spike over the past few weeks, say China watchers, there may have been some increase in emissions due to the severe cold, with more coal burning for home heating.
In addition, there could have been a few consecutive days where the winds were stagnant and trapped pollution against the mountains in northern and northwestern Beijing.
“Clearly the long-term solution has to be to reduce direct pollutant emissions, as policymakers can’t control atmospheric or weather conditions that give rise to secondary pollution and accumulating pollution spikes,” said Live From Beijing blogger Vance Wagner, an expatriate engineer who has spent years in China.
Public outcry
That is a sentiment echoed by an increasing number of Chinese nationals as well.
The crisis dominated discussion on Sina Weibo, China’s hugely popular version of Twitter. “This pollution is making me so angry,” said one user, who posted a picture of herself wearing a face mask.
The Chinese media has also entered the fray, a sharp departure from the days when the nation’s press would downplay pollution reports, calling it “fog” and claiming that foreigners were meddling in China’s affairs by even monitoring the most dangerous pollutants.
In an editorial on Monday, the state-run Global Times newspaper called for more transparency on pollution.
“The choice between development and environment protections should be made by genuinely democratic methods,” it said.
The government “should publish the facts and interests involved, and let the public itself produce a balance based on the foundation of diversification,” the paper continued.
“The government is not the only responsible party for environmental pollution. As long as the government changes its previous method of covering up the problems and instead publishes the facts, society will know who should be blamed.”
The paper also ran a story on differences between air quality figures given by Chinese authorities and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
“The choice between development and environmental protection should be made by genuinely democratic methods,” it said. “Environmental problems shouldn’t be mixed together with political problems.”
An editorial in the state-run China Daily blamed the pollution on China building its cities too quickly, adding that “China’s process of industrialisation has not finished.
“In the middle of a rapid urbanisation process, it is urgent for China to think about how such a process can press forward without compromising the quality of urban life with an increasingly worse living environment,” it continued.
Stalling in the spotlight
All eyes are now on Beijing’s reaction to the catastrophe. Live From Beijing’s Wagner noted that the event came at a critical time.
It was just on New Year’s Day that the government started releasing real time PM2.5 data for 74 cities, a major first step toward transparency.
In December 2012, it released a major regional air quality improvement plan, which, for the first time, calls for specific reductions in pollution levels in key cities for a variety of pollutants including PM2.5 and requires cities to develop plans to meet the requirements.
And the 18th Communist Party National Congress passed an amendment to the Party Constitution
that included a paragraph about “socialist cological progress.”
The party will “work hard to build a beautiful country, and achieve lasting and sustainable development of the Chinese nation,” it said.
Said the Atlantic Monthly’s Fallows, “Given the risk to any government when many of its citizens believe they do not have clean air to breathe, safe food to eat or clean water to drink, expect there is more to this than just rhetoric.”
One would hope.