Thick dust is choking the air and settling over every living thing in China. Linfen, China is probably the most-polluted city in Earth. Farmers wheat crops are diminishing due to dark, sooty, and hollow kernels. Crops like cotton too fragile to survive.
The cause of all this is coal pollution. But nobody in China care enough to investigate it. The soil is covered with a layer of grey soot and tree leaves are laden with dust. Even cabbages and other foods are blackened. Bees and animals don't come to the flowers of the apple trees and coal pollution is causing great harm to the agriculture of the city.
The city is toxic. A coal-producing heartland spewing out flames, suffocating fumes, and a constant supply of dust.
Smog is so thick that people can't see more than 100 metres ahead. Ancient temples are blackened with coal dust, while the sun is barely visible.
Inhabitants don't realize that in a global scale, China has largely ignored the fact that they contribute massively to global warming. China is responsible for 90% of the rise in world coal consumption in recent years. There are 21 000 coal mines and produces 70% of energy in China, but the country is among the top ranked contributors in terms to carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.
The average Canadian consumes far more energy than the average Chinese and is responsible for releasing far more carbon dioxide. But with China's massive population, it is producing much more carbon dioxide in total.
China is officially striving to restrain the rapid growth of its coal consumption, but mainly because of concern for its coal reserves, not because of the global-warming issue.
"China is going up the intensity curve in its energy use, and it has four times the population of the United States," he says. "Coal is what China has, and people use what they have."
CHINA and other developing countries are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol's rules for cutting the production of greenhouse gases. They argue strenuously that they should be allowed the same historical privileges that allowed the industrialized nations to develop their economies, even if it means a sharp increase in global-warming gases over the next decade or two.
China, like India and other developing countries, has always seen the environment as something that can be sacrificed to the god of economic growth. Their air and land are being surrendered to the overriding goal of catching up to the industrialized world. But global warming has pushed the stakes to a much higher level.
"They're using low technology and they're very wasteful. The local business interests are against the interests of the central government, but the Chinese political system allows them a space."
It just seems that China is so driven economically that they aren't taking into the consideration the planet itself. They are putting the environment so low on the agenda that people in their own country are dying, coughing up dirt, and starving because of it.
