By Michael Barris, January 28, 2014
A study showing dirty emissions from China's export industry blow
across the Pacific Ocean to Western US cities such as Los Angeles
underscores the need for the US to help China combat pollution, an
official with a California clean-air organization said.
"It is important for California's air quality that we try to help
China reduce its pollution," Bill Magavern, policy director of the
Coalition for Clean Air, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit advocacy group
that aims to improve the state's air quality, told China Daily on
Monday. On the other hand, most air pollution in California is of the
state's own making, "so Californians should not be blaming China for
their air pollution problems", he said.
California officials have been working with China to help the
country benefit from lessons the state has learned in its decades-long
fight against smog, Magavern said. The key for both countries is to
"drastically" reduce their coal consumption, he said.
A team of Chinese, US and UK researchers found Los Angeles
received at least one extra day of smog that exceeded federal health
standards for ozone in 2006 as a result of nitrogen oxide and carbon
monoxide emissions from factories in China making goods for export to
the US and other countries. The report published last week by the US
National Academy of Sciences, a non-profit society of scholars, said it
was the first to quantify how much pollution reaching the US West Coast
stems from Chinese production of cell phones, televisions, and other
US-bound consumer items.
"Rising emissions produced in China are a key reason global
emissions of air pollutants have remained at a high level during
2000-2009 even as emissions produced in the United States, Europe, and
Japan have decreased," the researchers wrote.
The researchers used 2006 data from 42 sectors that directly or
indirectly contribute to emissions to analyze the degree to which
China's production of goods for export to the US and other countries
added pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and black carbon
to the US atmosphere.
Between 17 and 36 percent of air pollutants in China were related
to export-goods production, and a fifth of that specifically tied to
US-China trade, the scientists found.
The pollutants - including black carbon, which contributes to
climate change and is linked to cancer, emphysema and heart and lung
disease - rode global winds known as "westerlies" across the Pacific
Ocean to the US West Coast, according to the report. They gathered in
valleys and basins in California and other western states, according to
China's ramping up of manufacturing in recent decades has
contributed to severe smog problems in cities such as Beijing. Even
though exports accounted for 24.1 percent of China's economic output
last year, down from a peak of 35 percent in 2007, the impact of China's
manufacturing industry on US air quality shows trade issues must play a
role in global talks to cut pollution, the report said.
Co-author Steve Davis, a scientist at University of California
Irvine, said discussions aimed at reducing cross-border air pollution
"must confront the question of who is responsible for emissions in one
country during production of goods to support consumption in another."
When you buy a product at Wal-Mart, "it has to be manufactured
somewhere," Davis said. "The product doesn't contain the pollution, but
creating it caused the pollution".
Trans-boundary pollution has for several years been an issue in
international climate change negotiations, where China has argued that
developed nations should take responsibility for a share of China's
greenhouse gas emissions, because they originate from production of
goods demanded by the West.
Ned Helme, president of the Washington-based Center for Clean Air
Policy, a nonprofit group dedicated to improving climate and air
quality, told China Daily the new study reaffirms the need to build
environmental impact costs into future US-China trade-pact discussions.
"The point is, you want to equal internalization of the cost of these
environmental impacts" in trade agreement talks, Helme said.
Jintai Lin, a professor in the department of atmospheric and
oceanic sciences at Peking University's School of Physics who led the
study, said "trade changes the location of production and thus affects