The Airpocalypse is Nigh

Contrary to the wildest expectations when Nixon met with Mao Zedong in 1972, China has become a capitalist Utopia. It has become the world's fastest growing economy and will likely become the biggest economy in the near future. China produces 70% of the world's iron and steel and half the cement. It is the world's factory.

But this development has a price: Beijing is currently socked by a deadly smog. The pollution levels are 25 times higher than the levels considered safe in the United States. They're calling it the "Airpocalypse."

People wear Darth Vader masks when they venture on to the streets. The hospitals are packed with people suffering from respiratory distress. The government is shutting down building sites and factories, and is taking a third of official cars off the road.

We heard a lot about China's pollution problems leading up to the 2008 Oympics. It hasn't gotten any better. They have added millions of new cars since then. They opened thousands of new factories and constructed hundreds of coal-fired powerplants.

The US embassy in Beijing has angered the Chinese government by setting up a Twitter feed with data from a pollution monitor on the the roof. Their instrument shows the pollution index level at 755, on a scale of 0 to a "maximum" of 500.

Beijing is not stewing in smog alone. Last week Tehran was socked by an inversion, as the same sort of calm, cold winter weather settled over Iran's capital. Their pollution levels are exacerbated by the economic sanctions imposed on them by the UN for their nuclear program; they've taken to burning low-quality gasoline that they've refined themselves. Even though Iran is an oil exporter, they import refined fuels. They have a passable argument for why they need nuclear power.

We don't have problems like this in the United States anymore because of an organization called the Environmental Protection Agency. Yes, that same organization that is on all Republicans' short list of  government agencies to eliminate. Because we used to have problems just like this.

In November 1939 St. Louis was hit by an inversion that cloaked the city in smog. Streetlights were turned on during the day and cars had to use their headlights. As in Beijing, the cause was the burning of low-quality coal.  In 1948 a deadly smog enveloped Donora, Pennsylvania, killing 20 people. The Great Smog hit London in 1952, causing 6,000 deaths. The LA and New York  skylines used to be a filthy brown: now they actually have blue skies.

Burning low-cost, low-quality fuels has dire consequences on human health, wildlife, forests, livestock, and agricultural production due to sulfur dioxide and particulate pollution, mercury poisoning and acid rain, all which impose significant economic costs.

One man's freedom to burn whatever the hell he wants to power his factory or fuel his trucks should not impinge on the right of another man's children to breathe: the lungs of children who breathe polluted air are permanently damaged, and they will suffer from asthma their entire lives.

The price of fuels should reflect all their costs, including the environmental effects of their extraction and the aftereffects of their pollutants in the environment. If those costs were included in the price of natural gas, oil and coal, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar would be cost competitive, and there would be a huge incentive to develop new sources. Since fossil fuels are used in many non-energy-producing industrial processes and products, not burning them for energy would stabilize our industrial base into the distant future.

Climate change isn't the only reason we should pursue non-polluting energy sources: it's better for our health as well.