Byproducts from Chinese power plants are damaging the Northwest.

[Triana]

We Cannot Afford This Extra Pollution
Tuesday 13 June 2006
Byproducts from Chinese power plants are damaging the Northwest.

Living on the very edge of the vast Pacific Ocean, our air is as clean as air can be, right? Wrong. Demonstrating just how interconnected our little world really is, we are downwind of a huge plume of coal soot.

High-altitude collectors in the Cascades are coated with black soot, sulfur compounds and other byproducts from coal-powered electricity plants in China. In April, American satellites tracked the progress of a vast cloud of pollution and desert dust from China as it passed over us, according to a New York Times article last week. But far from being a one-time occurrence, we increasingly are literally on the front lines of a burgeoning global environmental crisis as China and India step up coal consumption to meet exploding consumer demand for cheap electricity.

According to the Times, every week to 10 days another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego. The technology used in these plants is far behind ours in terms of efficiency and pollution control, particularly when it comes to sulfur and particulates.

The soot has direct detrimental effects on human health, contributing to a variety of respiratory diseases. In China itself, sulfur dioxide is estimated to cause up to 400,000 premature deaths per year. The sulfur compounds also cause acidic rain harmful to plants and animals, but actually have a positive role in curbing global warming, which might otherwise already be much more intense in the absence of sulfur's cooling influence.

Demonstrating just how interconnected all the world's billions of people now are, Chinese pollution accounts for 10 to 15 percent of allowable federal particle levels over the West Coast states. Ultimately more importantly, all the world's people will pay a steep price for the hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide being added to the global climate equation.

...

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061406EA.shtml

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. So China is shipping us particles of mass destruction in exchange

for all the McToys and plastic widgets we purchase from them. Fair trade I suppose... Shrub will pardon them, quoting that they are helping in the WOT or some such nonsense.

[brook]

2. Thanks for calling this

to our attention.

Some of us here are asking for an EPA hearing on a &#$! power plant renovation permit in town.
Actually, it's down on the perimeter of our lovely public beach on which the brilliant polticos just banned smoking.

[Union Thug]

3. But, just think of all the jobs they are creating...

err.. oh never mind.

[NNadir]

4. Um, by products of the midwestern power plants are damaging

the Northeast.

Why is China singled out? Per capita the worst pollutant profile belongs to Americans. When we get our own house in order, maybe we can lecture the Chinese. But our own house is a disaster. We still produce more carbon dioxide than China, and our population is probably less than a fifth of theirs.

We are hypocrites.

[Triana]

5. 100% agreed about that...

...we're definitely the worst. China doesn't help, but we're the top polluter.