MCLC: China exports pollution

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China exports pollution
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (1/20/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/world/asia/china-also-exports-pollution-t
o-western-us-study-finds.html

China Exports Pollution to U.S., Study Finds
By EDWARD WONG 

BEIJING — Filthy emissions from China’s export industries are carried
across the Pacific Ocean and contribute to air pollution in the Western
United States, according to a paper published Monday by a prominent
American science journal.

The research is the first to quantify how air pollution in the United
States is affected by China’s production of goods for export and by global
consumer demand for those goods, the study’s authors say. It was written
by nine scholars based in three nations and was published by Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences <http://www.pnas.org/>, which last
year published a paper by other researchers that found a drop in life
spans in northern China.

The latest paper explores the environmental consequences of interconnected
economies. The scientists wrote that “outsourcing production to China does
not always relieve consumers in the United States — or for that matter
many countries in the Northern Hemisphere — from the environmental impacts
of air pollution.”

The movement of air pollutants associated with the production of goods in
China for the American market has resulted in a decline in air quality in
the Western United States, the scientists wrote, though less manufacturing
in the United States does mean cleaner air in the American East.

Jintai Lin <http://www.atmos.pku.edu.cn/acm/contact.html>, the lead author
of the paper, said in an interview that he and the other scientists wanted
to examine the transborder effects of emissions from export industries to
look at how consumption contributes to global air pollution.

“We’re focusing on the trade impact,” said Mr. Lin, a professor in the
department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Peking University’s
School of Physics. “Trade changes the location of production and thus
affects emissions.”

Powerful global winds called westerlies can carry pollutants from China
across the Pacific within days, leading to “dangerous spikes in
contaminants,” especially during the spring, according to a news release
<http://news.uci.edu/press-releases/made-in-china-for-us-air-pollution-as-w
ell-as-exports/>from the University of California, Irvine, where one of
the study’s co-authors, Steven J. Davis <http://tinyurl.com/mb9gno3>, is
an earth system scientist. “Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in
valleys and basins in California and other Western states,” the statement
Said.

Black carbon is a particular problem because rain does not wash it out of
the atmosphere, so it persists across long distances, the statement said.
Black carbon is linked to asthma, cancer, emphysema, and heart and lung
Disease.

“Los Angeles experiences at least one extra day a year of smog that
exceeds federal ozone limits because of nitrogen oxides and carbon
monoxide emitted by Chinese factories making goods for export,” the
statement said.

Using a modeling system called GEOS-Chem <http://geos-chem.org/>, the
scientists estimated that in 2006, sulfate concentrations in the Western
United States increased as much as 2 percent, and ozone and carbon
monoxide levels also increased slightly because of the transportation of
pollutants from emissions that resulted from the manufacture of goods for
export to the United States. Because the Eastern United States has a much
denser population, the outsourcing of manufacturing to China still
resulted in “an overall beneficial effect for the U.S. public health,”
even if Western states suffered, the scientists wrote.

The amount of air pollution in the Western United States resulting from
emissions from China is still very small compared with the amount produced
by sources in the United States that include traffic and domestic
Industries.

The study’s scientists also looked at the impact of China’s export
industries on its own air quality. They estimated that in 2006, China’s
exporting of goods to the United States was responsible for 7.4 percent of
production-based Chinese emissions for sulfur dioxide, 5.7 percent for
nitrogen oxides, 3.6 percent for black carbon and 4.6 percent for carbon
Monoxide.

The interdisciplinary research project was begun two and a half years ago
by scholars in Britain, China and the United States. The group included
economists as well as earth and environmental scientists. The methodology
applied various analyses and modeling to the Chinese economy and to the
earth’s atmosphere and weather patterns.

The scholars who gave emissions estimates for China’s export industries, a
significant part of the country’s economy, looked at data from 42 sectors
that are direct or indirect contributors to emissions. They included steel
and cement production, power generation and transportation. Coal-burning
factories were the biggest sources of pollutants and greenhouse gases,
which contribute to global warming.

In recent years, scholars have been studying the impact of China’s total
emissions on global air pollution and warming. Residents of nations in the
path of winds carrying pollutants from China have grown alarmed at what
they believe to be deteriorating air quality in their countries because of
that pollution. In Japan, for instance, an environmental engineer has
attributed a mysterious pestilence that is killing trees on Yakushima
Island to pollutants from China.

Alex L. Wang, a law professor at the University of California, Los
Angeles, who studies Chinese environmental policy, said after reading the
new paper: “This is a reminder to us that a significant percentage of
China’s emissions of traditional pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions
are connected to the products we buy and use every day in the U.S. We
should be concerned, not only because this pollution is harming the
citizens of China, but because it’s damaging the air quality in parts of
the U.S.”

Mr. Lin, the report’s lead author, said he hoped that the research would
stimulate discussion of adopting consumption-based accounting of
emissions, rather than just production-based accounting.

Exports accounted for 24.1 percent of China’s entire economic output last
year, down sharply from a peak of 35 percent in 2007, before the global
financial crisis began to weaken overseas demand even as China’s domestic
economy continued to grow. The 2013 number takes into account economic
data that was released on Monday.

Economists caution that this does not mean that a quarter of the economy
was dedicated to producing goods for exports, since China still does a lot
of reprocessing instead of making exports entirely itself.

But the proportion of China’s exports that are made in China has risen
steadily in recent years as many companies move more of their supply
chains, instead of just having final assembly work done here. So the
overall percentages of economic output might not by themselves be fair
indicators of the importance of exports to the Chinese economy.

Chinese exports to the United States sagged in 2009 because of the global
financial crisis but have resumed vigorous growth. By China’s method of
counting, which includes only direct shipments from mainland Chinese ports
to the United States and excludes goods that travel by way of Hong Kong,
Chinese exports grew to $368.5 billion last year from $252.3 billion in
2008. By contrast, China imported only $152.6 billion worth of goods
directly from the United States.

The United States, which does include goods briefly transiting Hong Kong
in its trade figures with mainland China, has shown even larger American
trade deficits with China for many years, because Chinese companies use
Hong Kong heavily for exports but much less for imports.

Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.