Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Fog.”
“Smog.”
“Fog.”
She was an uncompromising negotiator. But later in the evening, after we retired to our
hotel rooms, she sent me a text message to tell me that, on television, the news was that it
had been the most polluted day of the year so far. I win, Cecily.
Night. Beside the highway, the squat, flaring glow of a refinery floated by, bladerunner-like
in the haze. We watched from the pitch-darkness of Liu's cab.
The most polluted city in the world.
The beams of oncoming headlights writhed in the
heavy air. We were driving to Linfen. Through the city's outskirts and onto a broad mul-
tilane highway, an empty avenue of streetlights, the smog unbelievably thick. We passed
a carved sign:
WELCOME TO LINFEN.
With perfect timing, a truck piled high with coal came
onto the road in front of us. A chunk of coal skittered loose and obliterated itself against
the roadway, joining the stains that marked the passage of previous coal trucks.
Linfen is a coal town, and legendarily dirty. In fact, hardly anybody outside China has
ever heard of the place, unless they've heard of its pollution. That was the only reason I
had heard of it, and the only reason you're hearing about it now. Linfen sits at the heart
of China's coal country, in Shanxi Province. But to visit Linfen is not merely to travel to
another time, to remember how industry used to dominate the landscape around American
and European cities. Linfen is also a convenient symbol of what China is doing to the glob-
al environment—the same thing we've been doing for a hundred years.
Let's run some numbers. China's consumption of coal doubled in the decade leading up
to 2010, to more than three billion tons. That's nearly half the world's annual supply. About
three-quarters of China's electricity comes from coal, and as the country's electrical needs
have skyrocketed, so has coal-fired power generation. China is not only far and away the
world's biggest consumer of coal but is also its biggest consumer of energy, and its biggest
emitter of carbon dioxide. And even though China is fast becoming a world leader in re-
newable energy, like wind and solar, it is coal that has powered the nation's precipitous rise.
This matters. The coal gets burned over there, but the carbon dioxide goes everywhere.
So if, by some miracle, the West manages to stop screwing over the global climate—well,
we probably won't. Regardless, China has picked up where we haven't left off.
The most polluted city in the world.
We were downtown now. There was dust every-
where, thick on the cars, thick in the air, coating the buildings.
Finally,
I thought. Some-
