The United States may have exported much of its manufacturing and the attendant pollution to China but a new report indicates that quite a bit of the pollution is coming back to the US.
The US study has found pollution from China is travelling in large quantities across the Pacific Ocean to the United States.
Reuters Newsagency reports the US National Academy of Sciences research has attributed a significant fraction of the Chinese emissions to the manufacture of goods for export.
Steve Davis, a scientist at University of California Irvine and co-author of the report, said; “We’ve outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us.”
According to the team of Chinese and American researchers who wrote the report, on some days, acid rain-inducing sulphate from the burning of fossil fuels in China can account for as much as 24 per cent of sulphate pollution in the western United States.
Cities such as Los Angeles had received at least an extra day of smog a year from nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide from China’s export-dependent factories, the report said.
The report shows pollutants such as black carbon, which contributes to climate change and is linked to cancer, emphysema and heart and lung diseases, travelled huge distances on global winds known as “westerlies”.
Reuters reports between 17 and 36 per cent of various air pollutants in China in 2006 were related to the production of goods for export, according to the report, and a fifth of that specifically tied to US-China trade.
One third of China’s greenhouse gases is now from export-based industries, according to environmental research group Worldwatch Institute.
China’s neighbours, such as Japan and South Korea, have regularly suffered noxious clouds from China in the past twof decades as environmental regulations have been sacrificed for economic and industrial growth.
Trans-boundary pollution has for several years been an issue in international climate change negotiations.
At those talks 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.
The report said its findings showed that trade issues must play a role in global talks to cut pollution.
“Polluting industries in China and other emerging economies supply a large proportion of global consumption through international trade,” it said.
“International cooperation to reduce trans-boundary transport of air pollution must confront the question of who is responsible for emissions in one country during production of goods to support consumption in another.”
The report said technological improvements could help reduce emissions in China.
“Production-based Chinese emissions could be reduced if China were to enhance energy efficiency and deploy emission control technologies as effective as those used in the US,” it said.
The report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
