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China's Coal Addiction Is Cutting Years Off Lives

A well-intentioned free heat program has had a deadly unintended consequence, with lingering effects for half a million people.
Photo: Chris Tse/Flickr

China's economic rise, powered in the most part by prodigious consumption of coal, has a dark counterweight in the rampant environmental degradation that accompanied it—a graphically-demonstrated fact in photos of the greyed-out skies over Beijing. As a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows, though, all this coal burning has an even worse effect on people's health than previously believed.

Looking at health and air quality data from the last two decades of the 20th century, the study found that China's policy of providing free winter heating for people north of the Huai River, via coal-fired boilers —a program dating back to the 1950s—cut an average of 5.5 years off the lives of 500 million people, due to cardio-respiratory health problems.

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The study found that the total suspended particulate pollution was 55 percent higher in the north than the south, at 184 micrograms per cubic meter. Long-term exposure to particulate pollution levels above 100 micrograms per cubic meter was found to reduce life expectancy at birth by 3 years.

The paper concludes that though the policy of providing free indoor heating had a "laudable goal," it "had disastrous consequences for health, presumably due to the failure to require the installation of sufficient pollution abatement equipment."

Looking at data from more recent years, from 2003-2008, it appears that all that coal burning has had lasting effects. Concentrations of PM10 air pollution remain 26 percent higher north of the Huai River.

Critically for health more broadly, especially in other nations that rely on coal-fired power and heat for their economic growth, the study's authors point out that the total suspended particulate concentration that occurred during the study period is "not atypical for many cities in developing countries today, such as India and China," which "may help explain why China's explosive economic growth has led to relatively anemic growth in life expectancy."

All that pollution also has a quantifiable economic cost. Just one example: A study from last December, released by Greenpeace and Peking University, looked at the economic effect of fine particulate air pollution–a subset of the type of pollution examined in the PNAS study–in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi'an, and Beijing. This analysis found over 8,500 people died in 2012 as a result of fine particulate air pollution, causing total economic losses of over $1 billion.

If there's any clearing in this choking haze, it's that even though China is the world's largest consumer of energy on a national level, as well as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the growth of renewable energy in China has been outpacing the growth of coal-fired power generation for several years now.

The results of that growth in clean power have yet to be fully realized, however. According to World Bank stats from earlier this year 16 of the world's 20 most-polluted cities are in China.