China
smog: millions start new year shrouded by health alerts and travel
chaos
On
the first day of 2017 in Beijing pollution climbed as high as 24
times the level recommended by the World Health Organization
Benjamin Haas in
Hong Kong
@haasbenjamin
Monday 2 January
2017 03.22 GMT
Millions in China
rang in the New Year shrouded in a thick blanket of toxic smog,
causing road closures and flight cancellations as 24 cities issued
alerts that will last through much of the week.
On the first day of
2017 in Beijing, concentrations of tiny particles that penetrate deep
into the lungs climbed as high as 24 times levels recommended by the
World Health Organization. More than 100 flights were cancelled and
all intercity buses were halted at the capital’s airport.
In the neighbouring
port city of Tianjin, more than 300 flights were cancelled while the
weather forecast warned thick smog will persist until 5 January. All
of the city’s highways were also shut as low visibility made
driving hazardous, effectively trapping residents.
Across northern
China 24 cities issued red alerts on Friday and Saturday, while
orange alerts persisted in 21 cities through the New Year holiday. A
red alert is the highest level of a four-tier warning system
introduced as part of China’s high-profile war on pollution.
Decades of economic
development have made acrid air a common occurrence in nearly all
major Chinese cities, with government-owned coal burning power
stations and heating plants and steel manufacturing concentrated in
northern provinces the main source of pollution.
Landmark buildings
are seen through smog on 1 January in Beijing.
Smog worsens in the
winter as coal burning spikes to provide heat for millions of people.
China declared a “war on pollution” in 2014, but has struggled to
deliver the sweeping change many had hoped to see and government
inspections routinely find pollutions flouting the law.
“Why didn’t
those polluting industries take a rest for the holiday,” one
commenter mused on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo.
“New Year’s
morning in Beijing, I thought I was blind,” said another, attaching
a photo of a window completely darkened with grey haze.
China’s middle
class is increasingly less tolerant of the deadly air, and in
December tens of thousands of “smog refugees” decamped to clearer
skies. Top destinations included Australia, Indonesia, Japan and the
Maldives.
That bout of smog
saw 460 million people, a population greater than North America,
breathing toxic air, according to Greenpeace.
As pollution covered
swaths of the country on New Year’s Eve, China announced plans to
increase coal output to 3.9 billion tonnes by 2020.
A study earlier this
year found acrid air is linked to at least one million deaths a year,
and contributed to a third of all fatalities in major cities, on par
with smoking. Another research paper said the smog had shortened life
expectancies by five and a half years in parts of China.
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