CHINA:POLLUTION WIDESPREAD

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Date: Thursday June 14, 2007 12:28:00 pm
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    Chinese Pollution Is An Increasing Threat
    BEIJING, June 2007 Where to start? With the melting glaciers of Mount Everest?
    Or
    a village in Shanxi province that survives on trucked-in water —
    because underground explosions for coal mining have drained the lakes
    and wells. The coal keeps electric plants humming, but the mining
    generates pollution that has left farm fields toxic.Nothing can grow
    here anymore, one resident told CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen.
    Sinkholes swallowed village graves and the coal dust makes breathing
    hard — which is why 400,000 people each year die prematurely from lung
    disease.And thanks to bad air, China has 16 of the world’s top 20
    polluted cities.Take Beijing, which just proudly announced it now has 3
    million cars … so clear days give way to more bad pollution days.And
    there’s a new danger: Dust storms from the northern Gobi Desert used to
    hit once a decade. Now it’s once a year; visibility can drop to less
    than a city block.It’s happening because every day the Gobi Desert
    moves a little more south, claiming land left barren by overgrazing or
    from water shortages because of too much irrigation.In fact, Petersen
    reports, the leading edge of the desert is less than 50 miles from
    downtown Beijing.

    China’s uses America’s inaction on the environment as an excuse.
    “They
    say as long as the U.S. doesn’t move forward, how can you expect a poor
    country like China to move forward,” said University of Michigan China
    scholar Ken Leiberthal.And an ill wind is blowing China’s bad air to
    America. Steve Cliff already sees Chinese pollutants on his monitors in
    northern California and worries about China’s ever-increasing
    dependence on coal.”It stands to reason that if one new coal-fired
    power plant is built per week that more pollution will be evidenced
    here in the United States,” said Cliff.That also means Americans may
    soon be paying a price for China’s polluted rise to prosperity.

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