China Also Exports Pollution to Western U.S., Study Finds

By EDWARD WONGJAN. 20, 2014

BEIJING — Filthy emissions from China’s export industries are carried across the Pacific Ocean and contribute to air pollution in the Western United States, according to a paper published Monday by a prominent American science journal.

The research is the first to quantify how air pollution in the United States is affected by China’s production of goods for export and by global consumer demand for those goods, the study’s authors say. It was written by nine scholars based in three nations and was published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which last year published a paper by other researchers that found a drop in life spans in northern China because of air pollution.

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Powerful global winds called westerlies can carry pollutants from China across the Pacific within days, leading to “dangerous spikes in contaminants,” especially during the spring, according to a news release from the University of California, Irvine, where one of the study’s co-authors, Steven J. Davis, is an earth system scientist. “Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins in California and other Western states,” the statement said.

Black carbon is a particular problem because rain does not wash it out of the atmosphere, so it persists across long distances, it said. Black carbon is linked to asthma, cancer, emphysema and heart and lung disease.

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