“See this street! Look!” says Bai Xiao Cheng as gestures toward his village’s main concrete road. It’s barely half a mile long,…
“See this street! Look!” says Bai Xiao Cheng as gestures toward his village’s main concrete road.
It’s barely half a mile long, and apart from one small grocery store, a few home entrances and a handful of parked cars, it has no notable features. That for Bai, is precisely the point. “It’s very clean, very good!” he smiles.
This time last year the streets of Tangzitou village were strewn with coal. Black dust covered the ground and coal was piled high by doorways and courtyard entrances. It had been the village’s main source of energy for cooking and heating in the village, an hour north of downtown Beijing. Winter temperatures plunge as low as one degree Fahrenheit.
“You had to refill the coal several times a day and it was extremely dirty and very tiring. We stored it in our homes and each winter we needed tons of it,” says the 61-year-old.
That changed in September of this year, when a Communist Party secretary informed the village’s 300 residents they would be converting to natural gas. “They confiscated our coal ovens and installed gas systems instead. Coal was forbidden, and that was that!” says Bai.
The optimism expressed by Bai is felt across many parts of China. In rural villages, there’s a sense that the air is improving because of government drives to replace coal as a household energy source.
But for urban residents, a more pressing issue is pollution from power plants and factories. The government has made attempts to regulate heavy industry. But in the winter of 2018, there are concerns about backsliding.
Since 2017 the Chinese government says around 4 million homes in the country’s north have been converted to natural gas. Forcing households to make the switch from dirty-burning fuel sources such as coal, wood or corn stalks, to cleaner energy sources such as gas and electricity, is just one of the Communist Party’s strategies in its long-running war against air pollution.
According to research published this month in the journal PNAS, it works. The study, conducted primarily by Beijing’s Tsinghua University and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, found that transitioning to cleaner fuels cut the average person in China’s exposure to PM2.5 — the most dangerous particles contained in air pollution — by 47 percent. Using World Health Organization data relating to major diseases associated with air pollution, such as chronic obstructive lung disease and lung cancer, the researchers also calculated that China’s energy conversion has helped prevent 400,000 premature deaths annually.
“Household air pollution has a bigger effect on health, because emissions from households are right next to the people and the impact in terms of exposure is higher,” says UC Berkeley professor Kirk Smith, a co-author of the report.
Reducing household emissions, he says, also improves general air quality. “The pollution starts in the kitchen, but it soon goes outdoors. So when you improve the household fuel situation by swapping to cleaner fuels you help villagers directly, but you also progress in reducing outdoor air pollution.”
Lead analyst of Greenpeace’s Global Air Pollution Unit Lauri Myllyvirta agrees, saying the approach was a major contributor to the reduction in air pollution around Beijing last winter. “Last winter was enormously good, they exceeded targets,” says Myllyvirta.
But on a national level, he says that stricter emissions standards for factories and power plants played an even more important role in improving air quality.
