Where it hurts to breathe

You can count yourself fortunate if you live in Oregon because in most parts of the state air pollution is relatively tame, but the top 5 polluted cities in the US are all to the South in California.  But some cities in Iran, India, Pakistan and China are ranked at the top of the WHO's most polluted cities.

There are a lot of stories about Bejing, but despite being at a dangerous level to human health, Tehran and Delhi have even worse, with levels of pollutants that are very dangerous to human health. 

A report in the Lancet says that worldwide, a record 3.2 million people died from air pollution in 2010, compared with 800,000 in 2000.  Most of those deaths are in Asia.

 In China, Alistair Thornton, a China economist at the research firm IHS Global Insight says “Digging a hole and filling it back in again gives you G.D.P. growth. It doesn’t give you economic value. A lot of the activity in China over the last few years has been digging holes to fill them back in again — anything from bailing out failing solar companies to ignoring the ‘externalities’ of economic growth..

 Given that we're all on the same planet, the pollution doesn't stay in one place, and about 30% of the pollution in West Coast States comes from Asia principally China.  Ironically, we export the coal from the West coast to China, which gets returned by air.

US coal is already being exported to China through Canada. Just south of the west coast port city of Vancouver, the Westshore Coal Terminal ships 22 million tonnes of coal a year, of which 59% goes to China. There are now plans to build dozens of new terminals in the states of Washington and Oregon, on the west coast of the US, and export 150 million tonnes of coal a year to Asia.

 Now how dumb is that?