14 DAY TRIAL // The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that, according to information at hand, rich countries are to blame for a significant amount of the air pollution that rising economies produce annually.
A paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week details the case of China and the United States, and shows how the latter influences the ecological footprint of the former.
In this report, researchers say that, as surprising as this may sound, the United States is responsible for roughly 20% of China's air pollution.
This is not because Americans very much enjoy traveling to the other end of the world carrying nothing but a bucket of coal with them and setting it on fire once they reach their destination, but because a significant amount of products sold in the United States are manufactured in China.
“When you buy a product at Wal-Mart, it has to be manufactured somewhere. The product doesn’t contain the pollution, but creating it caused the pollution,” researcher Steve Davis with the University of California at Irvine explains, as cited by Mongabay.
What's interesting (and quite ironic, one might want to add) is that, some of the air pollution that China produces when manufacturing products for export eventually works its way to the United States.
As detailed in the paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the country's western regions are the ones most affected by this phenomenon.
Thus, it would appear that, each year, the city of Los Angeles experiences a day of extreme air pollution that is due to nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide emitted by factories in China.
Besides, specialists say that it sometimes happens that roughly 25% of the sulfate pollution documented on the Californian coastline has China as its point of origin.
“We’ve outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us,” scientist Steve Davis says.
“Given the complaints about how Chinese pollution is corrupting other countries’ air, this paper shows that there may be plenty of blame to go around,” he adds.