The One Thing China Can Do to Clean Its Air

China is bracing for the winter by firing up coal-powered heating systems, so, naturally, the country's air quality has been shockingly bad. China's smog-choked cities are already infamous, but the most recent spate of widespread, severe pollution goes beyond anything we've seen for a while. Which poses a big question: What can China do to clean its air?

Last week, more than 100 Chinese cities reported PM2.5 air quality readings—a measure of how many dangerous, inhalable airborne particles are larger than 2.5 micrometers—of over 300. That ranks them all as "severe," the worst tier on a standard six-level rating system. That's some 12 times higher concentrations of small particulate matter than World Health Organization guidelines, which note that such tiny particulate matter is dangerous because of its ability to penetrate lung tissue.

Such overwhelmingly terrible air quality promises to become a major drag on the country's health and productivity. It's already having an effect. Per Bloomberg, Shanghai warned children and the elderly to stay indoors for seven of the first nine days of this month, thanks to automated warnings triggered when particulate levels exceed 200. US Embassy air readings in that city topped 500 last Friday, which led the city government to shut factory production and order cars off the road in a bid to clear the air. Similar scenes have played out across the country.

In order to combat the smog, one first has to know where it's coming from. Industrial pollution and auto emissions are of particular concern, both of which have expanded along with China's decades of economic growth. Especially in the winter months, China's reliance on coal for energy production and heating is an important factor to consider. According to PBS, coal burning is one reason why "in October, the northern city of Harbin was covered by black smog that limited visibility to mere feet."

Because geoengineering solutions designed to combat smog, like using artificial rain to wash the air, are unreliable at best, China's going to have to clean its air the old fashioned way: by developing cleaner factories, power plants, and cars. Cutting coal usage has been a goal of the Chinese government for a while now, but with the country still producing some 70 percent of its power from coal—about half of the entire world's coal consumption is attributable to China—it's a long road ahead.

In September, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese government hopes to cut coal to 65 percent of its energy mix by 2017, and retrofit current coal plants to be cleaner burning, which can be effective but costly. But as the world's largest consumer of energy, and without robust natural gas reserves like the US, China's ability to move past coal is limited. Currently, the country is heavily interested in syngas, or natural gas converted from coal, which can help alleviate certain kinds of air pollution but is otherwise altogether worse.

To its credit, the country is also investing heavily in cleaner alternatives. Last year, China became the world's largest producer of clean energy, a title it's unlikely to give up. It's also taken the lead on nuclear development, especially with alternative designs like thorium reactors, and plans on becoming a huge exporter of nuclear technology. Contrasted with the United States' drive to extract cheap natural gas, it's easy to marvel at China's investment in clean tech. But on the whole, it's still decades away from making large shifts away from coal.

And while coal burning is certainly a major factor, industrial and automotive pollution must also take a large portion of the blame. Factory production has grown immensely, and earlier this year, the Chinese government said that the 15.1 million new cars added last year were more than all cars on the country's roads in 1999. Shuttering factories or taking cars off the road in any meaningful volume isn't likely to happen, so cleaning China's air means making those cars and factories pollute less.

In the South China Morning Post, Wang Xiangwei argues that China needs its own Clean Air Act to model the landmark, comprehensive legislation enacted by the US in the 1970s. With periodic updates and amendments, the Clean Air Act remains one of the most successful pieces of US legislation in industrial era, and has led to massive reductions in both industrial and automotive emissions, despite growth in industrial production and car ownership.

But can China coalesce around environmental legislation? Wang notes that, even as pollution has invaded China's waterways and already taken a toll on the nation's health, its leaders have been slow to embrace sweeping reform:

The new leadership under President Xi Jinping has shown more willingness to tackle pollution as it tries to slow the breakneck economic growth.

But the efforts have been half-hearted at best. Last month, the Communist Party held its landmark meeting and unveiled its blueprint which was supposed to bring the country's development to a new level.

It indeed contained some exciting grand goals and slogans including allowing the market forces to play "the decisive" role in the economy and boosting mainlanders' living standards. But it contains little on how to tackle environmental degradation.

There's no doubt that clean air laws that comprehensively tackle pollution, such as requiring scrubbers for industrial plants and higher emissions standards for cars, would result in noticeable increases in air quality. And, if the US is any example, such measures are unlikely to have severe long-term economic consequences. In fact, in many sectors, it can increase productivity, as it did with American crop and timber industries.

Sweeping change takes time. New emissions standards are arduous to implement, and with inevitable exemptions made to grandfather in existing factories and cars, it's going to take time until dirty old factories and cars get replaced with newer, cleaner ones. Thankfully, because similar laws already exist elsewhere, emissions technology is largely mature—but it's unlikely that industry and automakers will make the changes on their own. For a country whose ambitions on the world stage are increasingly being hampered by poisonous air, enacting clean air laws can't wait.

@derektmead