While China is blocking documentaries on pollution and arresting environmentalists, thousands of Chinese are dying each day due to the suffocating pollution levels in the country. A new study has found that an average of 4,000 people a day in China from air pollution — largely due to coal-burning as a fuel.

Berkeley Earth has also found that tiny particles known as PM2.5 that can trigger heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and asthma, account for a total of 1.6 million deaths a year, or 17 per cent of China’s mortality level. That figure is staggering. Almost twenty percent of China’s mortality rate is due to air pollution.

We have previously discussed how deaths from air pollution are often treated as abstractions while a fraction of those deaths in some other form like accidents would be viewed as a national emergency. China’s figures however are truly frightening.

Scientific director of Berkeley Earth and a co-author of the paper Richard Muller noted that “[w]hen I was last in Beijing, pollution was at the hazardous level: Every hour of exposure reduced my life expectancy by 20 minutes . . . It’s as if every man, woman and child smoked 1.5 cigarettes each hour.”

Muller and co-author Robert Rohde found that 92 per cent of China’s population experienced at least 120 hours of unhealthy air during the April 5 to Aug 5 study period. For 38 per cent of the population, the average pollution level across the whole four-month period was deemed unhealthy.

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