dust-storm image that I have ever seen.” Visibility soon dropped close to zero in Beijing and driving was nearly impossible. Satellites tracked the dust as it moved across eastern China, the Yellow Sea, Korea, the Russian coast from Vladivostok to the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Sea of Japan, and Japan itself. In less than a week, it crossed the Pacific Ocean, and produced thick haze as far east as Denver. High concentrations of dust were found as far away as Maine and Georgia and eventually in the Canary Islands off northwest Africa. Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington-Bothell, calculated that only a 20th of the storm’s dust reached the United States, but that amount, 50,000 metric tons, was two and a half times as muchthe premature deaths of more than 400,000 Chinese each year from air pollution and has led to the outbreak among Chinese in their 30s of chronic lung diseases usually associated with old people. By 2005, China’s sulfur-dioxide emissions were nearly double those of the United States—and they are estimated to have grown by 14 percent since. As a result, acid rain now plagues a third of China, much of Japan and Korea, and even the Pacific Ocean.

Coal has also made China the world’s leading producer of human-caused mercury emissions, accounting for 30 percent of the global total and rising. A 2004 peer-reviewed study found that up to 36 percent of man-made mercury emissions settling on America originated in Asia. Mercury impairs neurological development in fetuses, infants, and children,