My first morning in China, I was unexpectedly stricken with a fear known
to all working journalists: Did I come all this way in search of a nonexist-
ent story? Back in the United States, I had heard over and over again that
China had the worst air pollution in the world, thanks to its overwhelm-
ing reliance on coal to fuel an economy that, throughout the 1990s, was
growing by an average of 8 percent a year. All this coal burning was not
only fouling China’s skies, I’d been told, it had also made China the sec-
CHAPTERONE
China: The Cost of Coal
Mark Hertsgaard
11Fig 1: AP Photo/Greg Baker