Beijing 2018 | Smog Makes You Stupid

The atmosphere was otherworldly, the morning light refracted in an unhealthy hue, not of yellow, but of a sickly brown and orange.

It was another polluted day in Beijing. A dense layer of smog hung over the city, obscuring the sun, creating eerie shadows and a nighttime feel, much like a noonday eclipse.

I was in a cab, looking for something to talk about.

“Why is there so much smog in the city today?” I asked the driver.

He looked out his side window and considered the scene as if seeing it for the first time.

“Bad air,” he said simply.

Did he blame Chinese President Xi Jinping and rest of his bureaucratic hacks for robbing his daylight, making each breath an unhealthy thing?

He shook his head and gave a crooked smile.

No, of course not.

Call me a health fanatic, but I don’t like to see the air that I breathe. And that makes every trip to Beijing a grueling challenge, like running a marathon on Mars. You try not to take deep breaths while walking outside, knowing that the accumulated dirt and detritus hanging about will eventually make your lungs black and lethal.

Everyone knows that smog is a killer, but recent studies here have begun to quantify its effect: Scientists believe that living in Beijing over a cleaner Chinese city, say Shanghai, cuts 5.5 years off one’s life span.

Each year, air pollution kills an estimated 1.1 million people across China. And the effects of breathing bad air, it’s believed, are particularly dangerous for people over 60 — and in Beijing, particularly, that means uneducated, working-class men who labor outdoors every day.

Another recent study shows that the prolonged exposure to air pollution actually causes a “huge” reduction in intelligence, indicating that the damage to society of toxic is far deeper that the well-known impacts of physical health.

The Chinese study found that high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of education.

Smog, it turns out, makes you stupid.

Go for a run here, like Mark Zuckerberg did on a recent trip to China, and it’s almost as though you can feel your IQ leaking out of your body, one breath at a time.

The Chinese refer to the smog as “wu mai,” or, simply, haze. Western journalists call it “airpocalypse.”

For a long time, people here lived in denial. On many days, I would wake up and not be able to see the high-rise building right across the street. It was simply lost in the murk.

“It’s foggy today,” my wife would say.

“Honey, you’ve lived in San Francisco. You’ve seen fog,” I said.

“And this ain’t fog.”

For the past decade, however, China has waged a war against bad air, pledging to “make our skies blue again.” The government has spent billions of dollars to significantly reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide from coal-burning power plants, while rolling out the world’s biggest investment in wind and solar power.

They’ve also established vast network of monitors to track levels of PM2.5, the very DNA of air pollution — tiny combustion particles that penetrate deep into the body, causing breathing problems, heart attacks, strokes and neurological damage.

Today, more than 83% of China still burns dirty coal for its heat, but that’s changing. Chinese cities are pressing residents to give up coal stoves and furnaces at home and have required vehicles to burn higher-quality gas and diesel.

Car-emission limits set for 2020 will compare to those in Europe and the U.S. As important, the government also closed more than 100 coal-fired power plants nationwide.

As it turns out, winter air is the most dangerous.

In Beijing and other metropolitan areas in northern China, the months between November and March can be frigid, with temperatures dropping to zero degrees and below, calling for more home heating, more coal burning.

But there have been snags in bringing cleaner air to China.

While people here want cleaner air, they also don’t want to freeze to death by Christmas. Controlled by the government, the heat here isn’t turned on until mid-November.

Last year, China announced a major cutback in small-scale coal burning by shifting 3 million households in northern China to natural gas. But the gas source ran thin and numerous households were left without heat during the coldest parts of the year, causing a major embarrassment to the government.

This year, China has also resisted curtailing emissions in many northern construction sites and factories due to the ongoing trade war with the U.S., some experts believe.

A recent Harvard study here may convince China to change its focus on the real cause of its wintertime bad air: by reducing formaldehyde emissions rather than sulfur dioxide.

Scientists believe that a large amount of sulfur in smog is created by a chemical reaction between formaldehyde and the sulfur dioxide released by burning coal.

So, China’s new air public-enemy-number-one may be formaldehyde, which comes from gas stove and kerosene heater emissions and cigarette smoke. It’s also used in making home-building products in construction and furniture.

Meanwhile, many of my friends in Beijing are literally holding their breath. Air filters are a common fashion statement here. Many athletes check the daily smog levels before deciding on whether to engage in any outdoor exercise.

Myself, I hope China gets its air-quality act together.

And soon.

That morning, I said goodbye to the cabbie, and stepped back out into the bad air, into yet another day of Beijing’s airpocalypse.