India: Lethal Air Pollution from Dirty Coal
by Professor Bruce E. Johansen
Significant protests directed at the construction of coal-powered energy plants in India have met opposition, mainly from farmers whose land has been expropriated, as well as others whose enterprises will be caught in the path of air and water pollution from power plants spewing the world’s dirtiest air.
The protests have been held nationwide, led by farmers, indigenous people, and environmental activists. These protests have been large and sometimes violent, with several dozen people killed over a decade in protests of land expropriation for coal-powered power plants and mining of low-power “brown” coal to fuel them.
India is pursuing an all-out program to develop any available power source to meet swift increases in power demand from population increases. India is or will soon be the most populous country in the world, soon to pass China, both at 1.4 billion. China’s birthrate is falling, while India’s is increasing. China’s authoritarian government has abandoned strict population controls (restricting births to one or two per family) as they showed signs of over-success. By 2022, the Chinese population was declining, and the number of elderly people was increasing.
India’s Population and Pollution Increase
In semi-democratic India, the government tried to control the population once, an abandoned effort because of mass public disapproval, even as the population grew. At the same time, economic development required more power for comforts such as air conditioning in a climate that can turn lethal in summer. The newly affluent are a minority of India’s vast population but enough to continually strain power-producing infrastructure. While India attempts to raise its coal-fired electricity production amidst widespread protests, sun, and wind power are being developed as quickly as possible, but not fast enough.
At the same time, global warming is raising temperatures and speeding up the melting of crucial water resources in the Himalayas. Other mountain ranges further endanger a nation with more than four times the population of the United States living on less than half the land. This is the context of the sometimes violent opposition to developing coal mining and power production in India. The outcome of ballooning demand for power is quickly rising greenhouse-gas production and air pollution that now ranks as the dirtiest in the world.
The World’s Worst Air Quality
Given a preponderance of publicity, many people believe that the world’s worst urban air pollution is in Beijing. According to the World Health Organization, China’s capital runs second in this noxious sweepstakes as the world capital of smog to the Ganges River valley around Delhi.
The Delhi airport sometimes closes for smog so thick that jets cannot safely land. Many people have persistent coughs, and some wear gas masks. Many days, the sun shines through a gaseous haze. Approaching Delhi from the south at 35,000 feet, the setting sun turns the Ganges Valley brown cloud a dull yellow, then a dun orange, then dark red before the sky goes black. Entering the Ganges Valley resembles sinking into an immense bowl of very old, brown clam chowder.
India’s Air Pollution Stunts Children’s Brains
A United Nations report issued in 2017 asserted that air pollution in India, especially in the Ganges Valley, was triggering neuroinflammation, which impedes the cognitive development of children’s brains. At the same time, the World Bank said that air pollution was costing India at least $55 billion a year in 2015, as The Lancet, a prominent British medical journal, said that the same pollution was causing 2.5 million Indian people to die prematurely. India’s premature deaths from dirty air have doubled in 25 years, from 1990 to 2015.
One reason for the Ganges Valley’s filthy air is the combustion of petroleum coke, a residual waste product of Canadian tar sands refining that is imported from the United States. It burns hotter than coal, but that “also contains more planet-warming carbon and far more heart- and lung-damaging sulfur, a key reason few American companies use it. Refineries instead are sending it around the world, especially to energy-hungry India, which last year got almost a fourth of all the fuel-grade ‘petcoke’ the U.S. shipped out. After widespread press coverage of this practice, India’s government said such imports would be phased out. “We should not become the dust bin of the rest of the world,” said Sunita Narain, a pollution authority member who heads the Center for Science and the Environment. “We’re choking to death already.”
Delhi “Gasping for Breath”
India’s highest court has called Delhi’s atmosphere “like a gas chamber.” On December 16, 2015, India’s Supreme Court banned the registration of luxury diesel cars and SUVs with an engine capacity of more than 2,000 cubic centimeters in the National Capital Region (which includes Delhi) until March 31, 2016. It also imposed a one-time pollution tax on small diesel cars.
A lively debate was taking place in the public press over what do about Delhi’s pollution. Coal-fired power and the dung-fueled stoves used by 600 million (mostly rural) Indians seemed off-limits. People need to eat, and at least 300 million in India have no electricity. That left only “four-wheels” —private cars and trucks—open to regulation.
A year after Delhi’s air was likened to that of a gas chamber, it was even worse. The United States Embassy in New Delhi measures air quality on its roof (the same is done at the Chinese embassy in Beijing); on Monday, November 7, 2016, the reading on a scale of zero to 999 (twice the hazardous level of 500, and 16 times the safe limit of 60 was off the chart, entirely beyond the 0-999 range.
Coal Fields a Fiery Moonscape
New Delhi’s particulate level was as dangerous to the city’s 20 million residents as smoking more than two packs of cigarettes daily. “Open a window or a door, and the haze enters the room within seconds. Outside, the sky is white, the sun a white circle so pale that you can barely make it out. The smog is acrid, eye-stinging, and throat-burning, reported Ellen Barry in the New York Times.
Gardiner Harris, also in the New York Times, wrote of Dhanbad, India: “Decades of strip mining have left this town in the heart of India’s coal fields a fiery moonscape, with mountains of black slag, sulfurous air and sickened residents. The city of Dhanbad resembles a postapocalyptic movie set… “With villages surrounded by barren slag heaps half-obscured by acrid smoke spewing from a century-old fire slowly burning through buried coal seams. Mining and fire cause subsidence that swallows homes, with inhabitants’ bodies sometimes never found.”
Dr. Johansen taught journalism, environmentalism, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha from 1982 to 2019, when he retired as emeritus, with 55 books.
Significant protests directed at the construction of coal-powered energy plants in India have met opposition, mainly from farmers whose land has been expropriated, as well as others whose enterprises will be caught in the path of air and water pollution from power plants spewing the world’s dirtiest air.
The protests have been held nationwide, led by farmers, indigenous people, and environmental activists. These protests have been large and sometimes violent, with several dozen people killed over a decade in protests of land expropriation for coal-powered power plants and mining of low-power “brown” coal to fuel them.
India is pursuing an all-out program to develop any available power source to meet swift increases in power demand from population increases. India is or will soon be the most populous country in the world, soon to pass China, both at 1.4 billion. China’s birthrate is falling, while India’s is increasing. China’s authoritarian government has abandoned strict population controls (restricting births to one or two per family) as they showed signs of over-success. By 2022, the Chinese population was declining, and the number of elderly people was increasing.
India’s Population and Pollution Increase
In semi-democratic India, the government tried to control the population once, an abandoned effort because of mass public disapproval, even as the population grew. At the same time, economic development required more power for comforts such as air conditioning in a climate that can turn lethal in summer. The newly affluent are a minority of India’s vast population but enough to continually strain power-producing infrastructure. While India attempts to raise its coal-fired electricity production amidst widespread protests, sun, and wind power are being developed as quickly as possible, but not fast enough.
At the same time, global warming is raising temperatures and speeding up the melting of crucial water resources in the Himalayas. Other mountain ranges further endanger a nation with more than four times the population of the United States living on less than half the land. This is the context of the sometimes violent opposition to developing coal mining and power production in India. The outcome of ballooning demand for power is quickly rising greenhouse-gas production and air pollution that now ranks as the dirtiest in the world.
The World’s Worst Air Quality
Given a preponderance of publicity, many people believe that the world’s worst urban air pollution is in Beijing. According to the World Health Organization, China’s capital runs second in this noxious sweepstakes as the world capital of smog to the Ganges River valley around Delhi.
The Delhi airport sometimes closes for smog so thick that jets cannot safely land. Many people have persistent coughs, and some wear gas masks. Many days, the sun shines through a gaseous haze. Approaching Delhi from the south at 35,000 feet, the setting sun turns the Ganges Valley brown cloud a dull yellow, then a dun orange, then dark red before the sky goes black. Entering the Ganges Valley resembles sinking into an immense bowl of very old, brown clam chowder.
India’s Air Pollution Stunts Children’s Brains
A United Nations report issued in 2017 asserted that air pollution in India, especially in the Ganges Valley, was triggering neuroinflammation, which impedes the cognitive development of children’s brains. At the same time, the World Bank said that air pollution was costing India at least $55 billion a year in 2015, as The Lancet, a prominent British medical journal, said that the same pollution was causing 2.5 million Indian people to die prematurely. India’s premature deaths from dirty air have doubled in 25 years, from 1990 to 2015.
One reason for the Ganges Valley’s filthy air is the combustion of petroleum coke, a residual waste product of Canadian tar sands refining that is imported from the United States. It burns hotter than coal, but that “also contains more planet-warming carbon and far more heart- and lung-damaging sulfur, a key reason few American companies use it. Refineries instead are sending it around the world, especially to energy-hungry India, which last year got almost a fourth of all the fuel-grade ‘petcoke’ the U.S. shipped out. After widespread press coverage of this practice, India’s government said such imports would be phased out. “We should not become the dust bin of the rest of the world,” said Sunita Narain, a pollution authority member who heads the Center for Science and the Environment. “We’re choking to death already.”
Delhi “Gasping for Breath”
India’s highest court has called Delhi’s atmosphere “like a gas chamber.” On December 16, 2015, India’s Supreme Court banned the registration of luxury diesel cars and SUVs with an engine capacity of more than 2,000 cubic centimeters in the National Capital Region (which includes Delhi) until March 31, 2016. It also imposed a one-time pollution tax on small diesel cars.
A lively debate was taking place in the public press over what do about Delhi’s pollution. Coal-fired power and the dung-fueled stoves used by 600 million (mostly rural) Indians seemed off-limits. People need to eat, and at least 300 million in India have no electricity. That left only “four-wheels” —private cars and trucks—open to regulation.
A year after Delhi’s air was likened to that of a gas chamber, it was even worse. The United States Embassy in New Delhi measures air quality on its roof (the same is done at the Chinese embassy in Beijing); on Monday, November 7, 2016, the reading on a scale of zero to 999 (twice the hazardous level of 500, and 16 times the safe limit of 60 was off the chart, entirely beyond the 0-999 range.
Coal Fields a Fiery Moonscape
New Delhi’s particulate level was as dangerous to the city’s 20 million residents as smoking more than two packs of cigarettes daily. “Open a window or a door, and the haze enters the room within seconds. Outside, the sky is white, the sun a white circle so pale that you can barely make it out. The smog is acrid, eye-stinging, and throat-burning, reported Ellen Barry in the New York Times.
Gardiner Harris, also in the New York Times, wrote of Dhanbad, India: “Decades of strip mining have left this town in the heart of India’s coal fields a fiery moonscape, with mountains of black slag, sulfurous air and sickened residents. The city of Dhanbad resembles a postapocalyptic movie set… “With villages surrounded by barren slag heaps half-obscured by acrid smoke spewing from a century-old fire slowly burning through buried coal seams. Mining and fire cause subsidence that swallows homes, with inhabitants’ bodies sometimes never found.”
Dr. Johansen taught journalism, environmentalism, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha from 1982 to 2019, when he retired as emeritus, with 55 books.
