since last year and a little bit earlier a
nasa
has retrofitted a a number of planes
and an international scientific %uh team %uh has been put together under
doctor V. Ramanathan at Scripps institution of oceanography
they are tracking starting April last year there were big articles in the Wall street journal
and all over the west coast though it didn't seem to get the kind of attention
I would have hoped
%uh this international team has been tracking the the pollution from India
and from China
and the clouds really are brown and I can tell you from living in California for thirty
five years that it's this
we had we don't see them here as much
but they're here because we're in a closed loop
and what affects one part of the country eventually comes around and hits other parts of the
planet
but the pollution
is filled with
%uh industrial pollution that includes soot
heavy metals
urban exhaust
power plant emissions including more mercury
acid
ash from coal-fire plants home heating stoves and forest fires
the highly toxic pollution
is measured in what are known as terra grams
one teragram equals two point two billion
pounds
of toxic soot
and assorted other things that are coming here from China it takes about a week give or
take %uh the weather
so in addition to our own pollution figures we are now getting more than forty billion
pounds of pollution annually from asia
and pollution figures have doubled over the last twenty years
the US gets the heaviest
load of these brown clouds
during the springtime and less over the summer
this is a global issue
and we certainly as Americans haven't been
stepping up to the plate
a survey report issued by the world bank in two thousand seven
estimates that there are about four hundred and sixty thousand premature Chinese deaths
a year just from breathing polluted air
and drinking poisoned water
although this was questioned by
an official of China's state environmental protection administration saying that it was
baseless
however the financial times and the Chinese government
which conducted
this research in partnership with the world bank
asked that the lender that is the world bank not publish these estimates for fear that
it could trigger
social unrest
China is beset by growing public alarm about acid rain and toxic water
and has promised by twenty ten
to cut their pollutants by ten percent but even last year they failed to meet last year's
measurements that they had
Done
the united states has %uh got its own shameful statistics and i'd like to just give
you some of them
car emissions
which include benzine which is highly toxic and causes cardiovascular problems
and an elevated blood pressure
kills thirty thousand Americans each year
the risk of cancer from breathing diesel exhaust that we breathe every day
is about ten times more than ingesting all other toxic pollutants combined
with diesel emissions contributing to over seventy percent of the cancer risk
from air pollution in the united states
third we take the equivalent of smoking
twenty cigarettes every day even if we are non-smokers
just in the air pollution that we're breathing every second
the boston area
ranks number five in the country for premature deaths due to diesel pollution annually
and in the state of Massachusetts alone diesel emissions are responsible for the following
figures of annual statistics
four hundred fifty premature deaths
seven hundred non-fatal heart attacks
nine thousand
nine hundred asthma attacks
thirteen thousand respirator symptoms in children
and sixty thousand lost work days
according to the EPA
emissions from power plants contribute to over two thousand eight hundred lung cancers
and deaths
and thirty eight thousand two hundred
heart attacks annually in the united states
so this is just
a little bit of what we are dealing with in terms of figures
of toxicity in the air that we breathe every day
for on a small done