The Dirtiest Place on the Planet
It’s the Chinese city of Linfen, where breathing the air for a day or so is about the equivalent of smoking three packs of cigarettes.
The scary thing is that there are still many cities like this in China. China is home to 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world.
Linfen produces what every country with more than one billion people needs – a ton of energy. It is an endless landscape of factories, each spewing mounds of toxic chemicals into the air, poisoning the land and water.
There are no clouds, just a permanent toxic smog hanging over the city. Linfen is located in the middle of Shanxi Province. Every day, thousands of coal trucks commute between Linfen and other Chinese cities. Then they come back empty and ask for more.
China faces both local problems and global environmental challenges. So the combined effects of climate change and local pollution are having huge consequences. Many environmental problems in China are closely related to energy consumption.
