Bloomberg View: How Shale Gas Can Save China From Itself

For years the Chinese have been told that the blinding, sooty haze choking Beijing and other cities is the price of progress. Yet China’s appetite for energy is literally killing its people. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on data compiled between 1980 and 2000, estimated that pollution caused by burning coal stripped five years from the life expectancy of Chinese in the northern half of the country—a collective loss of 2.5 billion years. A separate study published in December in the Lancet attributed about a million deaths a year in China to air pollution.

Although other factors have contributed to the blackening of China’s skies—including millions of cars and motorbikes clogging roads—coal remains the deadliest. In the past decade, China’s coal consumption has more than doubled. It now burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined. In the first three months of the year, levels of PM-10 (particulates with a diameter of 10 micrometers or less) in Beijing were almost 30 percent greater than during the same period a year earlier.