Nerds of Steel

Before we get too “hoity-toity” about the effects of Chinese industrial expansion on the Chinese and global environment, it’s worth being reminded of events in the not so distant past that affected industrial cities in the West and how we talked about them.

The “Donora Death Fog” is one such incident that occurred near Pittsburgh 59 years ago today. A temperature inversion had trapped toxic chemicals from an American Steel & Wire plant and a US Steel zinc works. The human death toll was 20 with thousands sickened by the fog. It was akin to the ‘pea-souper’ fogs that hung over London in the 1950’s and claimed thousands of lives. You can read a contemporary account of the Donora incident courtesy of the Google News archive service. And there is a 1960’s article with more reflection on air pollution in general in a Time magazine cover story. It’s a long and fascinating piece about air pollution in many parts of the West (even contains a short reference to the potential effects of global warming on the polar ice caps). And consider this ominous piece of analysis in 1967:

“…most communities in the U.S. have still to come to grips with the problems. There is still time to do so, but it is dwindling. U.C.L.A. Meteorologist Morris Neiburger points out that the air that now streams across the Pacific from Asia is clean when it reaches the west coast of the U.S. It picks up pollution over the coastal states, loses some over the Rockies, and becomes dirty again as it moves toward the Eastern Seaboard. “Imagine the smog that would accumulate,” he says, “if every one of the 800 million Chinese drove a gasoline-powered automobile—as every Angeleno does.”

The Chinese autos and the new fac tories that produce them will quickly pollute the Asian skies, Neiburger fears, dirtying the air currents even before they reach the U.S. Eventually, if air pollution increases beyond the capacity of the atmosphere to cleanse itself, smog will encircle the earth, he says, “and all of civilization will pass away. Not from a sudden cataclysm, but from gradual suffocation by its own effluents.”