The AP carries a hand—wringing dispatch about pollution from China blowing across the Pacific, and being detected on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco.

On a mountaintop overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Steven Cliff collects evidence of an industrial revolution taking place thousands of miles away.

The tiny, airborne particles Cliff gathers at an air monitoring station just north of San Francisco drifted over the ocean from coal—fired power plants, smelters, dust storms and diesel trucks in China and other Asian countries.

 

Researchers say the environmental impact of China's breakneck economic growth is being felt well beyond its borders. They worry that as China consumes more fossil fuels to feed its energy—hungry economy, the U.S. could see a sharp increase in trans—Pacific pollution that could affect human health, worsen air quality and alter climate patterns.

"We're going to see increased particulate pollution from the expansion of China for the foreseeable future," said Cliff, a research engineer at the University of California, Davis [....]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that on certain days nearly 25 percent of the particulate matter in the skies above Los Angeles can be traced to China. Some experts predict China could one day account for a third of all California's air pollution.

A serious problem, to be sure. But amongst all the facts in figure in the article, one phrase does not occur: The Kyoto Protocols.

You see, China (and India) are not bound to the Kyoto limits on emissions. So Kyoto, for all the emphasis placed on it in left wing strongholds like Marin County, does nothing about the more serious threats from China, threats that involve particulate matter, indisputably serious, whatever you think about the global warning hypothesis.

Thanks to the anti—Western bias of the left and its handmaidens at the AP, Kyoto accomplishes nothing, and that fact is conveniently unreported.

Hat tip: Jack Kemp, who adds:

Can you see the mayors of Sausalito and Berkeley leading a protest march on the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco? How about a Mothers March Against Air Polution and Cancer being held by Marin County liberals? It will happen around the same time that ice skates become popular in Hell

Thomas Lifson  7 29 06