It’s coal and flu season in China.
The heaviest air pollution in Chinese cities tends to appear when the temperature falls. That makes it an apt time to cozy up with “The People’s Republic of Chemicals” by William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs, a breezy new book that explores China’s pollution woes by tracking a key source of the problem: coal.
U.S. President Barack Obama this week highlighted China’s problems associated with coal when he said, “you would not want your kids growing up in Beijing right now because they could not breathe.”
But fresh from a climate deal with China’s President Xi Jinping, Mr. Obama also said Los Angeles was in similarly bad shape until the U.S. passed its Clean Air Act in 1970. LA is also the reference point for “The People’s Republic of Chemicals.”
The book’s California-based authors previously examined the Golden State’s polluted history in “Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles” to delve into the history and future of coal in China. They find fault from Beijing to Washington, and remind readers that China’s pollution problems transcend geography because “Americans better get used to the airborne incursions from the People’s Republic.”
The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Mr. Jacobs.
WSJ: You trace how the Empress Dowager’s viceroy sought to import British mining techniques and how that prompted the arrival in China in 1899 of a mine engineer, and future U.S. president, named Herbert Hoover to run an operation in Kaiping, Hebei. Coal has an interesting east-west relationship, doesn’t it?
Chip Jacobs: We’re social historians writing about the environment. China because it was so mistrustful and xenophobic just stuck with what it knew: coal.
The idea that it’s this big major blockbuster revelation that they polluted their way into this apocalypse and that it was unpredictable, that is not accurate.
WSJ: You talk about China’s “human vacuum cleaners” of four chemicals: brown-orange nitrogen oxide gases; microscopic bits of ground-level ozone created with nitrogen oxides and the hydrocarbons; sulfur dioxides that are respiratory irritants; and fine particulate matter that when are 2.5 micrometers or smaller can penetrate the lungs and bloodstream.  To reduce risks from this exposure, you discover home remedies in China to clean lungs, one involving kung fu and another white peony root. What do these responses show you?
CJ: We saw this in Los Angeles. These are kind of hokum amateurish responses to a scientific medical problem. From a sociological point of view it does show a kind of depression and an acceptance of a problem. The Chinese people don’t have the avenues of address we do. I do think if you look at the stages of grief, where are the Chinese relative to grieving about the loss of their old environment?
WSJ: The book visits a place you call “Detroit East” and the failing effort to get the electric car market going. What’s your hope for technology to address the problems?
CJ: Technology is always the easy answer to a big social problem.
[Pollution] is a problem of mathematics. So many people are buying so many cars that any efficiencies are being swamped and offset by the number of vehicles on the road. Even if they keep all their promises and reduce coal [use] they are going to exchange a sulfur smog and pollution problem for an ozone hydrocarbon problem.
WSJ: The book says Americans better get used to airborne incursions from the People’s Republic, including nitrogen oxide and particulate matter straight out of the back of Chinese cars. How much risk of this is there?
CJ: It’s an odd thing we aren’t standing more alert to this problem. No doubt some of the ozone coming over the Pacific is being made from products that used to be built here. Ozone is the No. 1 problem.
WSJ: A scary chemical the book highlights is airborne mercury, which you call a “truly global pollutant.” What is mercury’s role here?
CJ: The world has been on an antimercury kick because we realize it’s a neurotoxin. Other countries have denounced it, moved away. [But in China)] it’s also a byproduct of smelting.  Because of its lightness and its ability to undergo changes once it gets into the food chain, it’s definitely affecting the West Coast of the United States. The No. 1 source of mercury contamination in the Great Lakes is from China. It can go a super-long way.
WSJ: The book takes issue with what you call taxpayer subsidized exports of U.S. coal to China, in the form of everything from equipment financing and lending to U.S. mining on federal land. Can you explain how Americans are boosting China’s use of coal?
CJ: We did subsidize coal plants in China, no doubt. Today we still sell China coal. It’s only 1% of their imported coal, but we’re still selling coal. It is only 1% but there’s a symbolic hypocrisy to it that I find very galling.
WSJ: You discuss China’s coalfield development projects, including one in the northwest that is the size of Los Angeles, that you say could dwarf the impact of the Canadian Oil Sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline in terms of their potential to boost greenhouse gas emissions. What gives?
CJ: A lot of the purpose of these coal bases is to produce synthetic natural gas. If they all get built — and only a few have been greenlit so far — it could pretty much drive us to what all the scientists fear. They kind of look like a refinery but spread out over gigantic amount of acreage.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that President Xi said we will cap our coal use at 2030. That’s probably about the time that a lot of these plants are up and running and producing energy that’s going to the populated eastern part of the country.
WSJ: What do you think of the recent U.S.-China climate deal?
WJK/CJ: I think the biggest benefit of this ‘deal’ is it’s inspiring and putting pressure on the other big industrialized polluters, Germany, India, rising countries in South America. I think the peer pressure element is fantastic.
WSJ: Was President Obama correct in his comment about kids and Beijing’s air?
CJ: I think it’s tremendously honest.  The thing you worry about isn’t going out in one or two days of smog. That won’t hurt anybody. But living year after year with it can mess with your molecular structure and set you up for danger. I’m so glad President Obama said that. I wish he would have acknowledged we made a gigantic error in the World Trade Organization when we did not require binding environmental rules.