Guangzhou, China: Every night, columns of hulking blue and red freight trucks invade China’s major cities with a reverberating roar of engines and dark clouds of diesel exhaust so thick it dims headlights.
By daybreak in this sprawling metropolis in southeastern China, residents near thoroughfares who leave their windows open overnight find their faces stiff with a dark layer of diesel soot.
After Mary Leung opens her tiny open-air shop along a major road soon after dawn, she must wipe the soot off her countertops and tables; the tiny yellow-and-olive bird that has kept her company is harder to clean.
Trucks are the mules of China’s spectacularly expanding economy—ubiquitous and essential, yet highly noxious.
Trucks here burn diesel contaminated with more than 130 times the pollution-causing sulphur that the US allows in most diesel. While car sales in China are now growing even faster than truck sales, trucks are by far the largest source of street-level pollution.
Tiny particles of sulphur-laden soot penetrate deep into residents’ lungs, interfering with the absorption of oxygen. Nitrogen oxides from truck exhaust, which build all night because cities limit truck traffic by day, bind each morning with petrol fumes from China’s growing car fleet to form dense smog that inflames lungs and can cause severe coughing and asthma.
The 10 million trucks on Chinese roads, more than a quarter of all vehicles in this country, are a major reason that China accounts for half the world’s annual increase in oil consumption. Sating their thirst helped push the price of oil to record levels this year, before a recent decline, and has propelled China past the US this year as the world’s largest emitter of global-warming gases.
Yet, cleaning up truck pollution presents complex problems for China’s leaders.
For instance, regulators have begun raising emissions standards for new trucks, but have left millions of older ones belching black smoke. Forcing businesses and farmers to buy more-expensive vehicles could put a drag on the economy, which already faces inflationary pressure from rising food prices and other costs.
That fear of inflation—not to mention political and social unrest—has led Beijing to prevent the country’s mostly state-owned oil firms from increasing diesel prices at the pump in pace with global oil prices. But price controls create a vicious circle. Oil giants such as China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec), losing money on every gallon of diesel they refine because of the low sales prices, upgrade refineries slowly, if at all, and seek out cheap crude with high levels of sulphur to make diesel, negating the effects of higher emissions standards for new vehicles.
“Sinopec is trying our best to purchase low-quality crudes—much heavier and more sulphur content,” said Evan Jia, a Sinopec spokesman. “We buy those kinds of crudes to lower the purchasing cost.”