Harbin, northeast China’s largest and most important city, shut down many normal operations last week – including schools, airport and bus routes – because of choking smog that made it difficult to see the hand in front of one’s face.

Fine particulate matter readings were measured 40 times higher than the international safety standard set by the World Health Organization. The dangerous conditions were blamed on the firing up of coal-based heating systems and the practice of area farmers of burning crop stubble.

Harbin is not alone. Many Chinese cities struggle with serious pollution issues. Beijing, the nation’s capital, and nearby Tianjin are considered among the more polluted cities in the world. Research conducted by the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year concluded air pollution has caused the loss of more than 2.5 billion years of life expectancy in China. No wonder there was so much concern for the health of athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

China will one day pass the United States as the largest economy in the world. But the question remains how much that march will be affected by its environmental liabilities, and at what human cost.

Which brings us to the United States. For all the talk a few decades ago about the nation’s air pollution issues, it’s enlightening to observe that even the worst American cities are way, way down the international most-polluted list. Los Angeles, Chicago and New York all rank far below the worst offenders. Beijing’s air is 500 times more polluted than New York’s.

Another example of the United States’ 40-year commitment to improving air quality can be seen here in the northeast in the progress made in battling acid rain, which at one time was considered one of the region’s more vexing environmental challenges. It doesn’t seem that long ago that acid rain regularly made headlines because of its debilitating effects on flora and fauna. Today, the term has all but disappeared from public discourse.

A demonstrative example of the shift in environmental priorities can be found at the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation’s website. Hubbard Brook’s headquarters is nestled in the White Mountains town of North Woodstock, just down the road from Lincoln and Franconia Notch. It takes pride in the fact that it’s among the “longest-running and most comprehensive ecosystem studies in the world.”

Its most recent report detailing the seriousness of acid rain was issued a dozen years ago, in 2001, and to find it on the organization’s website takes a couple minutes of targeted searching.

We don’t mean to suggest the acid rain issue is solved, but progress since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970 has been pretty impressive.

Sulphur dioxide emissions, the chemical culprit of acid rain, have dropped 40 percent since the 1990s. In 2007, total sulphur dioxide emissions reached the 2010 statutory goal set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The overall costs of complying with the program have been one-fourth of original estimates, according to the EPA.

So while there was at the time much whining and hand-wringing over America’s environmental initiatives, and even calls by some politicians to abolish the EPA, one needs only look to China to see what might have been.

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