In the most polluted city on earth, the smog is so thick that it seems to consume its source. Iron foundries, smelting plants and cement factories loom out of the haze then disappear once more as you drive along Linfen's roads.
The outlines of smoke stacks blur in the filthy mist. No sooner are the plumes of carbon and sulphur belched out than the chimneys are swallowed up again.
"We only see the sun for a few days each year," said Zhou Huocun, a doctor in the outlying village of Liucunzhen.
"The color of our village is black. It is so dirty that nobody airs their quilts outside any more so we are getting more parasites. I have seen a steady increase in respiratory diseases as the air quality gets worse and worse," he said.
Outside Zhou's hospital, shoes leave marks in the black dust. But it is a different type of carbon footprint that is drawing international attention to this part of the world.
Linfen is the frontline of the battle against global warming. For the past five years, the city of 3.5 million people has been the most polluted place on the planet, bottom of the World Bank's air quality rankings, and a symbol of the worst side-effects of China's breakneck economic growth.
Enveloped by a spectral haze, the city lies at the heart of a 19km industrial belt, fed by the 50 million tonnes of coal mined each year in the nearby hills of Shanxi Province. The New York-based Blacksmith Institute puts it alongside Chernobyl on a list of the planet's 10 most contaminated places.
What Linfen symbolizes is the cost of development in China and the other most populous country: India. Both economies are growing explosively, leading to a rapid expansion of their middle classes. This in turn has seen a growing appetite for power -- one sated by the building of dirty, inefficient coal-fired plants that are slowly cooking the world's atmosphere.
The effects have been dramatic. By 2009 China is predicted to overtake the US as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. India has recently become the fourth biggest polluter, but its steeply rising emissions will see it in third place within a few years.
China's three decades of industrial blitzkrieg has extracted a heavy price. Seventy percent of its rivers are contaminated. In the southern Himalayas, ancient glaciers are melting. Further north, encroaching deserts threaten the livelihoods of 400 million people.
India, which is only half as rich as China, has also suffered. The frequency of catastrophic weather events such as flash flooding, say Indian meteorologists, is increasing. Clouds of brown soot cover the skies above the Indian Ocean for months each year. Agricultural scientists in the subcontinent note rising temperatures caused wheat yields to drop by a 10th last year.
The new consumption culture has brought Western-style affluence that largely rural India can barely cope with. Car sales are growing at 20 percent a year, but there are not enough roads for anyone to drive on. India -- unlike China, Europe and America -- does not set any fuel economy standards.
The result is that in the backstreets of a city such as Kanpur on the banks of the Ganges sit lines of cars, their engines idling in the sun. Kanpur, with 3 million people, is the world's seventh most polluted place, according to the World Bank study. A thick brown haze of exhaust fumes is visible at street level.
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