(SKY news) As a major climate conference gets underway in Washington, Sky News looks at the biggest open mine in Asia to examine China's deadly obsession with coal.
A giant truck looms behind Sharp From the lip of the An Tai Bao open cast mine, peering half a mile down to the floor of the workings, the monstrous tipper trucks with their 15 foot high wheels look like baby toys.
The mine workings stretch as far as the eye can see. This is the biggest open cast mine in Asia - a six hour drive west from Beijing.
Here in Shanxi Province Coal is King - and this is its castle.
This one region produces 2.5 billion - yes billion - tons of coal. That's more than Britain, Japan and the United States put together.
China's love affair with the black stuff is the catalyst for the biggest coal rush since the Industrial Revolution.
They are digging round-the-clock in 21,000 mines across China.
This is the fuel for China's coal fired power stations. It is the dirtiest energy source in the world.
The clouds of smoke, chemicals and carbon dioxide from China's more than 2,000 power stations, drifting across the Pacific towards the California coast, are thick enough to be seen from space.
After a half hour drive dodging the convoys of giant, 40 foot high Komatsu tipper trucks trailing flumes of coal dust, we arrived at the railhead.
The wagons stretched into the distance. Every 40 seconds, with a rattling roar growing in intensity, a hopper drop-filled another wagon as it passed slowly under the delivery shute .
Smog fills the air at the mineIt took just 40 minutes to fill the 110-wagon train with 8,000 tons of coal, and this process goes on night and day. Train after train.
As we left, tiny black granules of coal dust were drifting down from a gun-grey polluted sky. Our hands and faces were black as we drove away.
On the long journey back to Beijing, the police directed us off the motorway. The three lane highway was blocked as a convoy of coal lorries 30 miles long waited for nightfall for clearance to pass through Beijing.
China's appetite for coal is insatiable and also deadly.
Four hundred thousand people die prematurely because of pollution every year. Cancer rates are soaring.
China may have become the workshop of the world, but this is the real price you pay for those cut-price supermarket deals in Birmingham, Boston and Buenos Aires.