Our Future? Russian Town Is So Polluted It Gets Black Snowfall, And Residents Are Moving Out

Russians living in the town of Kiselyovsk have one thing to ask from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

They're desperately seeking asylum in the country, and they're asking for it based on an environmental emergency. But legal technicalities are thwarting them.

Kiselyovsk is an infamous town in Russia, located almost on top of an open-pit coal mine. At least 80 percent of the 90,000 residents live near the mines. Because of this, pretty much everything in the town is covered in soot; the plants, their homes, their water and food. It's gotten so bad that the town has a reputation for being the only place in the world with black, coal-saturated snow.

The residents have finally had enough, and are saying the town is inhospitable, so they're seeking asylum as environmental refugees. However, Canada doesn't view fleeing pollution as the same as escaping climate change, so they may be out of luck.

#Snow #darkening induced by #coal #dust in #Kiselyovsk (Siberia) #Sentinel2 (images: February-March 2019) ??? @sentinel_hub @ESA_EO pic.twitter.com/9pukvG2X8s

¡ª Biagio Di Mauro (@DiMauro_b) June 20, 2019

"We chose Canada because the climate there is similar to our region," one of the leaders of the escapist movement told a local newspaper. "So that they [Russian authorities] wouldn't say that we just wanted to move to warm countries."

"We were gasping in the city from coal, exhausting our children almost all winter," a resident says in one of the uploaded videos.

The residents have in fact put out a public cry for help through a number of YouTube videos. However Canada isn't usually wide open to environmental refugees, and especially not in this case where plenty of other parts of Russia remain perfectly hospitable. Some experts however believe this kind of thinking is outdated, as conditions across the world degrade thanks to pollution and climate change.

Think of India for instance. What if this sort of black snow phenomenon began occurring in Kashmir? After all, we've already seen that global warming is causing higher glacier melt in the Himalayas, releasing long-frozen pollutants into the water in the process. In that case, the people there may not want to relocate elsewhere in India, which is technically hospitable but also polluted. Or what about Indians living in drought-stricken states, who are desperate thanks to losing access to even basic drinking water?

It's the sort of policy that begs rethinking for the modern day, now that times and pollution levels have drastically changed in the past few decades.