It wasn't a good thing to start for people living in China as smog levels were reported to be serious.
China has been reported to be covered by thick blanket of toxic smog, causing road closures and flight cancellations.
"On the first day of 2017 in Beijing, concentrations of tiny particles that penetrate deep into the lungs climbed as high as 24 times levels recommended by the World Health Organization," The Guardian reported.
As Reuters notes, smog alerts are relatively typical in northern China, where the winter cold has coal power plants working hard to meet demand. However, the pollution this time around was definitely bad -- concentrations of harmful PM2.5 particles were about 50 times higher than World Health Organization guidelines. China has been eager to reduce pollution in recent years, but it's clear that existing efforts haven't been enough to prevent smog from causing serious disruptions.
That bout of smog saw 460 million people, a population greater than North America, breathing toxic air, according to Greenpeace.
As pollution covered swaths of the country on New Year's Eve, China announced plans to increase coal output to 3.9 billion tonnes by 2020.
