Banning Coal Puts Poor at Risk of Freezing.
JOHN VAUSE, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Welcome back, everybody, you're watching CNN NEWSROOM live from Los Angeles. I'm John Vause. We'll check the headlines this hour:</s>MATT RIVERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Look right behind me now, John. It's a perfectly blue sky day here in Beijing and frankly that's weird for this time of year. Last year, the year before that, the year before that, so on and so forth, the winter is usually when the air pollution is terrible and yet this winter things have been drastically different. And the only way the government can do that is by taking drastic measures. But by doing so, it has left some of the country's most vulnerable people behind.</s>RIVERS (voice-over): The winter in Northern China doesn't care if you're poor. It doesn't care that Huang Yi-min (ph) is 75, has heart problems, is partially paralyzed. The harsh air is relentless. And in the depths of poverty, coal is his only way to fight back. "Coal is so dirty. Leaves black soot all over," he says. So one shovelful at a time he feeds a furnace next to his bed -- not ideal but it's the only kind of heat he can afford, which is why the government ban on coal is so brutal. "I had to burn it secretly," he says. "How else could we survive?" Coal is cheap and the primary heat source here, where many household incomes are as little as a few dollars a day. But burning coal is also a major reason why the air here can look like this, a "Mad Max" style hellscape, eye-burning air pollution so thick you can taste it. So in October 2017 the Hubei (ph) province government banned residential coal use. Instead they hastily installed these yellow pipes meant to carry cleaner natural gas to people's homes.</s>RIVERS: But what homeowners are telling us is that buying that natural gas to their heat their homes would be way more expensive than using coal and, in most cases, it would be completely unaffordable.</s>RIVERS (voice-over): But even if you had enough money to buy natural gas, supply shortages meant that a lot of these pipes are empty. People were freezing; coal was still being burned and the public backlash was fierce, unusual in Communist China. So Beijing took notice. The ban on burning coal was lifted in December but the effects have lingered. Mr. Wong's (ph) hands aren't usually clean but they were during the ban because he wasn't allowed to sell coal anymore. He is back at it now but business isn't good. "People don't dare buy too much," he says. "They fear coal could be banned again at any moment." Huang Yi-min (ph) resents the choice --</s>RIVERS (voice-over): -- that he was forced to make: follow the law or freeze. "We are not being taken care of by the people in Beijing. They don't listen to us." The government says it's working on new lasting solutions but the winter won't wait while they figure things out.</s>RIVERS: And really the people that we spoke to, the interesting thing is that they all want cleaner air. They all want the government to do something. They don't want to keep burning coal. It is not fun to live in pollution like we see here in Beijing so often and that illustrates the dilemma for the government. They need to make sure the air is cleaner but figuring out how to do that in a way that doesn't drastically change the landscape, that doesn't slow economic growth, that doesn't make people freeze during the wintertime, that is their challenge. It's their persistent challenge that's going to continue as we exit this winter and look ahead to 2018-2019 coming up -- John.</s>VAUSE: It's been a problem for a while and it will be a problem for a while again. Matt, thank you, Matt Rivers there, live in Beijing. Appreciate it, thank you. Britain has been battling the beast from the east, a monster of a winter storm with subzero temperatures that has chilled much of Europe. The brutal weather has blanketed Britain in heavy snow, closing hundreds of schools and disrupting travel. And forecasters expect more snow in the coming hours. Weill, sometimes dreams do come true. Hugh Jackman explains how he stumbled into an acting career which has exceeded all of his expectations.