The centre of Hohhot is like any Chinese provincial capital these days. Glittering new buildings of marble and glass, and some of the ones that look like they were faced with bathroom tiles.
The traffic is a motley and undisciplined collection of VW Jettas (extraordinarily popular in China), carts, motorbikes and bicycles, punctuated by the odd black Audi with tinted windows.
But step off the main drag into the 'burbs and it's another world. Small alleyways, with chimneys belching out coal fumes and ancient braziers burning coal to roast seeds and cook kebabs.
When we landed here the hostess told us it was -11, and that was at 10am in the morning. So if you had coal you would burn it too, and that's what they have in huge quantities here in inner Mongolia.
Down the street from the man with the pumpkin seeds, and casting its pollution onto the winter air, is one of Hohhots coal power stations, scheduled to be closed because its emissions are too dirty. But another one will be built in its place.
Inner Mongolia and Shanxi province have the most coal reserves in China and so not surprisingly power plants have been built close to the mines.
We've been allowed to visit Tuoketuo, which started construction in 2000. When it's completed next year it will be the biggest thermal plant in Asia, supplying one third of the electricity needed by Beijing, a city of 16 million people.
It looks relatively clean and very modern. Tuoketuo's plant manager tells us about the plant's elaborate mechanisms to remove sulphur, which have been praised by no less than President Hu Jintao, who visited recently. However he is less forthcoming about the plants CO2 emissions saying only that they are not a serious problem.
But www.carma.org ( Carbon Monitoring for Action), which has just done a study of 50,000 power stations worldwide, estimates Tuoketuo's emissions are 32 million tonnes of CO2 and ranks it as one of the dirtiest worldwide because of its use of coal.
Three trains a day and hundreds of trucks deliver coal here from a nearby mine, and the plant manager confirms that at the moment they are burning 40,000 tonnes of coal a day.
The Center for Global Development, which produced the CARMA report, estimates that China's carbon emissions per capita are estimated to be less than a quarter of those of the US. And this is China's argument when others try to get it to commit to caps on its emissions. Its point is that most of the carbon in the atmosphere was put there by western countries and that they, rather than developing countries, have the primary responsibility to tackle the issue.
It's difficult not to have some sympathy with the Chinese, but then you hear stories about illegally built plants, un-enforced environmental legislation and an unwillingness by local officials to shut down dirty and outdated plants.
This is when you realise that China's lack of democracy has real environmental effects. Well-meaning central government officials and environmental experts in Beijing can send down directives to local governments, but without all the checks and balances of free media, independent judiciary, local elections and all the other paraphernalia of a democratic state, there is no effective pressure coming from the bottom up.
China has promised it will reduce energy use per unit of output by 20% by 2010, but with a still booming economy that means emissions will continue to rise for years to come.
Margaret Ward, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia
