China's pollution nightmare is now everyone's pollution nightmare
The environmental disaster springs largely from its emulation of the
American way of life - so let's set a better example.
By Jacques Leslie
from the March 19, 2008 edition
The emergence of China as a dominant economic power is an epochal
event, occasioning the most massive and rapid redistribution of the
earth's resources in human history. The country has also become a
ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up
international commodity prices and ****pping rates while its middle
class, projected to jump to 700 million by 2020, is learning the
gratifications of consumerism.
The catch is that China has become not just the world's manufacturer
but its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion.
A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its
forests have disappeared. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires,
sometimes triggered by lightning or mining accidents, consume 200
million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A
miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-
burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities.
Meanwhile, roughly 70 percent of the world's discarded computers and
electronic equipment ends up in China, where it is scavenged for
usable parts and then abandoned, polluting soil and groundwater with
toxic metals. If unchecked, such devastation will not just put an
abrupt end to China's economic growth, but, in concert with other
environmentally heedless nations (in particular, the US, India, and
Brazil), will cause mortal havoc in societies and ecosystems
throughout the world.
The fallout
The process is already under way. Acid rain caused by China's sulfur-
dioxide emissions severely damages forests and watersheds in Korea and
Japan and impairs air quality in the US. Every major river system
flowing out of China is threatened with one sort of cataclysm or
another. The surge in untreated waste and agricultural runoff pouring
into the Yellow and China Seas has caused frequent fish die-offs, and
overfi****ng is endangering many ocean species.
The growing Chinese taste for furs and exotic foods and pets is
devastating neighboring countries' populations of everything from
gazelles to wolves, and turtles to parrots, while its appetite for
shark fin soup is causing drastic declines in shark populations
throughout the oceans. According to a study published in Science in
March 2007, the absence of the oceans' top predators is causing a
resurgence of skates and rays, which are in turn destroying scallop
fisheries along America's Eastern Seaboard. Enthusiasm for traditional
Chinese medicine is causing huge declines in populations of hundreds
of animals - including tigers, pangolins, and sea horses. Seeking oil,
timber, and other natural resources, China is building massive roads,
bridges, and dams throughout Africa, often disregarding international
environmental and social standards.
China has also depended on im****ts of illegally cut wood in becoming
the world's wood workshop, supplying oblivious consumers in the US and
Europe with furniture, flooring, and plywood. Chinese wood
manufacturers have already consumed the natural forests of Thailand,
Cambodia, and the Philippines, and at current rates will swallow the
forests of Indonesia, Burma, Papua New Guinea, and the vast Russian
Far East within two decades. Most of these forests are formally
protected by law or regulation, but corruption and ineffectual
enforcement have fostered a flouri****ng illegal trade.
China has probably already overtaken the US as the world's leading
emitter of CO2, and the country's ecosystems are displaying climate
change's consequences: Arid northern China is drying out, the wet
south is seeing more and more flooding, and, according to a June 2007
Greenpeace re****t, 80 percent of the Himalayan glaciers that feed
Asia's mightiest rivers could disappear by 2035. Such a development
would jeopardize hundreds of millions of people who depend on the
rivers for their livelihood.
Nevertheless, China has maintained that the developed countries bear
primary responsibility for global warming and must be the first to
counter it. The argument has some merit: After all, the US alone is
responsible for a quarter of the man-made greenhouse gases pumped into
the earth's atmosphere over time, while China's ***ulative
contribution is still less than a third as much. And even today,
China's per capita carbon-dioxide emissions are less than a fifth of
America's. Yet China's refusal to curb emissions soon could single-
handedly wipe out reductions made elsewhere, crippling the
international effort.
All this is common knowledge among those who follow Chinese
environmental trends. Still, the news has not shaken China out of its
money-induced euphoria. One likely reason is that China's growth rate
takes no account of the environmental devastation the boom has caused.
In 2006, an official at China's State Council said environmental
damage (everything from crop loss to the price of healthcare) cost 10
percent of its gross domestic product - all of the economy's
celebrated growth. Vaclav Smil, a highly respected China scholar at
the University of Manitoba, pegs both the environmental-damage rate
and the growth rate closer to 7 percent, "so basically every year
environmental damage wipes out the GDP growth," Mr. Smil says.
Who's to blame
Of course, what the Chinese are chiefly guilty of is emulating the
American economic model. Since the 1980s, Chinese policymakers have
gone on foreign-study missions to figure out how developed countries
fostered economic growth. As Doug Ogden, former director of the Energy
Foundation's China Sustainable Energy Program, puts it, "It's not
surprising that the lessons the Chinese drew from their international
experiences are often based on sprawl development, private automobile
owner****p, and highly energy-consumptive practices," since the
economies they studied all possess those.
One of the Chinese officials' most fateful choices was to promote the
automobile industry as a pillar of China's economy. The decision must
have seemed obvious. After all, cars are the foundations of the
American, Japanese, and South Korean economies, generating economic
activity.
Now China's car industry is the world's third largest, but many of its
cities are paralyzed by traffic, the inhabitants are choking on the
fumes, and China's foreign policy increasingly revolves around
courting outcast nations such as Sudan to obtain oil at premium
prices. From an international perspective, the potential impact on
climate change is worst of all. Motor vehicles now account for no more
than 3 or 4 percent of China's greenhouse-gas emissions, but the
industry is still nascent. According to one projection, the number of
cars on Chinese roads will grow from 33 million to 130 million during
the next 12 years.
What now?
The United States passed up the op****tunity it had at the beginning of
China's economic transformation to guide it toward sustainability, and
the loss is already incalculable. But what is left is the one option
that would have served Americans (and the world) best all along, which
is to model environmental sanity.
Stop buying products made from illegally cut wood. Stop building coal-
fired power plants. Instead of subsidizing oil companies, promote
sustainable-energy technologies. Build effective mass-transit systems
in every city. Make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. Such
acts would not just revive our capacity for moral suasion; given the
breadth of the world's environmental crisis, they are prerequisites
for self-preservation.
* Jacques Leslie is an environmental writer and the author of "Deep
Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the
Environment." This piece was adapted from one published in Mother
Jones magazine.
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