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Can the World Survive China’s Headlong Rush to Emulate the American Way of Life?
Jacques Leslie, Mother Jones
…CHINA EATS THE WORLD
the emergence of China as a dominant economic power is an epochal event, as significant as the United States’ ascendancy after World War II. It is in many ways an astonishment, starting with the ideological about-face that enabled it, the throwing over of Maoist values for plainly capitalist ones starting in the late 1970s. So thorough is the change that the 19-foot-tall portrait of a stolid, potato-faced Mao Zedong that still looms over traffic-choked, commerce-suffused Tiananmen Square looks paradoxical, even startling, in seeming need of an update in which Mao winks-or sobs-in blinking neon. Meanwhile, inside Beijing’s Forbidden City, the heart of old China, buildings with such intoxicating names as Hall of Preserved Harmony and Palace of Heavenly Purity bear signs reading, “Made Possible by the American Express Company.”
The grander astonishment is the most massive and rapid redistribution of the earth’s resources in human history. In a mere two and a half decades, China has awakened from Maoist stagnancy to become the world’s manufacturer. Among the planet’s 193 nations, it is now first in production of coal, steel, cement, and 10 kinds of metal; it produces half the world’s cameras and nearly a third of its TVs, and by 2015 may produce the most cars. It boasts factories that can accommodate 200,000 workers, and towns that make 60 percent of the world’s buttons, half the world’s silk neckties, and half the world’s fireworks, respectively.
China has also become a ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world’s biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets.
(10 December 2007)
Author Jacque Leslie writes:
A narrative nonfiction account of the devastating international impacts of China’s economic growth, including the decimation of forests in Russia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America; highly toxic air pollutants reaching all the way across the U.S. and into the Atlantic; a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions; and many, many others.
As China Goes, So Goes Global Warming
Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times
… the fingers of many experts on energy and the environment [at the Bali climate conference] point both west and east – to the United States and China.
The established superpower arose riding a wave of fossil-fueled prosperity. The emerging one, sitting on a wealth of coal, sees few reasons not to follow suit; after all, it has only just caught its wave (with India and others in hot pursuit).
Yet the tide can only be turned, a host of scientists and economists with varied perspectives agree, if China and other rising powers like India speed through the familiar path in nation building – resource extraction, industrial and economic growth, accompanying despoliation, and then environmental restoration and protection. If they don’t, their emissions will eventually swamp all other sources, according to many analyses.
Richard Richels, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, helped produce an ominous forecast: even if the established industrial powers turned off every power plant and car right now, unless there are changes in policy in poorer countries the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could still reach 450 parts per million – a level deemed unacceptably dangerous by many scientists – by 2070. (If no one does anything, that threshold is reached in 2040.)
Libertarians say that once countries get rich, they’ll do the right thing for the climate. But critics of this view say the long life of carbon dioxide (and of sources like the coal-burning plants China is building at the rate of one a week) mean that waiting just compounds the problem beyond fixing.
(16 December 2007)
‘Eco-city’ in China gives off aroma of green – money
Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers
CHONGMING ISLAND, China – The world’s first major eco-city designed from the ground up to minimize environmental impact may soon take shape on this island near Shanghai. That is, if developers don’t hijack the plan.
As word spreads of the Dongtan Eco-City and its whisper-quiet streets and canals, where battery-powered buses will transport residents, the whiff of money is in the air, and developers already talk of building a Disney theme park to raise property values.
Dongtan is still just a vision. Groundbreaking won’t occur until next year. On the drawing boards, though, it’s a showcase of low-impact living. Each resident will live within a seven-minute walk of the buses and solar-powered water taxis that will pulse silently through the city.
Such an eco-city would be a novelty in what’s arguably the most polluted major country in the world, a place where rivers run fetid and skies often darken from smog. China’s leaders endorse Dongtan as the nation’s first major sustainable urban project.
(17 December 2007)
In China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters
David Barboza, New York Times
China is the biggest producer and exporter of seafood in the world, but contaminated water has created serious food safety and environmental problems.
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FUQING, China — Here in southern China, beneath the looming mountains of Fujian Province, lie dozens of enormous ponds filled with murky brown water and teeming with eels, shrimp and tilapia, much of it destined for markets in Japan and the West. Fuqing is one of the centers of a booming industry that over two decades has transformed this country into the biggest producer and exporter of seafood in the world, and the fastest-growing supplier to the United States. But that growth is threatened by the two most glaring environmental weaknesses in China: acute water shortages and water supplies contaminated by sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff that includes pesticides. The fish farms, in turn, are discharging wastewater that further pollutes the water supply.
(14 December 2007)
The eighth in a series of articles and multimedia on China and the environment. See original article for links to the other articles. -BA
China says it will run short of water by 2030
Chris Buckley, Reuters
Global warming will make drought an increasingly serious threat, Beijing warns
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will have exploited all available water supplies to the limit by 2030, the government has warned, ordering officials to prepare for worse to come as global warming and economic expansion drain lakes and rivers.
As well, a state newspaper warned on Friday that drought next year could hit crops and stoke already heady inflation.
China’s surface and underground water supplies are under strain from feverish economic growth and a population passing 1.3 billion. And scarcity will worsen with global warming, the central government warned in a directive.
(15 December 2007)
