Tuesday, February 28, 2006
I like Chinese (and yet...)
Just got my hands on December's Harper's, which has an insightful, truly frightening article about China, its "industrial revolution" and the environment. I cannot but think that this is the biggest challenge facing the world going forward.
According to the writer, China has more than 100 cities with 1 million inhabitants. It is adding an urban infrastructure equivalent to Houston every month. Environmental degradation, poisoning of natural resources, is becoming commonplace. There may be up to 70,000 protests in China every year, many of them about toxic factories. Every year, it adds the equivalent of Brazil's entire generating capacity to its electrical grid, but 24 of 31 provinces had power shortages in 2004. China already produces 16% of the world's CO2, against the US's 25%, and will overtake the US sometime in the next 25 years.
What's really scary is how difficult it will be to reverse any of this: massive processes like urbanisation and industrialisation are so hard to turn around, for any number of reasons, including inertia, human behaviour, sociology and even morality - why shouldn't the Chinese get the benefits of modernity?
The argument (upheld 95-0 by the US Senate in 1997 and by the pusillanimous John Kerry in 2004*) that this means China has to make the same cutbacks as the developed world in Kyoto and other instruments like it, also doesn't wash. For one, it's hard to see how China really could. For another, as the author (Bill McKibben) eloquently writes:
As he says, this means we face an actual tragedy "because, right now, a rapidly growing China is actually accomplishing some measurable good with its growth. People are enjoying some meat, sending their brothers to school, heating their huts." And he doesn't see America making major changes to its way of life (I don't either).
I have no suggestions. I just feel it's terribly depressing.
* The same pathetic man, remember, who didn't mention Guantanamo once in his "campaign".
According to the writer, China has more than 100 cities with 1 million inhabitants. It is adding an urban infrastructure equivalent to Houston every month. Environmental degradation, poisoning of natural resources, is becoming commonplace. There may be up to 70,000 protests in China every year, many of them about toxic factories. Every year, it adds the equivalent of Brazil's entire generating capacity to its electrical grid, but 24 of 31 provinces had power shortages in 2004. China already produces 16% of the world's CO2, against the US's 25%, and will overtake the US sometime in the next 25 years.
What's really scary is how difficult it will be to reverse any of this: massive processes like urbanisation and industrialisation are so hard to turn around, for any number of reasons, including inertia, human behaviour, sociology and even morality - why shouldn't the Chinese get the benefits of modernity?
The argument (upheld 95-0 by the US Senate in 1997 and by the pusillanimous John Kerry in 2004*) that this means China has to make the same cutbacks as the developed world in Kyoto and other instruments like it, also doesn't wash. For one, it's hard to see how China really could. For another, as the author (Bill McKibben) eloquently writes:
[M]easuring by people, when China passes the United States as the world's largest carbon emitter, the average Chinese will still be producing only a quarter as much carbon as the average American. And of course it goes deeper than that--the reason the atmosphere is filled to the danger point with carbon is because we've already been filling it for two centuries, burning coal and oil to get rich while the Chinese have been staying poor. As Ma Jun, a daring environmentalist who's taken big risks to write his books, told me one day, "Nearly 80 percent of the carbon dioxide has come from 200 years of the industrial world. Let's be realistic. Those historic burdens have to be shouldered by those counties that have enjoyed the benefits."
As he says, this means we face an actual tragedy "because, right now, a rapidly growing China is actually accomplishing some measurable good with its growth. People are enjoying some meat, sending their brothers to school, heating their huts." And he doesn't see America making major changes to its way of life (I don't either).
I have no suggestions. I just feel it's terribly depressing.
* The same pathetic man, remember, who didn't mention Guantanamo once in his "campaign".
Comments:
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I don't think that's what I'm saying (or the article). It's that, first, we (ie, the West, and the US in particular) are more able to do things about it than China is, and second, the current degradation of the Earth has been caused by the industrial West, not by China, so we bear the greater burden of sorting things out now. Looking forward, from an equity standpoint, one could not say China is more responsible than the US until it pollutes four times as much as the US.
Sure, China needs to get a handle on its environmental effects, and the rest of the world should try to help it (for our own sakes), but the tragedy that the author writes about is twofold: China is right now seeing the huge benefits that have the unfortunate side-effects of pollution (as the West did in its own industrial age); and the US is really not helping things at all.
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Sure, China needs to get a handle on its environmental effects, and the rest of the world should try to help it (for our own sakes), but the tragedy that the author writes about is twofold: China is right now seeing the huge benefits that have the unfortunate side-effects of pollution (as the West did in its own industrial age); and the US is really not helping things at all.
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