China's Pollution Problem—and Ours
The Times reports today on China's out-of-control pollution.
Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union....
Some
1,000,000 Chinese a year are estimated to die from pollution-related illness. And what's bad for the Chinese is also bad for us.
China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
China's air pollution sends out a stream of toxic dust across the Pacific that is wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon—and winds up on the West Coast of the United States.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the rise of China as an economic superpower is the greatest single threat (let's call global warming a collective issue) to the viability of the planet since the development of the nuclear weapon.
China's coal-fired pollution has made the Kyoto Protocol pointless; its fishing is depleting the oceans (while the fish that they farm and send overseas is poisoned); they are destroying their own rivers and forcing species such as the beautiful river dolphin into extinction; they are making enormously destructive environmental inroads into Africa and South America; and meantime, the Communist Party seems unwilling and/or incapable of enforcing any kind of environmental regulation, and is in fact cracking down on environmental protest, for fear of social unrest before the Olympics—even though, ironically, the pollution is going to be so bad in Beijing that the viability of the Olympics itself is being threatened.
This is a very scary situation. What do you do if one nation is destroying the world and refuses to do anything about it?
