heres a good article on china polution, it's really hard to describe unless you experience yourself. i work in xianju city and its miserable there,but on the ocasional day when it's windy is tolerable. you get a sore throat from just walking outside, sun is green when you can see it, smog is like a thick fog, no clean rivers or lakes, acid rain.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Environmental Costs in China
This commentary is by the vice-minister of China’s state Environmental Protection Administration:
Comment: China must pay pollution debt now or face bankruptcy, by Pan Yue, Project Syndicate: For a decade, the world has wondered when China’s leaders will recognise the staggering environmental crisis confronting their country.
This year, we got an answer: A new Five-Year Plan that makes environmental protection a priority. A storm of green propaganda has followed, and the government now talks about using "Green GDP" to measure development. But will all this talk amount to real progress?
While the central government admits to some of the environmental degradation caused by rapid economic growth, the picture it paints is incomplete. Consider "Green GDP". This spring, the state Environmental Protection Administration produced the country’s first official estimate of ... environmental losses. According to these calculations, it would cost US$84 billion (RM302 billion ) to clean up the pollution produced in 2004, or three per cent of GDP for that year. But more realistic estimates put environmental damage at 8-13 per cent ... each year, which means that China has lost almost everything it has gained since the late 1970s due to pollution.
China’s environmental problems, complex as the causes may be, can ultimately be attributed to our understanding of Marxism. For most of our recent history, we saw in Marxism only a philosophy of class struggle. We believed that economic development would solve all our problems. In the reform period, this misreading of Marx morphed into an unrestrained pursuit of material gain devoid of morality. Traditional Chinese culture, with its emphasis on harmony between human beings and nature, was thrown aside.
As a result, China’s economy is dominated by resource-hungry and inefficient polluters, such as coal and mineral mines, textile and paper mills, iron and steel makers, and petrochemical factories. Our cities are exploding in size, depleting water resources and creating horrific traffic congestion.
One-quarter of China’s people drink substandard water; one-third of urbanites breathe polluted air. Moreover, the country recently witnessed a spate of environmental accidents. Indeed, on average, China suffers a major water pollution accident every other day.
Although China has signed the Kyoto Protocol and some 50 other international environmental accords, we do little to honour them. ... Unfortunately, unlike Western countries, we cannot afford to wait until our per capita annual GDP reaches US$10,000 before tackling our environmental problems. Our experts predict that the environmental crisis will intensify to a critical stage by the time China’s per capita annual GDP reaches just US$3,000.
Making matters worse, ... the ... concept of a "social contract" based on rights and obligations — the essential values that constitute the most important precondition for effective environmental protection — goes ignored. As a result, environmental protection projects often fail to be included in calculating production costs. Scarcely anyone bothers to consider the environmental costs to, or rights of, the country’s poor and powerless. It is imperative that environmental factors figure in China’s macroeconomic planning in a real way. ...
Finally, China needs a new energy strategy. Industrialised nations have developed and made great use of nuclear, solar, wind and bio-gas, and other renewable energy resources. China’s technological capacities in this sector lag behind even other developing nations such as India and Pakistan, and its reliance on coal is one of the greatest threats to the global climate. For now, there is simply no alternative. But in the long run, clean energy will be the only way to bring economic growth without doing irreparable environmental damage.
Government cannot solve these problems on its own. China’s people have the biggest stake in environmental protection, and so must become the driving force. ... But ultimate power does rest with the government. China’s leaders need to ... move beyond rhetoric. They must give real power to environmental officials to implement laws and close legal loopholes. ...
China is dangerously near a crisis point. The country’s enormous environmental debt will have to be paid, one way or another. China must exercise the foresight needed to begin paying this debt now, when it is manageable, rather than allowing it to accumulate and, ultimately, threaten to bankrupt us all.
