If you've been paying attention, this isn't a particularly newsworthy story, but the Mother Jones cover story on the environmental cost of China's attempt to live the American Dream is a sobering wrap-up of what that country is paying -- not to mention the planet as a whole.
One indication is that China's 10 percent growth rate takes no account of the environmental devastation the boom has caused. In June 2006, an official at China's State Council said environmental damage (everything from crop loss to health care costs) was costing 10 percent of its gross domestic product—in other words, all of the economy's celebrated growth. Vaclav Smil, a highly respected China scholar at the University of Manitoba, pegs the environmental-damage rate at between 5 and 15 percent, with 7 percent a "solid, defensible figure." Smil says that shorn of hype, China's growth rate is also likely 7 percent, "so basically every year environmental damage wipes out the gdp growth."
Scientists have detected a near-continuous plume of pollution moving across the Pacific:
To be sure, it's a fraction of what is emitted within California's borders, and most of it continues wafting across North America, falling to earth bit by bit. Nevertheless, at Cliff's mountain sites, particulate matter from Asia accounts for 4 to 6 micrograms per cubic meter of air -- already approaching half of California's annual average pollution limit of 12 micrograms. "The problem is going to be that the ability to emit any sort of pollution from any industry here in California will be reduced because of federal regulations," (Steven) Cliff (an atmospheric scientist at the University of California-Davis) said. "There could be a day when essentially the entire regulatory limit is met" by Asian pollution.
The largest source of that pollution is the billion tons of coal China burns per year, more than virtually all the world's developed nations combined. The International Energy Agency reported in November 2006 that global coal consumption had increased as much in the previous 3 years as in the 23 before that, and that China was responsible for 90 percent of the increase. It operates more than 2,000 coal-fired power plants and puts a new one into operation every four to seven days. Few possess scrubbers that could limit emissions, and those that do tend not to use them, since scrubbers drive up the plants' energy and maintenance costs. China's central government has issued some fairly strict regulations to limit plant emissions, but they are rarely enforced because of corruption and the reluctance of local officials to confront job-generating power companies. Those companies called upon to meet the regulations usually opt for paying an annual $500,000 fee instead. The plants provide 80 percent of China's energy, at the price of emissions devastating to both China and the rest of the world.
... China has steadily 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 United States alone is responsible for a quarter of the man-made greenhouse gases pumped into the earth's atmosphere over time, while China's cumulative 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 could single-handedly wipe out reductions made elsewhere, crippling the international effort. ...
Nothing mentioned so far—not even China's supplanting the United States as the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter—should make Americans feel smug, for what the Chinese are chiefly guilty of is emulating the American economic model. From the 1980s on, Chinese policymakers went 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 and private automobile ownership and highly energy-consumptive practices," since the economies they studied all possess those features.
The United States passed up the opportunity it had at the beginning of China's economic transformation to guide it toward sustainability, and the loss is already incalculable. All that 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, invest government funds in research on sustainable-energy technologies. Build effective mass-transit systems in every city. Cut greenhouse gas emissions. Show China the benefits of responsible behavior.
As it happens, many of the best ideas for moving toward sustainability are already getting a tryout in China: It threatens to surpass the United States even in fostering environmentally beneficial practices. Many have been developed by some of the 2,000 or more environmental groups, domestic and international, that have established outposts in China. The groups have addressed a vast range of environmental issues, from developing energy-efficiency programs for appliances to providing legal assistance for pollution victims to promoting fish circulation by removing some of the thousands of sluice gates blocking flows between lakes and rivers. Yet as smartly conceived as many of these efforts are, virtually all are pilot projects still overwhelmed by the immensity of the problems they take on.