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Cultural Devolution: World effect of China pollution

By Bradford Plumer | The New Republic

Cross over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, head north for half an hour, and you’ll reach Mount Tamalpais State Park, home to redwood groves and, a little ways up, panoramic views of the bay. As it turns out, though, the park is also home to large amounts of pollution from Asia — dust, sulfur, trace metals — blowing in from across the Pacific. “We call it the persistent Asian plume,” says Steven Cliff, an atmospheric scientist currently working with the California Air Resources Board. On some days, one-third of the state’s background air pollution can be traced to Asia, and researchers are now looking into whether the plume could be disrupting cloud formation and rainfall in water-starved California.

It’s a reminder that China’s pollution problems aren’t just taking a devastating toll on China — they’re also affecting the rest of the world. Acid rain partly caused by Chinese sulfur emissions pours down on Japan and South Korea. Eighty percent of the East China Sea, one of the world’s largest fisheries, has become toxic, due to sewage dumps from the mainland. And China, which is building coal plants at a shocking rate of two per week, is now the world’s largest source of greenhouse gases, emitting 14 percent more carbon dioxide than the United States in 2007.

And, so, the international community is worried. At U.N. conferences, officials keep pushing the country to take stronger action on climate change. Europe and Japan have helped fund clean-energy projects in China, largely through the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. In the United States, it’s become common to hear politicians say that Beijing needs to be strong-armed into action. “If we do not act [on global warming],” Virginia Senator John Warner said recently, “China and India will hide behind America’s skirts of inaction and take no steps of their own.” Warner’s cap-and-trade bill, which would limit U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions, even had a provision to slap carbon tariffs on Chinese imports if the country didn’t take steps to tackle its emissions.

These ideas aren’t without merit. But they also miss a key point: China’s central government is well aware that its blackened rivers and sunless skies are a problem, not just because they’re sparking riots and social unrest, but because out-of-control environmental degradation is imperiling the country’s economic growth. Lately, Beijing has issued a slew of bold — at least on paper — environmental regulations. But the laws are doing little good because the central government can barely enforce them in its own provinces. This structural problem will remain the key to China’s environmental dilemma, and, as countries attempt to push Beijing toward a cleaner future, they’ll discover that the capital is the least of their troubles.

Even if the Chinese government does spruce up Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics, the environmental situation in China remains horrifying. Toxic discharge from factories is turning rivers bright red or even black. Water shortages and rampant desertification are threatening to force tens of millions off their land. Sixteen of the 20 dirtiest cities in the world are in China. And, while few would begrudge China the right to follow in the West’s footsteps and pollute in the service of getting richer, studies have found that contamination in the air and water now costs China up to 10 percent of GDP each year, destroying crops and forests and sending hundreds of thousands to the hospital with respiratory diseases or worse. A recent World Bank study estimated that pollution causes some 750,000 premature deaths in China each year. Even scarier for the Communist Party is the prospect of social turmoil: In 2006, China saw 60,000 pollution-related “incidents,” a number of them violent.

Copyright © 2008 The New Republic

Published in The New Republic