Environmental Horror Perhaps China’s Biggest Export
March 29, 2013 Leave a comment
The recent spate of sad and nasty ecological news coming out of China—nearly 3,000 dead pigs and 1,000 dead ducks found floating in a river that provides Shanghai with its drinking water—takes me back to my first visit to the country.
The West has done a very good job of exporting by example its own energy-sucking lifestyle, which is now deemed desirable by the burgeoning middle class in China.
The first time I was in western China, exploring a tributary of the Yangtze River, we got badly lost and ended up on a winding road leading through landscapes I’m sure the Chinese government that had given us the permit never intended for us to see.
All around forests were clear-cut, paper plants were built on rivers above towns, children with deformities were visible in outsized numbers on the streets, and the air was so hazy at midday that many people wore medical masks, even indoors. That was in 1996. Nearly three decades later, things have only gotten worse as China’s human population, energy needs and consumerism have all escalated.
In his new book, The Devouring Dragon, How China’s Rise Threatens Our Natural World, authorCraig Simons expands on the problem, suggesting that the ills of China are not just bad for the Chinese, but one of its biggest exports is now environmental calamity.
The country’s boom times, he contends, are impacting everything from dirty air and water around the globe to fast-climbing temperatures and fast-disappearing wildlife.
China, of course, is not to blame for the fact that the planet is screeching to an inevitable environmental meltdown. The U.S. and Europe have long led that charge thanks to healthy economies and the ability to earn and spend at will. The West has done a very good job of exporting by example its own energy-sucking lifestyle, which is now deemed desirable by burgeoning middle classes in China—and India, Russia, Brazil too.
But pollution created by the world’s biggest nation, 1.3 billion headed quickly to 1.5 billion, is accelerating global environmental problems on a scale not seen before. (Don’t forget those dead, floating pigs.)
- In 2011, China burned more than four billion tons of coal, almost half the world’s total and four times what was burned in the U.S. the same year. By comparison, in 1976, it was only burning 550 million tons.
- The illegal wildlife trade, from elephant tusks to tiger skin pelts and shark fins, is dominated by China’s demand. We are used to stories of excessive wedding parties where every table has a pot of shark fin soup on the table or miniature cityscapes carved from elephant ivory, but as Simons points out, some of the proudest Buddhists in Tibet still wear tiger skin robes as a sign of success.
- China’s fat pocketbook and voracious energy needs are having an impact far from home wherever fossil fuels are dug out of the earth. The nation has funded natural gas pipelines from Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan, has put $35 billion into railroads “to transport copper and coal out of Africa and into the power plants of China,” and is currently building half of all the nuclear reactors under construction globally. China’s energy and food needs are so big the country is buying up existing power plants from Tanzania to Saudi Arabia and farmland across Russia, Australia and Argentina.
The man who first alerted authorities to what would become the melamine-tainted milk scandal has been murdered. Jiang Weisuo, 44, was attacked by unidentified men in Xi’an city two weeks ago. On Friday, he passed away from his wounds.
