For an edifying picture of China’s real status on the environmental front, I suggest you read Peter Navarro‘s latest article in Energy Bulletin. Peter is the author of the upcoming book, ‘The Coming China Wars‘. In summary:
- Every single week, China adds one new large coal power plant to its energy base.
- China is now adding 15,000 new cars a day to its roads, and it expects to have more cars than the United States — as many as 130 million — as early as 2040.
- China is expected to construct fully half of all the buildings in the world over the next 25 years. Beyond sheer quantity, the nightmare here is that these buildings will be electricity sinkholes because Chinese buildings are notoriously energy inefficient.
- China plans to move almost a half a billion peasants off the farm into factories and cities over the next several decades. As a rule, urbanites introduced to the magic of refrigerators, TVs, and toasters use more than three times the amount of energy as their rural counterparts.
- Chinese manufacturers are extremely energy inefficient. To produce an equivalent amount of goods, they use six times more resources than the United States, seven times more resources than Japan, and, most embarrassingly, three times more resources than India, to which China is most frequently compared.
Guess who is feeding China’s gigantic pollution factory? Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, touted by Adam Werbach as the new corporate environmental hero, represents 30 percent of foreign purchasing in China. 27 billion dollars total. No greening strategy can make up for the fact that we, the 89% of American people who shop at Wal-Mart, are contributing in no insignificant terms, to China’s lethal gases spewing frenzy.
More than ever, let us make ours, the old ‘Reduce-Reuse-Recycle‘
La Marguerite 
Great point Marguerite. It’s amazing (or perhaps not so amazing) that mainstream media do not point this out, at least not much, and certainly not sufficiently.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that one of the great, great, and vital roles of the independent press and the internet is that traditional media typically fall WAY SHORT when it comes to questioning and covering certain things.
Cheers.
I’m part of a govt panel that tries to understand these issues. Navarro is right, but it turns out it is more pessimistic than he paints. The current rate of coal electric capacity is closer to 1 GW every 5 days (a good rule of thumb is that residential San Diego is about 1 GW). This is much dirtier than Western coal plants – there are a few modern showcase installations, but most are based on ancient soviet designs from the 50s and 60s and put out enormous amounts of “normal” pollutants in addition to being very inefficient and putting out that much more carbon dioxide. It will be impossible to retrofit these plants with capture technology if that is ever developed (I’m not counting on it in the next 15 to 20 years).
The private feeling in our working group is the only salvation is a deep economic depression in China and/or a war. I hope not – I like to be more positive.
And I note that China, per capita, is still much much greener than the US when it comes to carbon dioxide. They are now as big as we are in absolute terms, but per citizen are much lower. So pressure on them can be effective. We can’t point to them and use it as an excuse for our own inaction (also remember the half life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is long, so our sins are very present)
A good bottom line is to stop buying anything from China (very hard) unless the mfg can show a good and audited energy path. Some work is being done in that area now with some worried companies I can’t name (yet). I believe it is good to work with, rather than against, Wal-Mart. If they are pushed, they wield great power and might be able to force standards on the things they import.
At a personal level I believe it is important to drop the consumption of “stuff” to a lower level and buy stuff that lasts and can be repaired. At this point it is expensive to buy good “stuff”, but it needs to be encouraged (note: I don’t believe you can consume your way out of the problem, but I am enough of a realist to know there is a huge amount of consumption and that won’t change much).
ps ..
I should add that India is bad too, not as bad as China, but they need to improve.
Both countries are spending huge amounts developing coal to liquid fuel to run their growing car fleets. A very troubling prospect.
“And I note that China, per capita, is still much much greener than the US when it comes to carbon dioxide.”
It would be more precise to say that about a billion of China’s people are subsistence agriculture workers whose only emissions are from stuff rotting in their rice paddies and animal manure in their wheat fields, while about 300 million Chinese emit almost as much per person as Americans.
Same for India.
Developing countries are often in effect two countries – one the old impoverished rural peasantry, and the other Western. The rich-poor gap in those countries is also a pollution gap, and the poor – who are very poor in developing countries – emit very little.
Remember that if you say we should not support China’s economic growth, yes you are opposing all those dirty coal plants and people choking in cities, but you are also supporting Chinese peasants staying on the land and living in illiterate poverty.
So that rather than simply buying or not buying from Wal-Mart and the like, what’s needed is to promote something between the the industrial polluted city and the subsistence farming, something better than both.
And the best way to do that is to get started in our own countries. We went through our dirty industrial city stage in history, and it gave us the prosperity we have today. Looking at history, the Chinese and Indians assume that’s the only way. We have to show them there are other ways.
Much of this discussion explains why we have to push for change, and become active for real change, at home, i.e., here in the U.S. There’s not very much we can do effectively for, or about, China or India until we take credible and substantial action here. If we develop key green technologies here, we can provide them to China, India, and etc. If we make substantial change here, we can set a better example and regain some credibility. And so forth. Then we can negotiate better. But, as long as we aren’t doing much here, we can’t do much of anything about China or India or etc. except B(itch) and M(oan). That’s why action is what will count, and action is what’s necessary.
Cheers.
My take from this discussion:
Lead through example, Reduce-Reuse-Recycle, at all levels, from citizens to businesses, to governments.
And also invest in new technologies, and export these new technologies to developing countries.
By the way, I do support whatever greening is taking place at Wal-Mart. Let them do that. And let us consumers vote with our wallets, only buying essentials and truly green solutions.
Last, as citizens, let us also not forget to vote with our voices, reminding our congressmen and senators of the importance of renewing those tax incentives for renewables, for instance.
Hi Marguerite,
A very informative and helpful blog I stumbled upon…..love the way you write so I’ll keep visiting 😛
“It would be more precise to say that about a billion of China’s people are subsistence agriculture workers whose only emissions are from stuff rotting in their rice paddies and animal manure in their wheat fields, while about 300 million Chinese emit almost as much per person as Americans.”
Kyle, do you have a reference for that? I wouldn’t know how to check that.
There are lots of ways to check it, Meryn.
For example, the UN gives a measure of quality of life, the Human Development Index – one-third longevity, one-third per capita GDP, and one-third literacy and proportion of population in education.
But the HDI like all averages only tells us so much. So they also have the Human Poverty Index, which looks at the proportion of the population living… well, in the shit.
For HPI, we can see it for developing countries here (under 100k pdf).
Looking there, we find that India has 14% of the population without access to clean drinking water, 47% of children under 5 are underweight, 39% of adults are illiterate, and 80.4% of people are on less than $2 a day. Compare this to the images we’re shown of Indian software engineers living in Dehli and driving SUVs…
China has only 9.1% adult illiteracy, but 23% without access to clean drinking water, 9.9% of children underweight under 5 years old, and 34.9% of the population – which would be more than 400 million people, by the way – living on less than $2 a day. Now compare with the image presented of China’s happy and growing middle class.
Any glance at history shows that this is very common in industrialising countries, from modern China to Britain in 1840. The benefits of the development accrue to relatively few people. The reason peasants leave the land and go to factories is not that they’ll earn much more money, but that their income will be reliable, and not depend on the ups and downs of the weather.
50-100 years after the industrialisation has begun, the benefits spread more evenly about the country. Britons in 1950 were more equal than in 1850. And Chinese and Indians in 2108 would be more equal than in 2008… except that fossil fuel depletion will put a stop their industrialisation by 2050.
i love everyones comments but especially kiashu’s is the best at the end u said that we have to show them that there are other ways to improve theer community you were absloutely right that theer are about hundered more ways that they can improve it not by having poverty in there countries especially in china but i woint say that its not in india but in china its alot worse we need to stay out of it beacuse as far as we are concern they wont listen to anyone ” so let them do what they want”
[…] course, as the world’s largest importer of China goods, we the American consumers are playing a huge role in the Chinese mess. And we are being paid back in rising world emissions and unhealthy air over […]