[Marxism] As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes

["Darrel Furlotte" <darrel.furlotte@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html?ex=1189483200&en=a44584a8d27a1200&ei=5070

  August 26, 2007

As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes
By JOSEPH KAHN and JIM YARDLEY


(Excerpts)


"Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China's leading cause 
of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed 
for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people 
lack access to safe drinking water."
   ----------------------------
 "Yet most of the government's targets for energy efficiency, as well as 
improving air and water quality, have gone unmet. And there are ample signs 
that the leadership is either unwilling or unable to make fundamental 
changes."
  ----------------------------- 
"President Hu Jintao's most ambitious attempt to change the culture of 
fast-growth collapsed this year. ...  But the early results were so 
sobering - in some provinces the pollution-adjusted growth rates were 
reduced almost to zero - that the project was banished to China's ivory 
tower this spring and stripped of official influence."
------------------------------
"Only 1 percent of China's urban population of 560 million now breathes air 
considered safe by the European Unionist...The European Union stipulates 
that any reading above 40 micrograms is unsafe. The United States allows 50. 
In 2006, Beijing's average PM 10 level was 141, according to the Chinese 
National Bureau of Statics."
------------------------------
"China has only one-fifth as much water per capita as the United 
States....Now, many aquifers have been so depleted that some wells in 
Beijing and Hebei must extend more than half a mile before they reach fresh 
water....Chinese industry uses 4 to 10 times more water per unit of 
production than the average in industrialized nations...In many parts of 
China, factories and farms dump waste into surface water with few 
repercussions. China's environmental monitors say that one-third of all 
river water, and vast sections of China's great lakes, the Tai, Chao and 
Dianchi, have water rated Grade V, the most degraded level, rendering it 
unfit for industrial or agricultural use."
----------------------------------
"The toll this pollution has taken on human health remains a delicate topic 
in China. The leadership has banned publication of data on the subject for 
fear of inciting social unrest, said scholars involved in the research"
------------------------------------
"China burned the energy equivalent of 2.7 billion tons of coal, 
three-quarters of what the experts had said would be the maximum required in 
2020. To put it another way, China now seems likely to need as much energy 
in 2010 as it thought it would need in 2020 under the most pessimistic 
assumptions....In 1996, China and the United States each accounted for 13 
percent of global steel production. By 2005, the United States share had 
dropped to 8 percent, while China's share had risen to 35 percent....China 
now makes half of the world's cement and flat glass, and about a third of 
its aluminum. In 2006, China overtook Japan as the second-largest producer 
of cars and trucks after the United States.
Chinese steel makers, on average, use one-fifth more energy per ton than the 
international average. Cement manufacturers need 45 percent more power, and 
ethylene producers need 70 percent more than producers elsewhere, the World 
Bank says".
---------------------------------
"In 2005 alone, China added 66 gigawatts of electricity to its power grid, 
about as much power as Britain generates in a year. Last year, it added an 
additional 102 gigawatts, as much as France. That increase has come almost 
entirely from small- and medium-size coal-fired power plants that were built 
quickly and inexpensively."
----------------------------------
"Since Hu Jintao became the Communist Party chief in 2002 and Wen Jiabao 
became prime minister the next spring, China's leadership has struck 
consistent themes. The economy must grow at a more sustainable, less bubbly 
pace. Environmental abuse has reached intolerable levels. Officials who 
ignore these principles will be called to account.
   Five years later, it seems clear that these senior leaders are either too 
timid to enforce their orders, or the fast-growth political culture they 
preside over is too entrenched to heed them.
   In the second quarter of this year, the economy expanded at a 
neck-snapping pace of 11.9 percent, its fastest in a decade. State-driven 
investment projects, state-backed heavy industry and a thriving export 
sector led the way. China burned 18 percent more coal than it did the year 
before."
--------------------------------
"Energy and environmental officials have little influence in the 
bureaucracy. The environmental agency still has only about 200 full-time 
employees, compared with 18,000 at the Environmental Protection Agency in 
the United States.
 China has no Energy Ministry. The Energy Bureau of the National Development 
and Reform Commission, the country's central planning agency, has 100 
full-time staff members. The Energy Department of the United States has 
110,000 employees."
----------------------------------
  full at:
  
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html?ex=1189483200&en=a44584a8d27a1200&ei=5070


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