China and Pollution - Hopeful Signs?

As reported in the Guardian yesterday, China is poised to overtake US as the world's greatest carbon polluter. The combination of a heavy dependence on coal for energy and heating, combined with a rapidly-expanding urban auto fleet, thrown on top of as huge and growing manufacturing sector that consumes huge amounts of oil has rocketed Chinese carbon emissions towards American levels, far in excess of projected rates. And all this is just the carbon emissions facet of the overall pollution issue, in a country whose government now openly admits that 10% of arable land is now polluted, to the point where pollution threatens China's food supply.

On the bright side, this recent article in China Dialogue on Chinese attempts to rein in pollution and emissions levels (h/t Jeremiah over at the Peking Duck) is pretty interesting, and seems like a pretty balanced take on the enormous issue of pollution and economic growth. To the Chinese government's credit, it is actually working to deal with the problems that its economic policies - both Maoist and neoliberal reform era - have wrought, but cosmetic reform alone will not pull them out of this hole, any more than it will allow the US to avoid facing tough questions about growth and sustainability. Something has got to give.

In the end, any solution for global warming will have to be enacted in both China and America in order to succeed, and it will have to cut the gordian knot of economic growth and pollution. Our two countries are so deeply interconnected that they might as well be treated as one huge economy, with a globally segmented process of production. In particular, both countries are going to have to start factoring the cost of environmental damage (and the flip side, the value of an intact environment) into their economic calculus, probably in an overt carbon tax sort of set up. While the particulars of the two countries are in many ways quite different (America is outsourcing its pollution along withmost of its industrial base, China is insourcing both; America burns oil for transportation, China uses it to make plastics; America has a huge per capita emissions rate, China's per capita energy use is still quite low, even though the total amount is huge), at its heart the neoliberal, growth-focused economies powered primarily by coal and oil will have to change, and radically. The silver lining here is that if we do this right, and cooperate to come up with a new solution, it could make both countries a lot of money, as solutions are sold to the rest of the world.

Both countries have a wealth of natural resources in their wind, sun, tides and other untapped founts of alternative green energy, should they care to take advantage of them. Both countries have a ton of engineers and problem solvers to draw upon. The solution is right out there for the taking, as Chinese Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng noted decades ago when serving time in a prison camp in the sunny, windy western province of Qinghai. All we lack is the sense of urgency and the will to think outside the iron box of the status quo.

Failure to come to grips with carbon emissions (and thus, with global warming) will have huge costs for either country, as huge parts of both countries' densely populated urban cores lie on low-lying coastal lands vulnerable to tropical storms, and both countries have huge agricultural industries that are vulnerable to drought. It was not by accident that Al Gore was shown speaking at Qinghua University in An Inconvenient Truth; the fate of our very world depends upon our two countries changing their stripes and going from the two biggest global sources of the problem to two major parts of the solution. We cannot afford to continue using the other's poor behavior as an excuse not to reform our own, we simply do not have the time.

As Mencius once noted in his allegory of Ox Hill over two millenia ago, environmental degradation done for a long enough period can deceptively appear to be the world's natural state, but in the end, such destruction is a human product, and can be reversed. Global warming is a lot bigger than one deforested mountainside, but the principle is the same.