The Smog In China Should Terrify You

[kenny blankenship]

15. It certainly does.

Well actually the terror has long since congealed into morbid resignation.

Chalk it up to capitalism's ferocious "need" to access slave labor. We could have gone a different route after the end of the Cold War. We could have taken the "Peace Dividend" and invested it in industrial policy to find cleaner technologies for transportation and power generation, and thereby ensured the future of our civilization, and our leadership role in it. But instead we chose to pull down our laws and expose our population to global labor arbitrage. We chose NeoLiberalism. The big winners were multinational capitalists and, predictably, the elites of historically overpopulated countries like China and India. Because of its overpopulation problem, China had already degraded its environment over a thousand years ago (still kept on breeding though). So in addition to individual human life being held cheap, as in practically-regarded-as-a-nuisance, in the eyes of its government, and in addition to paying workers often less than 100 US dollars a month, China as a government and a people (although this is wildly generalizing obviously) don't give a shit about the environment. They destroyed theirs a long, long time ago and can't remember what they've lost. So now we witness the horrors of Britain's Industrial Revolution - but on a scale several orders of magnitude worse. Despite any BS you may have heard about the Chinese being leaders in solar tech, they are firing up a 1 gigawatt class coal burning power plant every fucking week, as you can see from the smog in the photos above. Currently around 300 million Chinese have attained something like a developed nation standard of living - and their consumption of natural resources has exploded. More CO2 is being dumped in the atmosphere from China now than even the USA. Despite this explosive growth of resource consumption, over a BILLION more Chinese still exist at roughly a Mao Era standard of living in the country's interior. They all want a piece of the "American Dream" too. If destroying the environment further for themselves and everyone else is required to maintain >2% GDP growth, guess what they're going to choose to do? And will keep choosing to do?

So, it doesn't matter how many Priuses or solar panels you buy, America. You gave up your ability to lead the world to a different future with the very same policies with which you laughingly ass-raped your working class and forced them into Walmart greeter vests and paper hats and into the underground drug economy. Enjoy the long slide down into the abyss and a future of being at the mercy of "others" who couldn't give a shit about you, or the lead in your kids toys, or what their ashen gray sky looks like and does to you when it settles over your mountains and formerly fruited plains.