The China Crisis-Spectacular Growth Now Biggest Threat to the Environment

[callady]

The China Crisis

Spectacular growth now biggest threat to environment

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

Published: 19 October 2005


Western politicians queue up to sing its praises. Economists regard it with awe and delight. Other countries are desperate to imitate it. Yet there is another side to China's exploding, double-digit-growth miracle economy - it is turning into one of the greatest environmental threats the earth has ever faced.

An ominous sign of the danger is given in a groundbreaking report from Greenpeace, published today, which maintains that China is now by far the world's biggest driver of rainforest destruction. The report documents the vast deforestation driven by the soaring demands of China's enormous timber trade - the world's largest - as the country's headlong economic development sucks in ever-more amounts of the earth's natural resources.

Citing figures from the International Tropical Timber Organisation, the Greenpeace study says that nearly five out of every 10 tropical hardwood logs shipped from the world's threatened rainforests are now heading for China - more than to any other destination.

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Because of their increasing reliance on coal-fired power stations to provide their energy, the Chinese are firmly on course to overtake the Americans as the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and thus become the biggest contributors to global warming and the destabilisation of the climate. If they remain uncontrolled, the growth of China's carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years will dwarf any cuts in CO2 that the rest of the world can make.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article320565.ece

[Matilda]

1. China's rapid growth is something of a human tragedy.

The strange combination of a free market economy without democracy
doesn't work very well for all its citizens. The few are becoming
very rich, while the majority - especially in rural areas - are
badly deprived, and these days they lack the state infrastructure
as a safety net when it comes to health treatment, unemployment
benefits, etc. And in the rush to produce, the state is failing to
set health and safety standards in mines and factories, at appalling
cost to the workers.

And the demand from China and India for oil is what is driving fuel
prices upward more than the failure to secure Iraqi oil.

But the West is in no position to lecture China - the Chinese market
for coal is a major reason for Australia refusing to sign the Kyoto
Agreement - we make too much money from selling our coal to China.
And now they want to come here and mine our uranium - for peaceful
purposes, of course! - truth is, neither the Chinese nor the
Australian Government cares a fig about the end result.

The Chinese one-child policy was the smartest thing they ever did,
but where's all that idealogy now in the rush to riches? Life under
Mao was appalling, but the rush to embrace all the evils of
capitalism without restraint looks like bringing the whole world
undone.