China and the environment: Be afraid... be very afraid
LP NOTE: This is a must-read article for anyone who has any interest in the lasting effect that China's burgeoning economy and standard of living will have on the environment... not just in Asia but worldwide.
The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global
Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?
Jacques Leslie, Mother Jones
Long before Mr. Zhang's crowning highway maneuver, I'd realized that his flamboyant unpredictability was an asset. I'd hired him as driver and guide for a three-day trip from Beijing to Inner Mongolia on the recommendation of a Chinese environmentalist who'd enumerated all of Mr. Zhang's virtues except the most important—his suppleness under pressure, which would enable us to overcome the obstacles that are a constant feature of travel in China.
Of course, Mr. Zhang's chief qualification was that he was an environmentalist, or, more precisely, a fellow environmental-disaster tracker. Now, having toured choked rivers, depleted forests, and grasslands that had ceded to encroaching deserts, we were near the end of our trip, with nothing in front of us but a two-hour jaunt down the broad, brutish Beijing Badaling Expressway to the capital. Ms. Lei, my delicate translator, had announced her wish to get back to Beijing before her four-year-old boy went to bed, and we were running late. Mr. Zhang's swashbuckling solution was a "shortcut": Instead of fighting his way along the paved, but circuitous, road to the highway, he sped down a narrow dirt path that held the promise of providing a more direct route. Within minutes he was doubling back on himself, loudly grinding gears as he cut through dust-shrouded cornfields and drought-stricken cherry orchards while peasants leaped out of our way and into the foliage. By the time Mr. Zhang found the expressway, the shortcut had cost us an hour.
(The rest is here.)
The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global
Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?
Jacques Leslie, Mother Jones
Long before Mr. Zhang's crowning highway maneuver, I'd realized that his flamboyant unpredictability was an asset. I'd hired him as driver and guide for a three-day trip from Beijing to Inner Mongolia on the recommendation of a Chinese environmentalist who'd enumerated all of Mr. Zhang's virtues except the most important—his suppleness under pressure, which would enable us to overcome the obstacles that are a constant feature of travel in China.
Of course, Mr. Zhang's chief qualification was that he was an environmentalist, or, more precisely, a fellow environmental-disaster tracker. Now, having toured choked rivers, depleted forests, and grasslands that had ceded to encroaching deserts, we were near the end of our trip, with nothing in front of us but a two-hour jaunt down the broad, brutish Beijing Badaling Expressway to the capital. Ms. Lei, my delicate translator, had announced her wish to get back to Beijing before her four-year-old boy went to bed, and we were running late. Mr. Zhang's swashbuckling solution was a "shortcut": Instead of fighting his way along the paved, but circuitous, road to the highway, he sped down a narrow dirt path that held the promise of providing a more direct route. Within minutes he was doubling back on himself, loudly grinding gears as he cut through dust-shrouded cornfields and drought-stricken cherry orchards while peasants leaped out of our way and into the foliage. By the time Mr. Zhang found the expressway, the shortcut had cost us an hour.
(The rest is here.)
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1 Comments:
correct me if I am wrong, but aren't 'emerging' countries such as China and India exempt from the Kyoto Protocol? And all we hear from Al Gore is that the big, bad US - a country he bashes at every overseas opportunity he gets - is the reason for global warming and environmental castastrophy.
Finally, someone on the left has the stones to report the ongoing environmental calamaties going on in countries such as China...and kudos to Mother Jones for reporting the obvious.
President Clinton made China in to the industrial powerhouse that it is today and yet, nary a word from Al Gore - Clinton's own Veep - about that fact or the fact that no matter what the US does to combat so-called man-made global warming, China's massive negative environmental impacts make the US environmental impacts have the same effect as a pee stain in the snow.
If you want to combat global warming and are concerned about the earth, go to China, Russia and India and protest the massive environmental problems they are causing over there. But, environmentalists never really cared about any other violator other than the US which proves their hypocrisy.
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