Copy from www.spiegel.de/international/ By Andreas Lorenz and Wieland Wagner
Can the environment withstand China’s growing economic might? As one of the planet’s worst polluters, Beijing’s ecological sins are creating problems on a global scale. Many countries are now feeling the consequences.
The cloud of dirt was hard to make out from the ground, but at an altitude of 10,000 meters (32,808 feet), the scientists could see the gigantic mass of ozone, dust and soot with the naked eye. In a specially outfitted aircraft taking off from Munich airport, they surveyed a brownish mixture stretching from Germany all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.
These kinds of clouds float above Europe for most of the year and they’ve traveled far to get there. By analyzing the makeup of particles in the cloud, European scientists were able to identify its origin. “There was a whole bunch from China in there,” says Andreas Stohl, a 38-year-old from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research.
Some 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) to the west, Steven Cliff is slowly winding his way up Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco in his RV. The 36-year-old researcher has installed a complex instrument to measure the air from Asia that reaches the West Coast of the United States over the Pacific Ocean.
Days like this are ideal for taking these measurements. San Francisco is shrouded in cool fog, but up on the top of the mountain there’s warm sunshine. Indeed, these are ideal conditions for surveying air currents untainted by local influences. But Cliff is alarmed by his instrument’s readings – soot particles have colored the device’s filter “blacker than we’ve ever seen it,” he says.
Back in a lab at the University of California at Davis, Cliff and his colleagues analyze the origins of the air pollution with the help of x-rays. According to their “chemical signature,” most have come from coal-fired Chinese power plants, Chinese smelters and chemical factories, as well as from the tailpipes of countless Chinese diesel-powered cars and trucks.
An export world champion — in pollution
On the other side of the Pacific, in Yokohama, Japanese climate change researcher Hajime Akimoto places three photos of the Earth next to each other. They show in red where concentrations of nitrogen dioxide are especially high. The picture from 1996 shows the area between Beijing and Shanghai as a loose group of reddish spots, but one from 2005 completely covers that part of China in bright red.
Winds are blowing ever-greater amounts of pollution from China into Japan, leading many Japanese to complain about irritated eyes and throats. Last year, two cities made official warnings about health dangers caused by Japan’s big red neighbor across the sea for the first time.
China has become a global environmental problem. Initially, it was only the economists who were shocked by how the country was changing the world with its cheap clothes, televisions and washing machines. But now climate researchers are concerned about another Chinese export — the pollution it is spreading across the planet. The massive nation is already the world’s second-biggest producer of greenhouse gases after the United States.
And particularly in North America and Europe, awe over China’s booming economy and its ability to produce cheap goods for the entire world is now often giving way to a critical question: Can the planet handle China’s growing damage to the environment?
China’s economy is booming — with an annual growth rate of over ten percent. But the more the country’s population of 1.3 billion strives to raise itself out of poverty with a mostly antiquated industrial base, and the more cheap Chinese goods the world’s consumers buy, the bigger the price will be that the world pays for China’s economic miracle.
A threat at home, a threat abroad
The Chinese are no longer simply destroying their own environment. Just as trade is global these days, so too is the threat against nature.
The connection isn’t always apparent at first glance. For example, what does the spreading desert of Inner Mongolia — a massive autonomous region in northern China — have to do with the comfy cashmere sweaters that shoppers are snapping up for next to nothing in cities from Berlin to Boston? For years, Chinese herders in the region let millions of goats graze until the grass was gone, roots and all. Then the soil simply blew away and the desert began to expand at an alarming rate. Since the early 1980s, China’s grasslands have shrunk each year by some 15,000 square kilometers — an area the size of the US state of Connecticut.
And now in the midst of a deadly drought, the sand dunes move ever closer to the small village Chaogetu Hure. Inch by inch, seemingly unstoppable, they claim everything in their path, as if the dunes purposely want to bury the government’s expensive efforts to plant trees, build fences, corral goats and resettle local inhabitants.
Abbot Lao Didarjie is being forced to watch the walls of the house opposite his Zhao Huasi temple slowly disappear under the sand. Out of fear for the house of worship he’s raised alarm with six different authorities. “The temple was built by the 6th Dalai Lama in the 17th century,” says the religious leader. “It should be saved for the coming generations.”
Chinese factories are already producing three times as many air conditioning units as they did five years ago. And although few people drive cars in China compared to industrialized countries, in Beijing alone the number of vehicles is growing by a thousand each day. In order to feed its appetite for energy, China is building coal-fired power plants as fast as it can. Every seven to ten days a new plant begins spewing smoke into the sky. The amount by which China increased its power production last year alone is greater than Britain’s entire capacity.
Coal heavily pollutes the air, but China’s leaders see little alternative to a dirty resource that is available in ample quantities around the country. Some 69 percent of all Chinese power plants are run on coal. China used 2.1 billion tons of it in 2004 — more than the United States, the European Union and Japan together. Even if the Chinese economy only continues to grow seven percent annually, its coal usage would double to 4 million tons within ten years.
Slowly, politicians and scientists are recognizing the path of destruction caused by China’s industrial revolution. Yet, communist China has a long tradition of abusing nature. Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong spoke of “dominating nature” and during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1959) he ordered the construction of numerous factories. In an attempt to overtake Britain as an industrial power, the Chinese were instructed to build mini blast furnaces across the entire land. The absurd project failed, but the environmental destruction is still visible. To heat the steel furnaces China chopped down an estimated ten percent of its forests.
A poison-producing factory
The country opened itself to the world in the late 1970s, its bizarre mixture of communism and capitalism has since produced growth rates that Western politicians can only dream of. But China was simultaneously turned into one massive, poison-producing factory.
The country is home to 16 of the world’s 20 dirtiest cities. The inhabitants of every third metropolis are forced to breathe polluted air, causing the deaths of an estimated 400,000 Chinese each year. Half of China’s 696 cities and counties suffer from acid rain. Two-thirds of its major rivers and lakes are cesspools and more than 340 million people do not have access to clean drinking water. The Yangtze River, once China’s proud artery of life, is biologically dead for long stretches. Many other rivers flow with blackened water and along their banks there are the notorious “cancer villages” where many people die early.
It’s now begun to dawn on Beijing’s politicians what China’s economy is doing to China’s ecology. Experts like Pan Yue, the deputy minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), are already fearful that environmental pollution will destroy the impressive economic growth of recent years. SO2 emissions cause damages worth €50 billion each year and the World Bank estimates environmental pollution already shaves eight to 12 percent off of China’s gross national product (GNP).
“China has gone through an industrialization in the past 20 years that many developing countries needed 100 years to complete. That’s why the country now has to deal with environmental problems that would also take 100 years to solve in many Western nations,” says Pan.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has also distanced himself from the country’s raping of the environment to promote “sustainable growth,” which includes an ambitious nuclear program. At least 20 new nuclear power plants are to be built by 2020 — but the communist leadership doesn’t say where the radioactive waste will end up. Beijing also wants at least ten percent of the country’s energy needs to be covered by renewable sources such as solar, wind and hydro. Photovoltaic facilities have already been erected in thousands of villages and giant wind parks dot China’s eastern coast.
Beijing also actively participates in the international emissions trade and provides foreign environmental polluters with opportunities to buy their way out of their obligations by financing somewhat clean chemical plants. The Chinese government plans to spend around $125 billion on sewage treatment facilities and new water pipes over the next five years.
But such impressive-sounding announcements, measured by the scope and speed of China’s environmental destruction, fall far short of what’s needed. And despite any good intentions, the Communist Party members make no secret that their most important goals remain those that will ensure their continuing power: raising the living standard of China’s citizens and eliminating the massive gap between rich and poor, as well as East and West.
Putting growth before the environment
China’s leaders are certainly pushing for tougher laws to allow for stricter punishments for criminal officials and unscrupulous factory managers. But the misery is partially caused by the country’s authoritarian system, which neither allows for an independent judiciary nor democratic supervision. SEPA’s 167,000 employees aren’t empowered enough to clamp down on polluters in every single province, especially if there’s an influential employer there. And often local officials simply consider impressive growth rates more important for their careers than a clean environment.
Of 661 Chinese cities, 278 did not have a sewage treatment plant at the end of 2005. But wealthy polluters can often pay any fines incurred with petty cash. Many recently built power plants shouldn’t actually even exist. Roughly half of them are illegal — many simply on formal grounds, but others due to corrupt or negligent officials who ignore environmental rules. Instead of falling as they should, emissions in 17 provinces have risen.
These grim facts aren’t kept secret, as some government officials apparently still believe in spite of everything that they have the dramatic situation under control. SEPA official Li Xinmin claims it remains unproven that pollution from Chinese power plants reaches other countries. “That’s a false, irresponsible argument,” says Li.
Climate expert Liu Deshun from Beijing’s Tsinghua University seemingly has a reassuring statistic or sensible Communist Party decree for almost any pressing environmental problem. But he avoids the key question: How much is China contributing to global warming and what is the government doing to try to stop it?
Liu wears a small green cap and an oversized pair of sunglasses. “We are a developing country,” he says. “We aren’t yet in the position to take on international obligations.” Beijing has signed the Kyoto Protocol — which aims to reduce CO2 emissions worldwide by 2012 — but as a developing nation China is not obligated to make cuts. Still, the professor claims Beijing’s leaders have made an important contribution to efforts to protect the environment: the country’s strict population control policies have ensured that 300 million fewer people live on the planet and use its limited resources.
A disaster in the making
When a chemical plant exploded in the northeastern Jilin province in November 2005, the industrial city Harbin had to cut water supplies for four days to prevent its 9 million inhabitants from being poisoned. But that didn’t keep the catastrophe from spreading, as a thick benzene film traveled from the Songhua River into the Amur River, where it slowly dissipated in Russia’s Far East.
Alexei Makinov, saw the disaster in the making. “It wasn’t just a problem since the accident,” says the 54-year-old Russian geologist and head of the hydrology lab of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Far East in Khabarovsk. “The river has been stinking since 1997.” The scientist’s desk is covered with tables and statistics and his cabinet with its glass door is crammed full of papers. All of it is environmental data on the Amur.
But it’s easy to see with the naked eye just how much damage the river has suffered. The Sungari — as the Songhua River is known in Russia — carries tons of poisonous sludge hundreds of kilometers downstream to the Amur. When fishers cut a hole in the river ice during the winter, a horrible odor is released. Makinov thinks the smell is from dying plant life and tells of residents complaining of infections, rashes and diarrhea.
The ailing Amur River has become the most important patient of 65-year-old doctor Vladena Rybakova as the end of her career nears. “The river began to stink of phenol,” she says. “And at first we thought it was a natural phenomenon.” But soon Rybakova and her colleagues found the actual cause — over the Chinese border. Whereas 65 million people live on the Chinese side of the Amur, there are only 4 million on the Russian side. Since the Chinese authorities offered the Russian scientists no information on what their factories were producing and what poisons they might be releasing into the waters, the Russians began investigating on their own in the early 1990s. After Rybakova fed lab rats fish from the river and then dissected them, she discovered that “their livers decomposed before you could start cutting.”
The road to Sikachi-Alyan leads past barracks and massive radar equipment. It is home to the ethnic Nanai minority, which has always lived from fishing. During Soviet times there was fishing collective here, but now the village of wooden houses has fallen into bitter poverty. These days no one will buy what the locals catch.
“For the past 12 years, the fish have smelled like chemicals,” says village leader Nina Druzhinina, a thin woman with a towering hairdo. “At first we thought it was Russian plants letting untreated water into the river. But now we know most of the filth comes from China.”
Damned by dams
In order to secure their future, the Chinese also intend to dominate the Mekong River, which is known as the Lancang in China. In Yunnan province there are two major dams holding back the waters of Southeast Asia’s longest river without regard for China’s neighbors. Six further dams are planned. At the construction site of the Xiaowan Dam, an army of workers is transforming the once green gorges into a barren Martian landscape. Xiaowan will be one of the world’s biggest hydroelectric plants — almost as huge as the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.
A few hundred kilometers further southward, the Mekong flows through fertile rice paddies and cornfields. Here and there, bamboo groves crowd the banks. But the lives of millions people, who depend on the river’s natural rhythms, have been disrupted. The Chinese now have a dam in place and they flood the Mekong as they please — when, for example, the water is too low and the Chinese need a big ship to enter the Thai river harbor of Chiang Saen.
In Cambodia, where river fish are one of the most important sources of food, the size of the catch is shrinking — especially in the important Tonle Sap lake and river system. But even down south in the Mekong Delta the river has become unpredictable, according to residents. Sometimes floods wash away houses and at other times there’s not enough water for the rice paddies.
Suthep Teowtrakul, district head of the small Thai town Chiang Khong, observes the river every day. He wears a yellow polo shirt sporting the words “I Love the King” and has four Buddha figures in his office. But neither his monarch nor the bodhisattva can help him counter the Chinese affects on the Mekong. “My motto is: ‘Leave the river alone’,” he says, while admitting that’s unlikely to happen. “Because the Chinese think the Mekong belongs to them.” Just like the fields they destroy or the air they pollute.
Setting its own course to the detriment of others
At a recent United Nations conference on climate change in Nairobi, the Chinese demanded that developing nations not be forced to make cuts in greenhouse gases. Only after pushing through this condition — from which China has the most to gain — did the Chinese delegates vote to work towards a follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.
China is a big country, a future superpower. Its leaders, accountable only to themselves, don’t care for economic or environmental advice. They set their own path.
But each year, each month, almost every week, China experiences some sort of major environmental catastrophe. The mess spreads across the land, in its waterways and the air. And far too often, the rest of the world gets sprinkled with some of it too.
Only a few kilometers away, on the edge of Luanjingtan, farmer Xu Changqin inspects a few meager green stalks of wheat. The local peasants worked hard to plant their fields, but last May a sandstorm covered them over. “The grassland is getting smaller, the fertile grounds are disappearing,” says Xu, explaining how growing numbers of people are moving away to seek more hospitable places to live.
The fine sand from the farmer’s homeland blows all the way to California and Europe. It’s mixed in with ash and other dangerous particles from industry in China’s Inner Mongolia region, which is home to countless factories, chemical works and power plants.
Along the Huang (Yellow) River in the city of Shizuishan, in the Ningxia region adjacent to Inner Mongolia, the extent of the pollution becomes rather obvious. Swaths of gray-black cloud blot out the sun to make the perfect setting for a Hollywood film about the end of the world. Two power plants belch ash into an artificial lake separated from the nearby river only by a thin dam. The wind blows the ash upward to start it on its journey around the globe.
Sand, smog and ash-filled skies
But it’s not just sand, smog and ash that China is spewing into the atmosphere. The country’s factories and power plants already emit more sulfur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) than Europe, even though the booming Chinese economy manages only a fraction of the per capita gross domestic product that the old industrialized nations do. Between 2000 and 2005, China’s SO2 emissions grew to 26 million tons. In just a few years the country will surpass the United States to become the world’s biggest carbon dioxide producer. China already accounts for more than 15 percent of total global CO2 emissions.
Independent US energy expert James Brock can see the smog-filled sky from his office in Beijing. “Currently each Chinese person uses just one-fifth of the energy that an American does,” he says. But when China reaches Western standards of living, each person in the country will use three times what they do now. Even done efficiently that will amount to five tons of coal each year. Presently, only very few Chinese can afford that standard of living. But what effect on the environment will there be if the Communist Party makes good on its propaganda to spread as much “modest prosperity” to as many citizens as possible by 2020? Can nature withstand the strain when the number of families with washing machines, driers, air conditioners and cars rises from 100 million to a half-billion?
Is that amazing when the whole day doesn’t seem to go well, and you just caught up in that miserable situations then a little miracle thing happen and just light you day up again!
“Your new “World Peace” and “Peace Symbol” jewelry is perfect. Once again, the weight, quality and beauty of your jewelry make me feel good when I wear it.”
is a mystical and sacred symbol used in Hinduism, Buddhism and other Dharmic religions. OM appears in Vedic Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language practiced by the Vedas. In Vedic Sanskrit, OM is used as a word of solemn affirmation and respectful assent, and it is often translated as “yes, verily so be it”, which is much like the Hebrew “amen!” In Hinduism, OM represents the manifest and unmanifest aspects of God or the Unknowable.
OM and Yoga
I was sitting on a remarkably warm bus during my way back to Warapun’s house, when it struck me how thankful I felt about being on the verge of completing one of the major goals of this business trip. The project started with my dream to be able to create jewelry pieces from scratch. The process for this begins by carving prototype pieces from wax. Once the carvings are suitable, the molds can be made. Then silver and gold can be cast from the molds, and finally the process ends by hand polishing each piece for a perfect look.
One of my ultimate goals for Attapinya is to have the company be Fair Trade compliant. It is much more complicated than it sounds; Attapinya must be able to trace back through all of its suppliers and service providers to ensure that they too are engaged in Fair Trade practices. Even though we are not Fair Trade yet, it took me two years to come this far with my dream because the materials industry in Thailand is so tight-lipped. I have been searching constantly, but I have never been able to discover the well guarded information about how our suppliers operate their businesses. People here seem to be afraid of letting competition into their market; they know that sharing the information means sharing the market. Furthermore, business people here have grown accustomed to ignoring anyone that does not have a large payoff to offer in exchange for help. To be honest, I was on the brink of giving up, even though I always have hope. I know from experience and inspirational teachings that if I do not give up easily, one day I will achieve my dreams. And now, at last, another ray of hope has come to me through my new designers. They have some connections in the jewelry industry that will help Attapinya to further its Fair Trade quest.
Hoo!! Where do I start… with the brand new Bangkok airport that I landed at, or the two days of being heavily jet lagged, or the stressful couple of days it took to set up my internet connection?
Traveling from one place to another in Bangkok can be difficult and time consuming too. The traffic is tremendous, many times worse than that found in Arizona. It seems like the beginning of my trip is all about adjusting myself with respect to time. I am so used to being able to set my schedule and push it as hard as I can because there are not so many barriers in Arizona. It looks like I will have to divide my estimates for accomplishments by two or even perhaps four. Those aspiring to be parents take note, bad traffic plus a baby equals a slow down of four at least!
As promised, I will continue to document our experiences and stories as we progress through our ambitious list of projects. In sharing this with you, I hope we can appreciate life together.
