The East is Black Each year China's roaring factories discharge some 36 billion tons of untreated industrial waste water and raw sewage into the country's rivers, lakes and coastal seas. That volume of waste is equal to the entire annual flow of the Yellow River. Four-fifths of China's rivers and lakes are 'seriously polluted' and their waters unfit for drinking, their fish unfit to eat. Rapid development has turned big tracts of China into environmental wasteland. In places, the Grand Canal resembles an open sewer. According to a report from the Agricultural Ministry in June, rural industrialization since the 1980's-one of the World Bank's favourite projects has polluted some to million hectares of farmland, causing losses of crops and animals worth $2.7 billion.19 China also now faces a solid waste crisis. Whereas up until the 1980's China did not really have garbage dumps because nearly everything was recycled, following the mass promotion of consumer culture with its excess packaging, disposable containers, and so on, China's cities now face a glut of garbage. By 1990 more than ten thousand dumps had been built. More than seven billion metric tons of industrial and house-hold waste, little of which is recycled or treated to remove toxins, fill up some 600 square kilometres of land. Currently, in China's ten biggest cities, some 3,000 tons of plastic wastes are produced every day. To add to these problems, China's for-profit market reformers have opened up Guangdong province to the establishment of toxic waste dumps for for-eign capitalists whose waste is unacceptable in their own countries. Things have got to such a state that even the US Embassy in China, erstwhile champion of unrestrained market-led growth, concedes that the situation has got out of hand. In a recent report the Embassy said that 'This rapid growth has had a devastating effect on the environment Solid wastes piled outside cities have leaked toxins into the ground water and the water in many rivers does not meet the standards for bathing much less drinking.' China's Agriculture Ministry reported this year that more than 100,000 people were poisoned by pesticides and fertilizers during I992 and I993. More than 14,000 of them died. Yet air pollution is probably China�s worst immediate problem. China�s industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, particulates and heavy are growing at staggering rates. If present trends continue, shortly 2000 China will be the world's largest producer of acid rain and the I largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Scientists estimate that even if ( industry grows at only 8.5 per cent per year (less than half its current of growth) by 2025 China will produce three times as much carboride as the US. China's National Environmental Agency reports that air pollution has caused a sharp increase in deaths from lung cancer, climbed 18.5 per cent in the major cities from 1988-93. According to a report by the Agency in June I995, polluted air and respiratory disease is now the leading cause of death in urban and even rural areas of China. And mercury and lead poisoning is on the rise among children. Pollution is also undermining growth itself. The government estimates that environmental losses total some $I 2 billion annually, and Smil, perhaps the world's leading authority on China's envirornment estimates that environmental abuse already costs the country at least,, seventh of its GDP. China's industrial development is only just beginning. Can these trends continue indefinitely? Smil warns that " Tomorrow's China behaving as if there were no limits to its prosperity inflict irreparable damage to its environment, and it would be the I contributor to potentially destabilizing global climatic change, tinuation of China's runaway economic growth would then be able p to inevitable economic decline-and to more human suffering the next century.'41 VI. Capitalism Against Scientific Rationality In the heyday of Britain's industrial revolution, Karl Marx marveled the bourgeoisie whose 'constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production', whose 'subjection of nature's forces to man, macl application of chemistry to industry and agriculture... created massive and colossal productive forces than all preceding generatio together.' Marx didn't know the half of it. To be sure, nascent industrialists were already wreaking havoc on the environment in his day. But their impact was still limited and localized. Over most of the globe the air was still reasonably clean,and, then at least. there was still plenty of fish in the sea. Back then, Marx could scarcely have foreseen that today's mega-corporations, fdriven by greed and global competition, would devastate entire ecosystems, strip the earth and seas of irreplaceable natural resources, and even alter the very climatre of the planet threatening the critical biological bases of life. The impact of capital's voracious appetite can readily be seen in the global crisis of resource exhaustion. Pro-marketeers like the Economist editors Rohwer and Cairncross take delight in ridiculing the Malthusian environmental catastrophists and doom sayers of the 1960's and 1970's who prophesied that the world was about to run out of food,or oil, or was just about to descend into planetary environmental collapse. In fact, they,contend, the world is os far from running out of resources that the real prices of almost every commodity have fallen in the last twenty years-- implying that there is glut and not shortage. But they leap to the desired conclusion a little too fast. Yes, the doom syers were wrong to think we were going to exhaust the planets supply of oil. And they were wrong to suppose that population growth would soon outstrip humanity's capacity to grow sufficient food. But a more difficult question is, will we be abe to breathe the air if we burn up all that oil? And will we be able to drink the water if we apply enough pesticides and synthetic fertilizers to grow all that food? Requiem For a Fish In fact, Rohmer and Cairncross are tendentious, if not mendacious, iin claiming that the falling prices for most commodities shows that the extinction of natural resources is an econut fantasy. For market competition is right now driving many crucial economic--not to say aesthetic-- natural resources like forests, fisheries, fresh water lakes to the point of absolute exhaustion. To take just one example, numerous reports have warned of the collapse of commercial fisheries the world ofver as, in a display of the vaunted rationality of the profit system, commercial fishers are racing to harvest the last bounties-- and in so doing, driving many species into extinction. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), nine of the world's seventeen fisheries are now in serious decline four are depleted and the others are 'fully exploited' or 'overexploited'. Some heavily fished species are approaching not only commercial but biological extinction. Fish prices are rising not falling. But far from this reducing pressure on remaining stocks, which we should expect on the premises of the fantasy- world supply and demand model Cairncross and Rohwer propound, this is only hastening their extermination. Take the bluefin tuna. These prize dfish market for $7000 to $10000 oer fish, and retail in thinly sliced portions at more that $11 an ounce ($176 per pound) are among the most expensive in teh world. But their astronomical market price has not saved them. Instead, even as their price rises, they are being hunted to extinction. Sad to say, there's little doubt that someone, somewhere perhaops even one of the Guandong nouveau riche entrepeneurs Rohwer is so enamoured of, will pay whatever price is demanded to eat that last fish. But then, perhaps, it does not matter if some fish become extinct, since increaasingly ocean fish are too polluted to eat. According to tests by the Consumers Union in 1992, 44 per cent of fish and shellfish bought from supermarkets were too contaminated to be deemed acceptable for human consumption. Entire ecosystems like coral reefs, mountain areas, dry tropical rain rests and other tropical habitats that evolved over millions of years are now being destroyed in a biohistorical blink of an eye. Worldwide topical rainforests are being felled at the rate of nearly 55,000 squar miles a year, an area roughly the size of Florida. At that rate, according to the Harvard ecologist Edward 0. Wilson, the world's rain forest ill be reduced by half in thirty years, and some 10-22 per cent of rain forest species will be doomed in the next three decades.49 And this to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of species of bird,amphibians, turtles, bats, primates, cetaceans, the hundreds of thousands of invertebrates, and the untold numbers of plant species that hat ready been driven to extinction over the last two centuries or so-round under the wheels of profit-driven development, over-exploitation and pollutions We are not just losing 'a few bugs' here and there, as the anti-environmentalists whine. Species extinction has accelerated to such a rate that, according to Wilson, some 50,000 species a year, or about six every hour, are being doomed to eventual extinction I a genuine holocaust ... That sounds alarmist. But I invite anyone to check through the figures. Ecologist Jared Diamond of UCLA concludes that if current trends continue, even taking into account the uncertainties, 'something like half the species that now exist will go extinct or will be on the verge of going extinct in the next century'.51 Better Living Through Chemistry? Modern capitalist development is also fast exceeding nature's capacity to act as a 'sink' to absorb pollution. Most toxic environments pollution comes from the production of raw materials-the global complex of mines, smelters, chemical plants, steel and aluminum ills, pulp mills, and other facilities that churn out the raw material that go to make up finished commodities from cars to clothes and buildings. Over-cutting has already decimated forest ecosystems if Canada, Brazil, Malaysia. Mining and smelting have ruined whole mountains, valleys and rivers from Arizona to Chile, from Brazil to New Guinea. Oil extraction has decimated land and water fron Alaska to the North Sea. Petrochemical biocides are ruining soil fron the US to Uzbekistan. The ever-growing demand for raw materials is largely driven by the extravagant levels of consumption of raw materials for the consumer economies of the inustrial world.According to calculations by John Young of the World Watch Institute, the average American accounts for the use of some 540 tons of construction materials, 18 tons of paper, 23 tons of wood, 16 tons of metals, and 32 tons of organic chemicals in the course of a lifetime. Yet, as Young points out, these current rates of materials production are unsustainable, not so much because we are likely to run out of raw materials, but because the processes used to produce them court human and ecological catastrophes VII. The Chinese Attitude China's leaders readily concede the gravity of the environmental threats facing their country. But they insist that pollution is a global problem and that the main responsibility for cleaning it up should fall on the developed countries. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro the Chinese quite rightly pointed out that, two hundred years after the industrial revolution, the world economy has greatly advanced and the developed countries are the main beneficiaries: Today, the industrialized North, which has 2 5 per cent of the world's population, owns 86 per cent of the world's industry and consumes 8o per cent of world energy. In comparison, the South which claims 75 per cent of the world's population, owns only I4 per cent of world industry and consumes just 20 per cent of world energy. Moreover, developed countries account for roughly 8o per cent of global pollu-tion of all kinds. On a per capita basis, the discrepancy is even greater. The us discharges ten times more carbon dioxide per capita than China. With considerable justice, therefore, China and the South demanded that if the developed countries wanted the developing South to adopt clean technologies, they should provide financial assistance for technology transfer. This is a reasonable demand but it is important to ask whether, in the Chinese case, it is not an excuse to carry on just as they are. China's pollution may be comparatively light in per capita terms. But in absolute terms China is already the third largest contributor to global climate changes, after the US and Russia. By 2050, if current trends continue, China will be the leader by far, emitting a projected 40 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide. China also contributes heavily to the destruc-tion of the ozone layer through its heavy use of ozone depleting substances (ODSS) including chlorofluorocarbons. Since 1986, demand for foam mattresses, office chairs, aerosols, air-conditioners, refrigerators and supermarket freezer cases has propelled Chinese consumption of ozone-depleting compounds from 3 to 18 per cent of the world total. China wasp robably the largest global consumer of ODSS in 1996, and its consumption will nearly double to just under 120,000 tons by the end of the decade. 54 China has,in fact, doubled expenditures on pollution controlsince the mid-80's. But average annual expenditure of Y83 billion (about $950 million) between 1991 and 1995 represent less than .7 per cent of China'S GNP. China's own experts say that the country needs to spend at least 2 per cent of GNP just to prevent worsening water shortages and air pollution, and 2.5 per cent and more to begin to reverse the tide of pollution. China's National Environmental Protection agency (NEPA) has called for spending $23 billion by the year 2000 but that sum includes money to be used on dams, cleaner energy and related industries-not just cleanup. 55 China's Ninth Five-Year Plan ( the years i996-2ooo budgets just 56 billion yuan ($6.75 I-35 billion) per year for environmental protection projects and air pollution control, solid waste disposal, and noise abatement. 56 The Chinese have also received funds from the World Bank that currently channels around $500 million per year into environmental projects in China. But all this does not come close to meeting the nations needs. In May 1996 China's State Council announced a big clean up effort to bring the country's river pollution under control, ordering the shutdown down of some 5o,ooo heavily polluting rural and township factories mainly paper mills, tanneries, electroplating and chemical works. While environmentalists welcomed the news that the government was finally taking action on pollution, the closures did not affect the major polluters-large state industries. Cash for the Clean-Up With a trade surplus in I995 Of $20 billion, and record foreign exchange reserves of $100 billion, China's rulers are not short of cash. There is plenty to squander on golf courses, fenced-off communities, villas and Hong Kong real estate. They have plenty to waste on military build-up. China's leaders recently announced that to spend 1 billion dollars on Russian jet fighters-with which to threaten Taiwan. This expenditure alone is more than the governments average annual expenditures for pollution control in the early 1990s. And they are also shopping for aircraft carriers. They also have plenty of foreign exchange to invest overseas buying up Peruvian mines, Canadian paper mills, French shopping malls, Australian meat processors, New Zealand steel mills, Hong Kong banks, American properties and businesses, to say nothing of importing whole fleets of Mercedes Benz limousines-China is now the largest market for Mercedes Benz and will likely soon be the largest foreign market for Rolls-Royce. We in the wealthy industrialized countries should emphatically demand that our governments and corporations transfer the latest clean technology to Third World countries as quickly and cheaply as possible. But neither we nor the Chinese should tolerate the Chinese leaders' fraudulent claim that they do not have the cash to clean up their mess. Furthermore, China's leaders have militantly resisted international efforts to persuade their country to set quotas for pollution reduction. As recently as April 1995, at the first follow-up to the Rio confer-ence, the Chinese delegation to the First Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Berlin, China's representative, Liu Daquan, insisted that 'My delegation is firmly opposed to any attempt to impose limitations or reduction obligations on the developing country parties at this stage'59 Li Junfeng, a senior energy-researcher for the State Planning Commission, has put the matter even more bluntly: 'It is just as hot in Beijing as inWashington, DC. You try to tell the people in Beijing that they cant buy a car or an air-conditioner because of the global climate change issue. If we reduce our emission of gasses it means we must reduce our energy consumption. When people get rich, they want to buy an air-conditioner or a car; that will increase energy consumption."6o In sum, China's leaders seem to think that they-and the rest of the developing world-have the right to develop and to pollute with the same profligacy as the advanced industrialized nations have done-and damn the consequences. Of course, there is nothing to stop them from operating on this principle. But if they do so, and if the industrialized countries also remain hell bent for growth regardless of the consequences, there seems little prospect of slowing the increase, much less reducing, emissions of carbon dioxide and other substances without which global climatic disaster looms as a real threat. _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
