EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- One American Who Isn't For Sale
- Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
- Major Loss to Organic Farmers as Court Rules in Favor of Monsanto
- The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning
- Remembering Satyajit Ray’s Hirok Rajar Deshe: On Edward Snowden, Resistance and Inverted Totalitarianism
Popular content
Today's Top News
Obama: Drinking the Tea Party's Environmental Meltdown
The name of the 1979 movie China Syndrome has ever since been attached to a catastrophic nuclear reactor meltdown. But the name is better suited for what is evolving now in China, a new version of the China Syndrome; complete “environmental meltdown.” (If you haven’t seen the pictures go here.) China actually has decent environmental laws, but they are not enforced. Chinese industry and utilities are basically free to do as they please, much like what the increasingly radical Anti-Science/Tea Party wing of the GOP is clamoring for in the United States. So how well is this Tea Party brand of environmental protection working in China?
Chinese authorities admit that 750,000 thousand of their citizens die from air pollution and 60,000 from water pollution annually. Outside organizations think that is a gross underestimation. The Chinese Ministry of Health admits pollution has made cancer the leading cause of death in China, followed by respiratory and heart diseases, also related to air pollution. Only 1% of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. All of China's major cities are constantly blanketed by the same choking, toxic gray shroud, the "China Syndrome."
Chinese citizens are becoming increasingly aware of how this affects their health, longevity and livelihoods. In 2009 China had 90,000 incidents of riots or mass protests triggered by outrage over chronic or acute pollution. Some of these riots involved 15,000 people risking arrest, beatings and even their lives.
After a 2007 investigation, the New York Times wrote, “Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public, but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party.”
Pollution is an equally severe economic liability for China. Our State Department estimates that pollution costs China 7-10% of their GDP, negating almost all of their GDP growth. In other words, pollution is an economic disaster as well. Nonetheless, Tea Partiers want to bring the China Syndrome to America. Actually some of it already does.
Satellite photos reveal an “Asian Brown Cloud”, a massive plume of Asian industrial pollution and dust from the Gobi Desert constantly making its way across the Pacific Ocean and reaching the United States. On average about 20-30% of the air pollution over Los Angeles originates in China. In May 2006, University of California-Davis researchers claimed that almost all the particulate matter over Lake Tahoe came from China. Mercury, furans, and dioxins from the burning of coal in Chinese power plants and cement kilns circle the entire globe--as does our own pollution--adding to the growing contamination of the US environment with these intensely hazardous toxins.
The Anti-Science Tea Party can never hear the words “freedom” and “liberty” too many times. To them the archetypal enemy of freedom is of course the federal government which they are determined to wrestle away from believers in science and the deniers of freedom. Inexplicably, this year no freedom is more important to the Tea Party than freedom for corporations to pollute our air and water at will, albeit using a more soothing name of "deregulation." Eric Cantor announced that is the entire GOP job creation plan, and he released a memo to his GOP colleagues last week itemizing the top ten environmental regulations whose evisceration he plans to make his number one priority.
Every Republican presidential candidate and virtually every Republican Congressperson is loudly demonizing the face of environmental regulation, the EPA. Michelle Bachmann proudly wants to abolish the EPA altogether. Not to be out done, pistol packin’ Rick Perry sounds like he wants to torture everyone who works there, then abolish it. Even Obama bought some of this anti-science snake oil last week, ordering the EPA to abandon a court ordered tightening of inadequate smog standards.
But most Americans aren't buying it. Polls taken even in the midst of our moribund economy, show that people don’t think their health and the environment must be sacrificed for economic recovery, they don’t want regulations watered down, and are even willing to pay more out of their pockets for cleaner energy.
The China Syndrome, literally and immorally sacrificing the health and lives of millions of innocent people in Asia, is the lesson we are ignoring. The Anti-Science Tea Party, carrying water for the industrial polluters, are hard selling the hogwash that giving Americans the freedom to breathe more pollution is an ideological virtue and an economic miracle elixir. Obama is shamefully conceding to them the stage, hiding behind the curtain, even handing us a straw to sip the hogwash. That the cure for our economic free fall is to allow environmental meltdown is a despicable lie, and Americans know it.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
12 Comments so far
Show AllIn then end, unregulated, "free market" capitalism is always its own worst enemy.
The pictures are numbing.
I'd always regarded our environmental efforts as lessons learned. The modern industrialization of China could have utilized those lessons but they look just like the early industrialization of America- on steroids.
As Dr. Moench and the linked pictures show, environmental responsibility has no meaning without adequate and enforced regulation. Industry will not clean itself up unless it is forced to do so. Most environmental political history proves that. Those photos should be used to shame China into action and to remind us of the way we were, before the EPA.
The Chinese pictures are horrific, and should move readers with any human feeling to tears, and then action.
It would be easy to blame the Chinese government, but in life things are never simple. I believe that in many, if not most cases, the central government wants to clamp down on polluters. But the need to promote economic "growth", the profit motive of the local entrepreneurs, who are often the local government officials, and the demands of the international business community for profit at any cost, mean that the country is ravaged. Anyone who has spent any time at all in China, and has gotten off the tourist track of Shanghai-Beijing-Xian knows what straits the country is in. And even the tourist cities are deeply affected as well. Young people are becoming more aware of this-- political leaders' children are more keenly aware of the ongoing environmental disaster-- yet it continues.
The reader can look at the pics and think: How can this happen? This is utterly unacceptable on any human level. It can happen, readers, because in almost any society if "progress" benefits a significant number of the society, political realities will dictate that the rest of the society can be tossed down the drain with very little complaint from those not affected. Of course this varies from country to country, and from era to era. USAns can justify kicking perhaps, say, 10% of the population to the curb if it means a good living for the rest.
Of course, even if all USAns were unaffected by the environmental costs of domestic industry, there are still millions upon millions in the "developing" world who pay the price of the US's vaunted lifestyle.
It is only when we travel and meet the real people of the world, and live under the risks that they endure, that we can realize and process fully how the world really works, and the costs of how we live. No amount of reading can do it, although it is certainly helpful.
All humans must somehow come to grips with the consequences of their consumption habits, and their political selves, whether active or inactive.
I can't add anything to your very insightful comment. I'll just urge everyone to read it.
This is what you get with two right wing parties in the bosum of a single state.
"only rich country's can afford enviornmental concerns" (sic)
You should check out Costa Rica. And you should change your screen name.
Also see Sioux Rose's excellent comment below.
The following excerpt is from a 2005 article in Chemical and Engineering News. Reading it may give a better picture of how things work in The Middle Country.
It is difficult to avoid concluding that local officials have too much power in terms of environmental protection.
Most telling is the following sentence: "Authorities were forced to admit earlier this year that a 10-year program launched by the central government to clean up the Huai River water system has been an utter failure, mostly because of local governments' failure to cooperate."
------------------------------------------------------------
The central government appears conflicted in its response to these protests. From one perspective, environmental protection is a national priority, and the protests help to focus attention on some of the most serious cases of environmental abuse. But protests are a step toward political instability, something that authorities seek to avoid above all else. Beijing's response is therefore both to suppress the protesters and to attempt to address their complaints.
The rise in protests so far poses little threat to the expansion of foreign chemical makers into China. For the most part, foreign companies are putting up plants in well-planned industrial parks where wastewater is treated and air emissions are measured. The increase in protests could even be considered good news for foreign firms if their Chinese competitors are forced to invest in expensive environmental abatement equipment as a result of increased government controls.
The responsible practices of foreign companies at times appear too advanced for China. Earlier this year, a large multinational company was told by local government officials that it would be unwise to explain to people living next to its new plant what the facility makes and how it does it. Executives eager to be responsible neighbors were told that doing so would merely make local residents suspicious.
For now, companies in China still enjoy considerable leeway if they wish to pollute. In her 2004 book on the Chinese environment, "The River Runs Black," Elizabeth C. Economy notes that Chinese national environmental laws are vague and open to interpretation by local officials. Citizens who wish to sue polluters thus face considerable difficulty in showing that they have a case.
An additional problem is the decentralization of Chinese environmental watchdogs. China's top environmental authority, the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), lacks power. And it's not clear that SEPA will be able to increase its influence in the near future.
SEPA has little authority over the thousands--11,000 in all, according to Economy--of environmental protection bureaus at the provincial, municipal, township, and village levels in China. While these agencies theoretically uphold national standards, they tend to operate in ways that best suit the local government they are attached to. They are aided by the vagueness of national regulations.
Mao Da, an environmental activist with the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Global Village of Beijing, tells C&EN that SEPA is studying ways to harness these regional agencies into a single structure under Beijing's direct control. A precedent for such reorganization was set in 1998 when China centralized its customs administration in a successful effort to clamp down on smuggling that had spun completely out of control. Chinese customs bureaus had been operating quite independently from the central government. SEPA did not respond to C&EN's requests for interviews.
There is a lack of political will to strengthen SEPA that is alarming given the severity of the environmental disasters that China has already suffered. Until the 1970s, environmental protection agencies lacked regulatory clout even in developed countries. In the U.S., one event that led to the strengthening of the powers of federal-level environmental protection was the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River. Japan strengthened its environmental controls after thousands of villagers living near Minamata Bay were poisoned by the mercury waste of a nearby chemical plant in the 1950s and 1960s.
Huo Daishan, an environmental and social activist in China's central province of Henan, believes that the pollution of the Huai River water system is making more people seriously sick than in Minamata. But he has yet to see effective official action to control the pollution. Authorities were forced to admit earlier this year that a 10-year program launched by the central government to clean up the Huai River water system has been an utter failure, mostly because of local governments' failure to cooperate.
The embarrassment is particularly grave, Huo says, given that China's highest decision-making body, the State Council, had sponsored the cleanup effort. Huo maintains that the $2.5 billion or so that the central government spent on cleaning up the Huai might as well have been thrown in the river. Pollution is worse than ever, he says.
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8339china.html
As taken from this excellent article:
"Satellite photos reveal an “Asian Brown Cloud”, a massive plume of Asian industrial pollution and dust from the Gobi Desert constantly making its way across the Pacific Ocean and reaching the United States. On average about 20-30% of the air pollution over Los Angeles originates in China."
I would not be surprised if right wing pundits, and/or the deregulatory whores for big business, used this data as a reason to encourage U.S. industries to pollute more. The rationale? "We're going to get China's pollution anyway," and/or "We might as well send ours over to Europe then!"
We're living in times where Truth does not move those already brainwashed into meaningful action. This is why the control of media, i.e. The Conversation, is so disastrous, and has proven insidious to human rights, along with the sustainability of Earth's ecosystems.
Conservative's utopia
So-called conservatives truly believe that the effects of climate change won't happen if they deny it and wish it all away fervently enough. By the time they are forced to see they're wrong, it will be too late.
They will keep on denying the undeniable till their dying day . . . and ours.
Good thing adding more people to the planet is no problem at all eh? In a densely populated country with mega cities it's smoke plums, I hate to tell you. Yes it can be "better" with pollution abatement, but sheer C02 gets you in the end with a growing population plus a growing economy. Even solar and wind infrastructure will be made with fossil fuels until they get online, there is no free lunch!