The pollution emmitted by China is not only dangerous to China but to the world (esp. its neibours). We can just hope that they do something about it.
The mainland’s rapid growth has only worsened its environmental problems, and the government expects pollution to quadruple by 2020
The 2008 Beijing Olympics is being billed as one of those glorious defining moments in history that will signal China’s arrival as an economic power. But what if the global media pack and the millions of tourists who descend on China two years from now take away a less-than-flattering impression of the Middle Kingdom?
Yes, China is a remarkable growth story. But it is also fast becoming an ecological wasteland, home to world-class smog, acid rain, polluted rivers and lakes, and deforestation. Environmental problems play a role in the death of some 300,000 Chinese people each year, according to World Bank estimates.
China’s torrid growth statistics—the mainland clocked 10%-plus growth in the first quarter—also mask the huge economic costs of this evolving environmental crisis. On June 5, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) issued a report that the mainland’s pollution scourge costs the country roughly $200 billion a year, or some 10% in gross domestic product, from lost work productivity, health problems, and government outlays. That is a staggering admission.
DEEP IMPACT China, of course, isn’t the first high-speed developing economy to grapple with the tradeoffs between prosperity that lifts millions out of poverty and environmental damage that degrades living standards (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/27/06, “Is Beijing Greedy for Oil?”. Think of Japan in he 1960s. What’s different is China’s outsized impact on the global environment.
China’s economy is only about one-fifth the size of the U.S, but is already the second biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, second only to the U.S. China’s emissions jumped 33% during a 10-year period ended in 2002, according to the latest World Bank figures. A miasma of dirty air from China is spreading across East Asia and even reaching the West Coast of the U.S.
RENEGADE POLLUTERS Pan Yue, vice-minister of SEPA, predicted last summer at an environmental conference in Beijing that “the pollution load of China will quadruple by 2020” if nothing is done. Some 20% of the population lives in “severely polluted” areas, according to SEPA estimates, and 70% of the country’s rivers and lakes are in grim shape, figures the World Bank.