Nathan Lee

Bit of a strange call, given that China is pouring out pollution like there’s no tomorrow, pollutes more than the USA and has 750,000 people dying each year thanks to pollution (and that’s the censored report!). But I think there are a few things that China has that the other big nations don’t have:

• ability to lay down the law
• massive market to apply new technology to
• lots and lots of money

So let me start by saying China is a horribly polluted place. The type of polluted that makes bushfire haze a clear day and makes effluent outfall water look like Evian spring water. Not only horribly polluted, but possessing some messed up socio/economic habits. An example of this is the willingness to trade in their environment, quality of life and ability to not have 3 headed babies for a quick buck.

There’s an overwhelming attitude problem that if something looks “kinda close enough”, then that’s good enough or that dumping pollution into rivers/land can be take place without consequence.

Some particularly shocking examples of this came up while I was living just over the border in Hong Kong:

• baby food that looked and smelled ok, but had zero nutritional content. Result: 50 to 60 dead kids who starved to death while the poor parents tried in vain to feed them with milk powder that was pretty much sawdust. (See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/10/health/main616432.shtml )
• Use of a carcinogenic red dye (called sudan red) in duck eggs because the redder the yolk, the more they can sell ‘em for (see http://french.hanban.edu.cn/english/health/189567.htm ) and also in sauce (http://www.china.org.cn/english/health/209080.htm)
• Benzene slick down the river. This stuff causes leukaemia upon exposure! (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4545502.stm )
• Major pollution of the rivers, such that freshwater dolphins are now gone. (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6935343.stm)
• Fake medical supplies (see http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/08/content_10625425.htm and  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jul/05/china.internationalnews1 )

Those are just some of the cases that spring to mind. This one kinda sums it up though:

Pollution from China blows out to sea. Image courtesy of NASA.

Anyhow, on to how this environment and how they might (kinda) fix it.

So China has the balls, ability and pliable population who are well trained to accept blanket decisions necessary for the massive change in lifestyle, technology and society that tackling climate issues demands. If coupled with blanket decisions that yield a good environmental outcome: they may well drag the necessary technologies from niche upper-middle-class-with-expendable-income to mass produced for peasants affordability.

An example of this ability to execute mass bans or decrees is the decision to ban motorcycles in Guangzhou (http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200611/14/eng20061114_321188.html). Now I don’t happen to think that this is going to necessarily have a good environmental outcome (more likely the opposite if people get cars instead), but it shows the sort of scale of sweeping authoritarian powers that China can swing into action. Try that in USA, UK, Australia and see how far it gets you. If you dig further and look into the darker areas where China has flexed its muscles: censorship. So successfully implemented (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/internet/sidebyside.html) that uni students fail to recognise perhaps the most famous and powerful photograph of political protest and indeed of China (see http://www.stwr.org/india-china-asia/the-tank-man.html)

A survey of uni students in China revealed censorship to have been very successful. Most thought it was from another country.

The Chinese government has in various degrees stomped on, arrested, imprisoned, “disappeared” and executed countless people for disagreeing with the party lines or expected behaviours.

So that’s the “balls” and execution aspect (no pun intended).

The motivation for China is that world prices for resources are going up, as is their internal needs as well. This will continue to rise most likely exponentially. Their energy needs (to fulfill the USA, Australasia and Europe’s increasing desire for plastic trinkets to show self worth) are going through the roof. So short of military action to secure supplies of diminishing oil/gas/coal: they’ll have to look elsewhere. This elsewhere is likely to be from renewable energy.

Wind energy not just hot air in China

An article (see http://ecoworldly.com/2008/07/03/energy-experts-say-chinas-wind-energy-could-grow-1667-by-2020/) talks of how China is exceeding their targets for wind energy and are likely to increase their wind energy sources by 1667% by 2020. Another article (see http://www.cleantech.com/news/3815/china-drives-global-wind-energy-supply-market) says that China has the fastest growing wind energy market. The rest of the world is struggling with NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) or pseudo environmentalism bullshit, government apathy and planning hurdles to the point where they’re almost crippled when it comes to actually executing on plans for renewables or affordable nuclear over coal fired power stations.

I predict it won’t be long before China’s dabbling in electric bikes turns into enforced decrees about electric/hybrid cars.

Meanwhile we’ll have the same old stories of misdirected consumer/voter energy as ridiculous ideas like “reduce the tax on petrol/gasoline” are the best we can come up with elsewhere. Want to live in a huge house, buy lots of shit we don’t need, eat 10 kilos of meat a day followed by a 2Litre bucket of coke while driving a hummer h2 with 1 mile per gallon fuel efficiency, but expect both the cost of living and quality of life to improve as well as the environment sort itself out? Get ready for a severe reality check. But hey, maybe reducing taxes will put off that reality check by a month or two while we pointlessly worry about plastic bags instead.

So while the stream of coal, oil will continue into China at increasing rates, when the crunch time comes China will have massive investments in the “other” options that the industrialised nations are putting off because they can (with a bit of whinging) withstand because they can afford them.

It can’t NOT go green

In short China can’t afford NOT to cut itself off from oil/gas/coal as soon as possible. It has money, sure, but thrift is the name of the game when you’re talking a billion or so citizens wanting refrigerators and transport.

Want a car? All cars in China must be electric. The only whining allowed is the whine of an electric drive train.
Want a house? You’ll have to put 5 square metres of Mao’s best solar cells on the roof and a little red transformer box or it’ll be bulldozed.
Need a job? We need a million workers sticking propellers on small scale wind generators, and another million sticking the “made in china” stickers on the propellers.
Don’t want a wind farm, nuclear plant, tidal generator or solar farm in your backyard: tough. Protest and you’ll disappear like all those before you.

How will this help? Well it’ll hopefully bring down the price of technology, give other governments a kick up the arse when they get left for dead as China becomes the world’s super power while the rest of the developed world struggles to support an industry nearly entirely dependent on oil and coal.
Sure, China will have by that stage pretty much guaranteed their people will be unable to drink clean water, eat food free of countless carcinogens or see 10 metres down the road on most days due to the street level nature of the cloud in “The land of the great white cloud”: but they’ll have main-streamed the solar/wind/nuclear technology and mass produced it for 5 bucks a pop which will (I hope) give the rest of the world some viable options to fix their problems while they debate on the colour of the promotional fridge magnets for members of the community consultation committee for deciding the font to be used in the applications for the environmental impact statement studies for a trial wind farm project.
That’s if China hasn’t experienced the (quite justified) mass uprising against the big brother nature of their existence. If so: they can join the rest of us in our paralysis of social freedoms as the end grows ever nearer.