Chap 6 The Coming China Wars Serialization

The Global Warming Wars—Killing Us (and Them) Softly with Their Coal

Team,

That garbage you see in the air sometime might well be from China. What happens in China doesn’t stay in China. If you are a West Coaster, you may all too well what I mean here.

Best,

Peter

6. The Global Warming Wars—Killing Us (and Them) Softly with Their Coal

China's population is so big and its resources so scarce that if we continue to ignore our environmental problems, that will bring disaster for us and the world.
—Pan Yue, China's Environmental Protection Administration

As an example of the severity of China's self-inflicted air pollution crisis, it would hard to top the northeast city of Benxi—one of the 20 largest cities in China. At one point, this heavy industry center, which burns roughly seven million tons of coal per year and produces more steel per capita than any other city in China, literally disappeared from satellite images because of the dense cloud of haze and soot that enveloped it.

The obvious question for those of us living outside China is this: Why should we care? Indeed, if one were to view the heavily polluted Chinese landscape from a totally free-market perspective, one might arrive at this conclusion: If the Chinese want to pollute their air and water so consumers in other countries are thereby able to enjoy lower-priced products, so be it.

One problem with this way of thinking—aside from its obvious disregard for the hundreds of millions of innocent Chinese victims of pollution—is this: As you saw in Chapter 1, "The Cheating 'China Price' and Weapons of Mass Production," China's extremely lax environmental regulations and weak enforcement allow Chinese manufacturers to produce at an unfair cost advantage over competitors. China's wanton fouling of its air and water thus represents an important source of competitive economic advantage that is helping to depress wages and put millions of people out of work in other countries.

There is, however, an arguably even bigger problem with China's pollution that affects literally everyone on the planet. China's prodigious pollution is now spewing well beyond its environmentally porous borders.

Some of China's environmental fallout is regional. Much of the acid rain now falling on the forests, farmland, and rice fields of Japan, the Korean Peninsula, and Taiwan originates in China. "Chinese-made" acid rain is so bad that it approaches levels of acidity equal to that of vinegar.

In addition, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are now regularly pummelled by fierce sandstorms that deposit tons upon tons of toxic yellow dust across these neighboring lands. These dust storms first rise up in China's Gobi Desert, suck up all manner of toxic pollutants as they pass over China's industrial heartland, and then quite literally sandblast China's neighbors.

In addition to these regional environmental effects, China's pollution, like its mercantilist economy, has also gone global. One problem is a particularly virulent brand of Chinese smog or "chog." This chog is sucked up into the jet stream and then travels as far away as Canada and the United States. Indeed, at times, as much as 25% of the air pollution in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco originates in China.

There is also what may turn out to be the mother of all global environmental issues—global warming. You may not be surprised to know that China has now surpassed the United States as the world's biggest global warmer. What is truly astonishing, however, is that within 25 years, China's carbon dioxide emissions will be double that of all other industrial nations combined!

The irony of China's prolific global warming contributions is that of all the large nations on Earth, China may well have the most to lose. Global warming threatens to melt the glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau that feed China's major rivers—the Yellow and Yangtze. Rising sea waters from the melting of the polar ice caps likewise threaten to flood coastal cities such as Shenzhen and Shanghai, along with much of coastal China, where the bulk of China's manufacturing might is concentrated. In addition, prolonged drought in China's northern breadbasket, which is already facing a severe water shortage, is projected to dramatically cut China's ability to feed itself.

In the analysis that follows, two things should become readily apparent. First, the scope of China's environmental degradation is quite literally breathtaking. Second, and even more disturbing, China is not really making a "choice" to be one of the world's worst polluters. Rather, like the toxic yellow dust storms being swept along the jet stream dispersing around the world and Chinese chog, the Chinese people are being swept along by a complex set of political factors and a model of unsustainable economic development that can only end badly—not just for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese dying annually from air pollution-related diseases, but for all of us—unless something is done now.