U.N. report raises pressure on China to cut pollution
BEIJING — As China's economy roars ahead, leaving Technicolor rivers and polluted skies in its wake, the world's most populous nation has struggled to craft environmental policies that will appease growing numbers of critics at home and abroad.
Traditionally, many of the issues outlined in Friday's ominous United Nations report on climate change have been framed here, as elsewhere, as a trade-off between clean air and jobs. Yet it's also becoming increasingly evident that the division is not so clear-cut. Some studies estimate that pollution exacts a 7% to 10% cost on China's economy.
Complicating what passes for an environmental debate in China are political sensitivities, a controlled media, widespread rural poverty and a long tradition of top-down government wary of too much "meddling" by citizens.
For two decades, China has made economic growth a priority. The results have been impressive as the country becomes a bigger player on the global stage and hundreds of millions of its people are lifted out of extreme poverty.
But the cost has been high. China is home to 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities, the World Bank concluded in a report last week. Officials here have acknowledged that 410,000 deaths a year are caused by pollution. And China is projected to surpass the United States and become the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases by 2009.
The U.N. report released Friday, which warned of the catastrophic results of global warming, served as a pointed indictment of the world's biggest producers of pollution.
Lagging behind
Many of China's neighbors, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, were able to pollute their way to prosperity and pay for the cleanup afterward. China, which comes to the development game late, is under growing international pressure to tackle its environmental problems at the same time, given its huge planetary footprint.
By some accounts, China remains two decades behind the United States in its environmental standards and as much as three decades behind Europe.
In response, Chinese leaders have set targets designed to promote alternate fuels, recycling and "green economic growth." These include vows by Beijing to get 16% of the nation's energy from renewable sources by 2020, double today's rate, and to become 20% more energy efficient by 2010.
