Catanduanes Forum

China Is Pulling Ahead On The Environment
Shaun Rein, 09.01.09, 03:15 PM EDT
Maray na balita para satuyang Planeta, Pilipinas lalo na sa Catanduanes asin sa mga Investors.

More from Shaun Rein

When I first moved to China, in the mid-1990s, every time I went outside my throat felt like someone had taken sandpaper to it and my eyes burned in pain. At the time, 80% of the country's electricity came from coal, factories belched soot and grit into the air and I could count on one hand the number of times a year I saw blue sky. The World Bank had found that 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities were in China.
China's neighbors protested that blankets of smog from factories invaded their territory. Even California, 5,000 miles away, detected Chinese contaminants in the air. And that was all before an increasingly wealthy Chinese populace made the country the largest auto market in the world. China's pollution problem a decade ago was very, very bad.
Is it still so dire? What about the future? Pollution is definitely still a problem: Levels of particulate matter in the air are far above safety thresholds--they're about 10 times as bad as New York's. However, there is reason for real optimism.
To begin with, the Chinese government recognizes that it has a severe problem and is doing something about it. This is a turnaround from just a few years ago, when the government argued that heavy pollution was a necessary part of economic development, Western countries having gone through it in the Industrial Revolution. The nation's rulers were more worried about feeding their citizens than about preserving their environment. But today most Chinese citizens have access to adequate food and shelter and are increasingly concerned about pollution's effect on their health.
Spiraling health care costs have also pressured the government. Unlike in the U.S., where private insurers control the market, most Chinese are covered by state health care programs. With mounting health care costs incurred by pollution straining an already unstable health care system, the government has realized it has to act.
Thus it has pushed the use of renewable energy and tried to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. The country has plans to provide 15% of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020; it recently suggested that it will revise that goal upward to 20%. Most of that renewable energy will come from hydroelectric, solar and wind projects. Installed wind power capacity already jumped from .76 gigawatts to 12.21 gigawatts between 2004 and 2008. The government has announced it aims to have 30 gigawatts of wind power capacity by 2020; it will likely have closer to 100 gigawatts.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/01/china-environment-pollution-leadership-...