We’ll be seeing plenty of China on our TV screens in the next little while, as long they don’t give us too many long shots. No matter how spectacular the Olympic opening ceremony, if we can see it, I think the abiding image from the Games for me will be the astonishing soup of pollution. I can’t wrap my mind around the kind of hubris and single-minded neglect that could produce such a mess. Rick Birch talking on local radio said the Chinese Government had assured everyone a couple of years ago that the weather would be fine for the opening ceremony, the weather apparently being subject to government will. Hence no need for a plan B in case it rains. Rick says you always have a plan B in case it rains, but not this time.

Similarly, we are assured that the atmosphere would be OK. China has gone to enormous lengths to showcase these games. I understand they have temporarily diverted water about 150k to make sure the city has enough to the deprivation of other parts of the country. But the air pollution has not conformed with government requirements. Hence the Australian team cancelled its traditional outdoor barbecue, apparently because the air might affect the meat!

The Australian Financial Review last Friday in their Review section republished Jacques Leslie’s cover story in the February edition of Mother Jones entitled The Last Empire: China’s Pollution Problem Goes Global. It’s over 9000 words, but it’s well worth a look.

Leslie tells of Mao’s assault on the environment when he launched the “backyard furnace” campaign. Some 90 million peasants set up mini steel smelters stripping 10% of China’s trees within a few months to fire them in order to produce unusable steel. Mao also launched the “Kill the Four Pests Campaign” resulting in the mass killing of sparrows followed by a great locust plague. The consequent harvest failure and famine saw between 30 and 50 million Chinese die, according to Leslie.

Yet the Mao era’s ecological devastation pales next to that of China’s current industrialization. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Acid rain falls on a third of China’s landmass, tainting soil, water, and food. Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities, producing an estimated $12.9 billion in economic losses in Shanghai alone. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning and mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities; of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese.

The government estimates that 400,000 people die prematurely from respiratory illnesses each year, and health care costs for premature death and disability related to air pollution is estimated at up to 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Four-fifths of the length of China’s rivers are too polluted for fish. Half the population—600 or 700 million people—drinks water contaminated with animal and human waste. Into Asia’s longest river, the Yangtze, the nation annually dumps a billion tons of untreated sewage; some scientists fear the river will die within a few years. Drained by cities and factories all over northern China, the Yellow River, whose cataclysmic floods earned it a reputation as the world’s most dangerous natural feature, now flows to its mouth feebly, if at all. China generates a third of the world’s garbage, most of which goes untreated. Meanwhile, roughly 70 percent of the world’s discarded computers and electronic equipment ends up in China, where it is scavenged for usable parts and then abandoned, polluting soil and groundwater with toxic metals.

Robert Merkel told us last year of an environmental disaster that killed 750,000 Chinese. The Chinese government persuaded the World Bank to suppress the story because it could cause social unrest. It seems their fears were justified. Leslie tells us:

Though government-run and heavily censored, the English-language China Daily has reported that pollution problems caused 50,000 disputes and protests throughout China in 2005. (See “The People’s Revolution”.)

If the impact of this environmental destruction was contained within their borders it would be bad enough. But it’s not.

Enthusiasm for traditional Chinese medicine, including its alleged aphrodisiacs, is causing huge declines in populations of hundreds of animals hunted for their organs—including tigers, pangolins, musk deer, sea horses, and sea dragons. Seeking oil, timber, gold, copper, cobalt, uranium, and other natural resources, China is building massive roads, bridges, and dams throughout Africa, often disregarding international environmental and social standards.

Chinese consumption of timber goes far beyond the 45 billion disposable chopsticks produced each year.

At one end are the consumers in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China itself, who are mostly oblivious to the social and environmental destruction left by the Chinese-made furniture, plywood, moldings, and flooring they buy.

At the other end are the wood suppliers, almost all poor countries with weak or corrupt law enforcement and a flourishing trade in illegal lumber. Among China’s leading wood importers, Thailand and the Philippines have already been stripped of their natural forests; Indonesia and Burma are projected to lose theirs within a decade. Papua New Guinea’s will succumb within 16 years, and the vast forests of the Russian Far East will survive no more than two decades. Even so, Forest Trends, a Washington-based nonprofit, estimates that China’s wood imports will probably double over the next decade. Chinese manufacturers are already developing replacement sources in Africa, and South America’s forests are under threat for a different reason: China’s growing consumption of pork and chicken is fed by soybeans grown on newly cleared Amazonian land; by one estimate, 30 percent of the jungle could eventually be transformed into soybean fields.

In the middle is China, the world’s workshop, now both the planet’s leading wood importer and exporter, supplying more than 30 percent of the international furniture trade.

Yet Leslie tells us that China itself uses 90% of the wood products it makes. And it has hardly begun. The middle class, numbering something less than 100 million is projected to reach 700 million by 2020. China’s per capita consumption of paper is a mere eighth of that of the US.

It seems that China is the world’s leading importer of illegal logs. Half of the wood from Siberia is illegal and fires are set in the forests because damaged timber can then be cut. Up to 80% of Indonesian logging is thought to be illegal.

All of China’s rivers are in trouble and of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are Chinese.

The haze that blots out Beijing at any given time may not be from industrial pollution, it could be dust.

Dust storms that now debilitate Beijing appear in records from as long ago as the 1200s, but they occurred less than once a year on average then; today they come at least 20 times a year.

When agriculture was de-collectivised trees were cut down on the unstable western grazing lands to build fences. Now with endemic overgrazing the desert is advancing.

The dust does not stop at the border but sweeps over Korea, Taiwan and Japan to the USA. A thick haze has been known as far east as Denver. The dust itself has reached as far as the Canary Islands off Africa.

Industrial pollution too sweeps eastwards. A peer-reviewed study in 2004 found that 36% of the man-made mercury settling on the US came from Asia. In California the legal pollution limit is 12 micrograms per cubic metre of air. Now 4-6 micrograms is being supplied by Asia.

Already climate change is affecting China. The already arid north is drying out further. The glaciers are melting (Greenpeace reckons 80% could disappear by 2035), floods and deluges have increased in the south.

Leslie believes the problem is that China, rather than find its own path is seeking to copy the West. Cars, for example, are projected to increase from 33 million to 130 million by 2020. And they won’t be diverted from their path while we maintain the lifestyle we do. Leslie says that Chinese per capita income is still less than 10th of that of the US. To achieve parity would require several planets worth of resources.

When China joined the World Trade Organisation the show was run by the ‘Quad’ – the US, the EU, Japan and Canada. At the recent WTO meeting Australia displaced Canada in the so-called G7 caucus presumably because of its leadership of the Cairns Group. India, China and Brazil were added.

Once you could say that if you wanted to address a problem of real importance in the world you needed the US there. You might not get much done with them but you couldn’t leave them out. I think in the future China, India and Brazil will similarly need to be there when important matters have to be addressed, especially in relation to global warming and the environment generally. Russia was missing because it’s not a member of the WTO. Africa has no single country near the top of the pecking order.

And so we are moving towards a multi-polar world, but given the environmental track record of the major powers the prospects for concerted action on anything don’t look all that flash.

It is more than a little interesting to contemplate what could bring about the necessary attitudinal and value changes to seriously address climate change. Perhaps when they twig to the threat of sea level change it might concentrate the mind. Some of the great powers, especially China, seem quite vulnerable:

(Image from slide 46 from Hansen’s Iowa Coal testimony – large pdf)

Certainly preaching at them while we continue our own profligate consumption of resources won’t do the trick.