Posted on 04/19/2006 7:27:44 PM PDT by blam
China admits 'green' failures
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
(Filed: 20/04/2006)
The Chinese government admitted yesterday that it had failed to meet almost half of the environmental targets it set itself six years ago.
Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, owned up after a fortnight in which Beijing has experienced some of its worst pollution for years.
He told a national conference on environmental protection that "lack of awareness, insufficient planning, illogical industrial structure and a weak legal framework" were all reasons why the country was falling behind on eight of 20 measures set out in 2000.
These included the release of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, the discharge of industrial solid waste, and improving the treatment of waste water.
At the same time, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) issued a report saying that China had doubled its consumption of the world's resources, on a per person basis, since 1961. It also cited a survey of big business which claimed that many companies broke environmental laws.
The government has set great store by its plan to "re-order" China's development away from increasing economic growth towards sustainable development.
The consequences of China's environmental devastation have been plain to see this month in the capital. On two occasions smog has been so bad that the government has issued warnings that children should be kept indoors.
This week, the worst dust storms in five years, caused by desertification in the north-west of the country and unusual climate conditions, swept across northern China, into Korea, and even into Japan.
The 11th five-year plan, announced last autumn, decrees that energy consumption per unit of GDP is to be cut by 20 per cent by 2010; major pollutants by 10 per cent and forest cover is to increase.
Dermot O'Gorman, WWF's representative in China, said despite its economic growth, the country's use of resources per head remained a third of that in western Europe and a seventh of that in North America.
The question was what would happen if growth continued, he said.
Boy I'm just so incredibly suprised that China should miss an envinromental goal.
They left out reason # 1: Communism. Every single one of the world's worst environmental disasters, from Chernobyl to the Aral Sea to Lake Semipalatinsk to Polish Silesia to the Three Gorges Dam to God knows what horrible mess in North Korea that we don't know about yet--they're all the products of Communism.
"Insufficient planning"? Just the opposite.
And this is different from the United States exactly how?
100 times different. A collective offers no individual ownership or care...
Exactly. Central Planning has always produced the worst pollution. Probably this is because, in most Western democracies, there is a division of power between government and business. Business wants to make money, government wants to regulate business. Whereas in Communist Countries, all power is concentrated in the same hands and you don't have different groups keeping an eye on each other.
The result is excess, of which maybe the most terrible example was Mao's Great Leap Forward. But there were plenty of examples in the Soviet Union, too.
Because Communist states traditionally operate on a command economy, not a demand economy: The only thing that matters in the Communist economy is production, production, production. Meeting quotas. Environmental worries are a drag on production, so they are ignored.
In spite of the introduction of free-market reforms, the Chinese state retains many of these oldtime Communist qualities.
In free market economies, environmental damage is a problem for consumers, and producers must be sensitive to consumer concerns. In a Communist or semi-Communist state, consumer concerns don't matter at all.
Translation: We environmentalists love the appalling poverty in China's interior.
If you want an example of what communism will do to China before they are finished, check out the environment of East Germany and a small town in the Ukraine called Chernobyl. If you want more examples, look at Kazakstan and the Aral Sea.
With all the world's major corporations invested in China it is doubtful that the Chinese government would allow reforms to empower the peasants.
Considering Kyoto was to give them a pass, it is all or nothing.
The more they miss their "targets" the more the Kyoto critcs are proven correct.
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