The greening of China.

Several years back, the Outlook section of the Washington Post featured an op-ed[1] that gave four reasons why China would not likely prove to be the dominant nation for the 21^st century: (1) rapid aging of the population, brought on by years of a one-child-per-family policy; (2) lack of the reliable financial statistics needed to guide effective economic policy formulation; (3) a failure to deal with rapidly growing environmental problems; (4) the lack of any compelling vision that would make the world’s peoples (especially the young) wish they lived there. [By implication, America’s arguably better track record in these four respects might be cause for comfort here in the United States.]

The environmental dimension in particular should matter to us. George Leopold’s most recent post made reference to Chinese environmental problems, and followed on the heels of a cover story in the August 10-16 issue of the Economist, entitled The world’s worst polluter. The Economist piece is worth a read in its entirety (e.g., it provided considerably more background on soil and water pollution than excerpted below); here are some bits and pieces:

… China is so vast and its economy is growing so rapidly that its effect on the world is far greater than that of any other single country…

In January 2013 the air of Beijing hit a level of toxicity 40 times above what the World Health Organisation deems safe. A tenth of the country’s farmland is poisoned with chemicals and heavy metals. Half of China’s urban water supplies are unfit even to wash in, let alone drink. In the northern half of the country air pollution lops five-and-a-half years off the average life…

The pace at which it deals with local pollution is a matter for China itself. But the country’s emissions are of wider interest because they also pollute the atmosphere, which is a global resource. The scale and speed of China’s development—it consumes 40-45% of the world’s coal, copper, steel, nickel, aluminium and zinc—means it is doing so fast. Since 1990 the amount of CO2 pouring from Chinese smokestacks has risen from 2 billion tonnes a year to 9 billion—almost 30% of the global total. China produces nearly twice as much CO2 as America. It is no longer merely catching up with the West. The average Chinese person produces the same amount of CO2 as the average European. Even if you reduce that number by a quarter to take account of the emissions produced by China’s exports, it is still huge…

If China cannot cut its CO2 emissions substantially, then either other countries will have to reduce theirs by more than they are doing now…

But getting China to cut back further is not a lost cause. The place is vulnerable to climate change: in absolute terms, more people live at sea level in China, and so are threatened by rising oceans, than in any other country. The leadership therefore knows it needs to come up with a more effective means of changing behaviour. The obvious way is through a carbon tax, which would be more transparent and less subject to negotiation than targets. The government has promised to introduce one, and should get on with it.

China is more likely to move if it sees movement elsewhere. Although attempts to reach a global deal on emissions have failed, Western countries need to continue to lead by example…

For the rest of the world, there is an upside as well as a downside to China’s vastness: it cannot shirk its responsibilities. National policy in China, unlike that anywhere else except America, makes a global difference. If China continues to pour emissions into the atmosphere, its own people are likely to suffer along with everybody else. If, on the other hand, it wants to do something about warming, it will have to cut its own emissions—and everybody will benefit.

We might well pay special heed to the last two paragraphs, not so much focusing on what they mean to China, but rather their implications for us. The Economist argues that “Western countries need to continue to lead by example…” (emphasis added). Some might say that our past example has not been particularly good. We owe much of our own reduction in the carbon intensity of our economies to the export of the energy-intensive, environmentally-degrading work off our shores.  And to say that China’s vastness implies “it cannot shirk its responsibilities” might appear overly hopeful since that’s just what we might appear to have been doing over a decade ago when as four percent of the world’s population we were consuming a quarter of its energy. We may have been right to reject the Kyoto agreement of the late 1990’s given that India and China were not obligated. But circumstances appear to be different today. Now just might be the time to put a fee on carbon in a revenue-neutral way, and take other measures to stimulate conservation and new energy technologies.

A people aspiring to maintain its role as the indispensible nation for the 21^st century has within its grasp an opportunity to do just that. For example, fracking technologies and policies with respect to natural-resource ownership make it likely that the United States will become a net exporter of fossil energy to the world over the near term. However, history has shown that nations enjoying such a position have almost unanimously grown complacent rather than use their new-found wealth to accelerate innovation and economic growth in other ways that will position them for the future when the wells run dry, as they surely will.

Even if it’s a little late to continue to lead by example, it’s never too late to shoulder our responsibilities… especially at this important juncture, with so much in the balance, and with so vast an audience worldwide watching and waiting to see what we’ll do.