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A few issues surrounding China Air Pollution

Find out more about the global environment.

How does China air pollution differ from that in other parts of the world? When news of pollution happens, the spotlight usually shines on the United States.

The good ol' USA has this distinct title: The largest per capita consumer nation on the planet, and until recently, the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

However, that spotlight hits the States because it's an easy target, with ready freedom of the press protected by law, and extensive environmental regulations, and the rule of law combating corporate cronyism to a fairly significant degree.

Indeed, many American and European citizens take pride in living green, even if those policies aren't exactly endorsed by their governments.

No Place to Hide

However, much like crime statistics, it's not the polluters you can see that are the problem. It's the ones that have drawn a veil, and worked in places where governments will let them have a free hand that causes the most damage.

One of those places is China. China has, in the last thirty years, doubled the total amount of land area that qualifies as a desert. It has also lost nearly three quarters of its forest land. This environmental change is causing people from the rural Northwest of China to seek new lives along the river network in the heart of the country, along the China air pollution central region, the new Industrial Corridor.

Unfortunately, the Industrial Corridor, most of which has factories built, or purchased from overseas and transported, is one of the major garbage pollution belts in China. Wastewater outlets are causing fish die offs and raising the incidences of liver, stomach and jaw cancers in the villages near the factories to skyrocket.

Environment and Chinese Infrastructure

China's extensive effort to do rapid modernizations and industrialization has created the Three Gorges Dam, which provides hydroelectric power to much of Northern China. It's also displaced tens of millions of people who used to live, fish and farm along the Yangtse River, and caused more of the China air pollution and urban problems to expand.

While China is the manufactuary of the world, it's also the largest consumer of illegally harvested timber. China's industrialization means that a new coal fired plant opens up roughly ever two weeks in China, and China's coal mining operations are causing underground fires that spit out tonnes of CO2, carbon dioxide, every day.

China Environmental Regulations

China does not regulate environmental issues the way the Western world does; in a very real sense, China is trying to catch up with the West industrially, without paying the surcharge that environmental sustainability will impose.

This attitude created the Ten Year Boom, which culminated in increasing Beijing pollution and the 2008 Olympics, but also created an acid rain problem that impacts Korea and Japan and soot and dust clouds of China air pollution that reach the western United States and Canada.

There is cause for hope. The same economic collapse that's driving down American and Western European consumption has caused a disproportionate ripple effect in the Chinese economy, which is driven largely by exports. Because the costs of Chinese environmental degradation was offset by the growth in GDP from the Ten Year Boom, it was easy to overlook the issue. Now that there isn't a booming economy, the costs of China air pollution are coming home and becoming all too real.

China's government has put out a 600 billion dollar program to boost sustainability and environmental regulations, including strong incentives to build more nuclear power plants, to improve waste water treatment, and rubbish disposal. Everything China does on an environmental scale will be a large scale experiment. The outcome is still in doubt.

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