Jacques Leslie, Mother Jones
(Excerpts of long article)
In a mere two
and a half decades, China has awakened from Maoist stagnancy to become the
world's manufacturer. Among the planet's 193 nations, it is now first in
production of coal, steel, cement, and 10 kinds of metal; it produces half the
world's cameras and nearly a third of its TVs, and by 2015 may produce the most
cars. It boasts factories that can accommodate 200,000 workers, and towns that
make 60 percent of the world's buttons, half the world's silk neckties, and
half the world's fireworks, respectively.
China has
also become a ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up
international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class,
projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by
2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin
the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel,
copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world's biggest consumer of
coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It
not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006,
but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations--the United States,
Russia, and India--combined. China uses half the world's steel and concrete and
will probably construct half the world's new buildings over the next decade. So
omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short
of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over
the world--Chicago lost 150 in a month.
The catch (tricky condition) is that China has become not just
the world's manufacturer but also its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as
its economic expansion. Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised
before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate
their destruction. With one stroke he launched the "backyard furnace"
campaign, in which some 90 million peasants became grassroots steel smelters;
to fuel the furnaces, villagers cut down a 10th of China's trees in a few
months. The steel ultimately proved unusable.
With another
stroke, Mao perpetrated the "Kill the Four Pests" campaign, inducing
the mass slaughter of millions of sparrows and a subsequent explosion in the
locust population. The destruction of forests led to erosion and the spread of
deserts, and the locust resurgence prompted a collapse of the nation's grain
crop. The result was history's greatest famine, in which 30 to 50 million
Chinese died.
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.
Acid rain
caused by China's sulfur-dioxide emissions severely damages forests and
watersheds in Korea and Japan and impairs air quality in the United States.
Every major river system flowing out of China is threatened with one sort of
cataclysm or another, including pollution (Amur), damming (Mekong, Salween),
diverting (Brahmaputra), and melting of the glacial source (Mekong, Salween,
Brahmaputra). The surge in untreated waste and agricultural runoff pouring into
the Yellow and China Seas has caused frequent fish die-offs and red-tide
outbreaks, and overfishing is endangering many ocean species. The growing
Chinese taste for furs and exotic foods and pets is devastating neighboring
countries' populations of gazelles, marmots, foxes, wolves, snow leopards,
ibexes, turtles, snakes, egrets, and parrots, while its appetite for shark fin
soup is causing drastic declines in shark populations throughout the oceans;
according to a study published in Science in March 2007, the absence of the
oceans' top predators is causing a resurgence of skates and rays, which are in
turn destroying scallop fisheries along America's Eastern Seaboard. China's new
predilection for sushi is even pricing Japan out of the market for bluefin
tuna.
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. Finally, China overtook the
United States as the world's leading emitter of CO2 in 2006, according to the
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
Half a
century ago, the world was much less dusty. Dust, after all, is nothing more than
fine particles of soil, in contrast to larger particles known as sand. Many
deserts are basins filled with dust and sand held in place by a protective
crust of mosses, lichens, and soil bacteria. But modern civilization has
exposed the fragility of these crusts as the human population has pushed
impoverished migrants and profiteers onto marginal land. As the deserts
deteriorate, they expand: Overgrazing of cattle, sheep, and goats causes
grasslands to collapse, baring the underlying dust and sand to the mercy of
wind. Sand is too heavy to travel more than a few miles, but dust can fly
farther than many birds. If a storm system sucks it upward into the troposphere
a few miles above the earth, it reaches a conveyor belt of powerful currents
that can carry it across oceans and continents.
China now
rivals North Africa as the world's leading producer of border-crossing dust. It
has always been generously endowed with deserts--including the Gobi, Asia's
largest (which China shares with Mongolia), and the forbidding Taklimakan, the
world's largest sand dune desert--which cover more than a fourth of Chinese
territory. Until recently, when programs to combat desertification began to
make some progress, it lost a Rhode Island-sized parcel of land to desert each year.
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. At their worst, the storms drape Beijing in a yellowish
cloak that blots out the sun, shuts down air and road traffic, clogs machinery,
and makes seeing across the street nearly impossible. Each year, they blow a
million tons of dust through Beijing and several tens of millions of tons as
far as the western Pacific Ocean, 7,000 miles away. Dust particles are so
small--at most a seventh of the diameter of a human hair--that human lungs are
defenseless against them. Frequent inhalation can cause coughing, painful
breathing, bronchitis, asthma, permanently decreased lung function, and
premature death.
Dust storms
also set off ripples of harm. "When dust blows, what you are seeing are
nutrients leaving a system--the ability of the soil to support agricultural
crops is leaving," says Jayne Belnap, a research ecologist at the U.S.
Geological Survey. "So you're setting up a dynamic that causes people to
starve or to add more fertilizer to their soil. If they add more fertilizer,
then the water becomes eutrophic (1), and it flows into the ocean and screws
that up. It's just this huge hunk of 'uh-oh' on a massive scale. And every time
we have an 'uh-oh' in a country, it doesn't matter where, it comes back and
hits us."
That became
clear in April 2001, when a satellite photograph showed a vast, perfectly
coiled cyclonic spiral of white clouds intertwined with brown dust plumes
centered over Inner Mongolia. Joseph Prospero, a leading atmospheric researcher
at the University of Miami, called it "the most remarkable dust-storm
image that I have ever seen." Visibility soon dropped close to zero in
Beijing and driving was nearly impossible. Satellites tracked the dust as it
moved across eastern China, the Yellow Sea, Korea, the Russian coast from
Vladivostok to the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Sea of Japan, and Japan itself. In
less than a week, it crossed the Pacific Ocean, and produced thick haze as far
east as Denver. High concentrations of dust were found as far away as Maine and
Georgia and eventually in the Canary Islands off northwest Africa. Dan Jaffe,
an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington-Bothell, calculated
that only a 20th of the storm's dust reached the United States, but that
amount, 50,000 metric tons, was two and a half times as much as all U.S.
sources typically produce in a day.
For all that,
dust storms are merely the most dramatic example of an array of pollutants that
Asian winds deliver to other countries. In 2003, Siberian forest fires covered
73,000 square miles, an area larger than North Dakota, and sent up a smoke
plume that drove ozone levels above epa limits in Seattle, 5,000 miles away.
The fires are assumed to be the work of arsonists intent on supplying Chinese
sawmills with logs. A year later, clouds from Asia carried enough industrial
pollutants across the Pacific to produce a sudden spike in measurements of
mercury, ozone, and carbon monoxide at a monitoring station at Mt. Bachelor,
Oregon. Analysis of the pollutants revealed a chemical signature with what
Jaffe calls "a very robust China fingerprint."
Sulfur dioxide
is "China's number one pollution problem," according to Barbara
Finamore, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's China program.
Sulfur dioxide causes respiratory illness, aggravates asthma and heart disease,
and turns soil, lakes, streams, and oceans acidic. It is the key ingredient in
the premature deaths of more than 400,000 Chinese each year from air pollution
and has led to the outbreak among Chinese in their 30s of chronic lung diseases
usually associated with old people. By 2005, China's sulfur-dioxide emissions
were nearly double those of the United States--and they are estimated to have
grown by 14 percent since. As a result, acid rain now plagues a third of China,
much of Japan and Korea, and even the Pacific Ocean.
Coal has also
made China the world's leading producer of human-caused mercury emissions,
accounting for 30 percent of the global total and rising. A 2004 peer-reviewed
study found that up to 36 percent of man-made mercury emissions settling on
America originated in Asia. Mercury impairs neurological development in
fetuses, infants, and children, and is highly toxic.
The most
insidious product of China's coal consumption is carbon dioxide, which, along
with CO2 generated by the rest of the world, is destroying China's ecosystems:
Already-arid northern China is drying out, the wet south is seeing more and
more deluges and floods, and the Himalayan glaciers that feed China's major
rivers are melting; according to a June 2007 Greenpeace report, 80 percent
could disappear by 2035. Such a development would jeopardize hundreds of
millions of people who depend on the rivers for subsistence and livelihood.
(1)
eu·troph·ic (y¶ träf´ik, -tr³´fik)
adj.
designating
or of a body of water, esp. a lake or pond, rich in nutrients which cause
excessive growth of aquatic plants, esp. algae: the resulting bacteria consume
nearly all the oxygen, esp. during warm weather, choking the fish, etc.
