Bloated Commie government can't clean up it's act.
Written by The Resista Tuesday, 30 May 2006 07:35
Fifty years of industrialization and economic development have had severe consequences on China's environment. China's rush into industrialisation after 1950 was undertaken with hardly any regard for the atmosphere, water supplies, forests or the countryside in general. Belching smokestacks were seen as proof of the success of socialist construction. Severe environmental pollution, including acid rain, thick smog, toxic waste, water pollution, and rapidly growing emissions of carbon dioxide, has been the result.
I have heard the nashing of teeth over the coming Chinese dominance since the eighties. I have tried to tell people to have confidence in capitalism and don’t give in to the negative thinking that is so often the hallmark of our press corps and the legions of soothsayers and pundits.
The fact is the communist system is restrictive and does not allow dissent. So when you have a major abuse of government power or the abuse by a corporation of trust of the masses then you don’t get any relief under that system. Nothing happens except the dissenters go to jail and the people get abused. And so it goes in China today.
The advantage of Capitalism is that it does not concentrate all of the power into the hands of government so really the free market rules. It may take longer then we would like but when people find out about pollution they start raising hell.
I know we have had some famous exceptions to this case and once again if you sound off and some how you come up missing and are never seen again, like Karen Silkwood, then you get killed all right but that is not the end of that story and now they make a move and a book about you all of which serves to bring down the corporate giant a civil action is filed and the whole thing unravels. A superfund site is developed from the fines. The bottom line is no matter how far someone wants to take a cover up it eventually effects the publicly held companies bottom line and the bull shit comes to an end.
In a closed system like China this is not possible. The government can not be questioned and the industry that is owned by the government. Has polluted the environment in ways that extend far beyond the local community. The same things happened here in Lake Ponchatrain and in the Mississippi river as well. It was dealt with by citizens groups that put pressure on the local government and industry. Laws were changed people that were in certain industries suffered, but it was dealt with decades ago and now is much better. Not so in China and they have taken it to the level where this river may be ruined forever and there are many such environmental tragedies waiting to be revealed.
Here is the dirty truth and you have to wonder how come the environmentalists are not down the Chinese government’s throat. Oh I remember why now it’s because they don’t really care and they are closet commies themselves. How could I have forgotten?
Here is the sad sad story.
China's longest river is "cancerous" with pollution and rapidly dying , threatening drinking water supplies in 186 cities along its banks, state media said on Tuesday.
Chinese environmental experts fear worsening pollution could kill the Yangtze river within five years, Xinhua news agency said, calling for an urgent clean-up.
"Many officials think the pollution is nothing for the Yangtze," Xinhua quoted Yuan Aiguo, a professor with the China University of Geosciences, as saying.
"But the pollution is actually very serious," it added, warning that experts considered it 'cancerous'."
Industrial waste and sewage, agricultural pollution and shipping discharges were to blame for the river's declining health, experts said.
The river, the third longest in the world after the Nile and the Amazon, runs from remote far west Qinghai and Tibet through 186 cities including Chongqing, Wuhan and Nanjing and empties into the sea at Shanghai.
It absorbs more than 40 percent of the country's waste water, 80 percent is untreated, said Lu Jianjian, from East China Normal University.
"As the river is the only source of drinking water in Shanghai, it has been a great challenge for Shanghai to get clean water," Xinhua quoted him as saying.
China is facing a severe water crisis -- 300 million people do not have access to drinkable water -- and the government has been spending heavily to clean major waterways like the Yellow, Huaihe and Yangtze rivers
But those clean-up campaigns have made limited progress because of spotty regional enforcement. Toxic spills are common, the worst recently being in the Songhua river in the northeast which led to the taps of Harbin being turned off for days.
Despite immediate concerns for the cities along its banks, the Yangtze, along with the Yellow river, is earmarked for China's ambitious South-North water diversion scheme -- a plan to pump water from southern waterways to the parched north.
But environmentalists fear that unless local governments and industries start getting serious about cutting pollution, most of the water shipped north will not be fit to drink.
Most of the Yellow River, the second-longest in China and the cradle of early Chinese civilization, is so polluted it is not safe for drinking or swimming, Xinhua news agency said in May last year.
Here is another. We already had our dust bowl. You think they would have taken notice.
China deserts eat up arable land: environmentalist
A giant dust bowl is forming across northern China, converting swathes of arable land to desert and triggering sandstorms whose impact carries across the Pacific, a leading environmentalist said on Tuesday.
Lester Brown, of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, said China was far from arresting the problem he attributed to overgrazing and falling water tables in the country whose landmass is already one-third desert.
"There are huge areas there that were once productive grassland that are now desert," Brown told foreign correspondents. "It represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert anywhere in the world."
China, which is plagued by sandstorms every spring, has embarked on a campaign to plant billions of trees and says it is slowing the rate of desertification, but Brown said the problem was far from under control.
"Here and there are successful pilot projects, but overall we are not anywhere close to arresting this situation. The deserts are expanding," he said.
The number of livestock grazing had mushroomed since China began economic reforms in the late 1970s, and, with little management, the number of sheep and goats jumped to 339 million, compared with about 7 million in the United States.
China has also said the sheer size of its deserts mean it will never completely tame the sandstorms that this spring covered the capital in brown dust, and left skies a murky yellow.
The dust from storms originating in China has in the past been traced all the
way to the United States and Canada, Brown said
Sandstorms were this year exacerbated by droughts across northern and western China, that were also contributing to forest fires raging in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang that some 20,000 firefighters were struggling to control.
Desertification, which officials at China's State Forestry Administration say is causing direct economic losses of about 54 billion yuan ($6.7 billion) a year, was also not helped by poor management of water, Brown said.
Water tables were diminishing in north China, causing rivers and land to dry out and affecting grain harvests, especially of wheat, which is grown predominantly in the drought-stricken northern provinces.
China plans to pump water from southern rivers to the parched north in a project known as the South-North water diversion scheme, but Brown said he doubted the efficacy of the plan already hampered by pollution and lack of adequate waste treatment.
Floods, mudflows and landslides triggered by days of torrential rain in parts of south China have killed at least nine people in recent days.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|