Environment Suffers Severely In China's Dash to Develop

peakoil.com -> enn.com

China's environmental woes are so large that they've begun to generate social instability.

Choking on vile air, sickened by toxic water, citizens in some corners of this vast nation are rising up to protest the high environmental cost of China's economic boom. In one recent incident, villagers in this hilly coastal region grew so exasperated by contamination from nearby chemical plants that they overturned and smashed dozens of vehicles and beat up police officers who arrived to quell what was essentially an environmental riot.

Across China, entire rivers run foul or have dried up altogether. Nearly a third of cities don't treat their sewage, flushing it into waterways. Some 300 million of China's 1.3 billion people drink water that is too contaminated to be consumed safely. In rural China, sooty air depresses crop yields, and desert quickly encroaches on grasslands to the west. Filth and grime cover all but a few corners of the country.

China's central government isn't sitting still. It's enacting fuel-efficiency requirements for cars and shutting down mammoth dam-building and other projects. By some accounts, it now has world-class laws on environmental protection. Yet provincial and local officials, who feel pressure for economic growth, often shield polluters and ignore environmental laws ...

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

Here are some of China's environmental problems:

BAD AIR: China is the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States. Two-thirds of its cities have poor-quality air, often due to coal dust from power plants. Auto exhaust is also a factor, and it will get worse: China expects to have 140 million automobiles plying its roads by 2020, seven times more than it has today.

BAD WATER: More than 30,000 children die each year in China from diarrhea that's due to contaminated water. Of China's seven biggest rivers, only the Pearl and the Yangtze are rated good in terms of water quality; the others are rated poor or dangerous. Forty percent of the raw sewage in the boom industrial city of Shenzhen, which has 10 million people, is flushed directly into city waterways.

WASTE: Just a snapshot: Chinese consumers throw out 2 billion plastic bags per day, clogging streambeds and landfills.

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