The environmental debate has always been something that has interested me. I think because it’s a reflection of polarization of American politics in general. It has been my perception that long ago the facts became irrelevant to many in the debate and became purely a emotional debate.

As I stated in one of my previous blog entries, I lost respect for the “green movement” and Green Peace specifically when a teacher made us as kids almost weekly watch two green propaganda movies one of which involved having us at 7 or 8 watch sealers club to death (very graphically) baby white coated seals. It turns out that Green Peace staged the entire escapade and had paid for people to do this to create an outcry (that was never how the seals were killed in reality).

My years spent in Texas included listening to my friends say “its arrogant to think that we damage this planet that has been around for so many years.” And finally to some extent Al Gore didn’t do the rational world a favor with his early books that basically predicted the world would be over by now, and clearly the environmental cause was hijacked by politicians with political agenda’s in site and by Hollywood with a desire to sell movies rather than rational discussion on the topics.

However, thankfully rational people like the editors in the Economist magazine and editors in the Asian Wall Street Journal have in recent years taken a far more objective approach to the matter. In addition my friend and partner in my education project has educated me being able to look past the noise to the real issues inside global warming.

Clearly it is beyond debate (sadly the Heritage Foundation have missed the boat on this one) that there are very serious environmental issues facing THIS generation and future generations. Ironically while the left have been the ones who have championed that cause and while big business have often been culprits it is general popular opinion in the WEST that holds the keys to finding solutions. Only in finding this common ground can market forces aid in the development and accountability of such solutions.

My concern as the following section from China Shakes the World shows is that developing nations, who have a general popular level the concern of “feeding and employing our developing nation” way ahead of the popular concern of “comfort and protection of our environment” in the West could well be the tipping point of environmental disaster on a scale never seen before.

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The Anyuan coal mine is known throughout China because it was one the places in which Mao Zedong cut his revolutionary teeth. When he worked there in the 1920s fomenting disaffection among workers towards their German bosses, the mine was one the main sources of fuel for the Yangtze River Basin and an early industrial base in the poor interior province of Jiangzi. By the time I got there, though, most of the coal reserves, along with the ideological poignancy of the revolution, had been exhausted. The place had a desiccated feel ot it, as if it had been plundered and left with little but memories. A cavernous museum to Mao and the glory of the revolution stood on top of a hill, but the city of Pingxiang, which stretched out beneath it, was anything but resplendent. Its streets were dirty, thronging with unemployed miners and full of brothels masquerading as hairdressing salons. But that was not the worst of it. Large urban precincts had begun to sink into the disused pits and mineshafts that had provided the town with its livelihood for a century. In some areas, the thin slivers of land that had concealed gaping subterranean holes had suddenly given way, causing the buildings they had supported to tumble into them. In other areas, schools, hospitals and houses were slowly and unevenly subsiding into the earth like ships listing at anchor.

The era of Communism in China, as in the former Soviet Union, has not been kind to the environment. A combination of neglect, overpopulation, careless industrialization and the inability of a planned economy – in which prices are fixed by state fiat – to put an accurate value on nature’s gifts has contributed to an environment crisis that is unparalleled in its severity. Everywhere there are signs of distress. The deserts of the north are marching towards the towns and cities on their fringe. Waterways that just ten years ago were gushing torrents have slowed to a trickle or disappeared altogether. Food is often contaminated with illegal and alarming levels of animal hormones and agricultural chemicals. Strange new diseases such as Sars and bird flu appear with regularity. Air pollution is so bad that some 380,000 people may be dying prematurely each year by 2010 because of respiratory ailments. Several animal and bird species face extinction or loss of habitat as wetlands and forest vanish. Several towns and cities like Pingxiang are sinking into underground holes that have been burrowed by miners or emptied of the underground water they used to hold.

These problems, or their antecedents, have been around for decades. It is not revelation to assert that the edifice of Chinese statehood rests on frail ecological foundations. But what is new – and world-shaking – is the projection of this environmental exhaustion into the international arena. Extraordinary though it now seems, the famine that followed Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” in the early 1960s took place for the most part without the outside world’s knowledge. More than 30 million people died of starvation while ‘China watchers’ debated whether hunger was, in fact, wide-spread at all. Not, though, the appetites unleashed by the rise of the world’s most populous nation are felt even in the most remote corners of the earth. The forests of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, the fish of the Pacific Ocean, the iron ore extracted from mines in Australia and Brazil, the soybeans grown in Latin America and the United States, the freshwater that flows into the Mekong River, the oil underground in the Middle East, the gas from Russian Siberia, cashmere from goats on the Mongolian steppe and hundreds of other resources and commodities from places all over the globe are being subject to voracious demand from a burgeoning China.

It may seem obvious that the rise of a great nation will result in great appetites and that those appetites would, in their turn, drive up the international prices of commodities in demand. But history also provides alternative precedents. The prices of grain and meat actually fell during the emergence of the United States in the last three decades of the nineteenth century because the commissioning of more and more virgin territory for agriculture raised the supply of food. China, however, is not blessed with excess farmland. Not only do domestic producers find it difficult to keep up with the surge in domestic demand, but the ongoing degradation of the environment and the exploitation of natural resources also means that the ability of producers to respond to demand signals is actually regressing with time.

Indeed, China’s endowments are deeply lopsided. The extreme frailty of its physical environment contrasts with the prodigious strength of its human capital. The disequilibrium that results from this mismatch explains, in a nutshell, both the intensity and polarity of the influence china exerts on the world. At one extreme, the world have never had to deal with such a large, cheap and versatile workforce joining the globalised economy in such a short period of time. At the other, never before has so large a country emerged so quickly from so eviscerated a natural base. These starkly different characteristics explain why China can drive down the average level of working wages and the prices of manufactured productions worldwide, while propelling the prices of most sources of energy and commodities through the roof. The cleavage between these areas of influence falls neatly between the things China makes and the things it needs.

At the top of the list of needs is oil. The US during the twentieth century was able to fuel its development with oil drawn from deposits in Alaska, the Gulf Coast states, Oklahoma, offshore Louisiana, California and Illinois. But China’s geology is less fecund. It made a few large discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s, but in the last two decades its production had fallen far behind domestic demand. Twenty years ago, it was the largest oil exporter in east Asia. Now its is the second-largest oil importer in the world. In 2004, it accounted for 31 percent of the global growth in oil demand, suggesting that the rise in the price of oil to above $60 per barrel in mid 2005 was to a significant degree due to the influence of Chinese demand. China’s appetite is growing at a pace that makes a mockery even of expert predictions; in 2005 it was consuming almost as much oil as the US Energy Information Administration though it would need a full five years later. And, as always, from a per capita perspective, the potential was mind-boggling. In 2001, Americans were suing more than eleven times more oil per person than Chinese. Indeed, if Chinese were ever to consume at the American levels of 2001, they would need to guzzle three times the world’s total consumption.

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Conservation in any part of the world happens best within stakeholder communities where citizens have the responsibility and the right to hold local officials accountable to their promises. But in China, notwithstanding the growing role of some embryonic non-government organizations, these conditions do not exist. Problems therefore deteriorate until they are so grave that they can no longer be hidden from central authorities. But by the time central authorities are called in, it is often too late for conservational solutions and Beijing resorts to sweeping, revolutionary policies. In the case of the Huai, this amounted to the over-ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful decree to halt all industrial waste pollution by closing down thousands of local factories. In the case of the Yellow River, it was to commission the largest civil engineering project since the Great Wall: a $60 billion project to transport a river-load of water from the Yantze and its tributaries to the Yellow River Basin and to parched northern cities such as Beijing and Tianjin. The project, which was already underway in 2005, envisages digging three canals of over 1,000 kilometers in length and pumping the water northward. But even before the scheme had started operating, environmentalists were questioning the efficacy of the Herculean efforts required. For one thing, some of the water to be pumped was expected to come from heavily polluted sources, including the Huai.

On the World Bank’s list of the twenty most polluted cities in the world, sixteen are in China. Acid rain falls over 30 percent of its territory. Although some large showcase cities such as Shanghai and Beijing are being cleaned up, rural areas are becoming a dumping ground for toxic waste. Chinese environmentalists tend to see the problem as at least partly imported. The factories that multinational companies have set up have turned China into the workshop of the world but have also made it the ‘rubbish tip of the world’, one senior official once told me. But this view is at variance with how much of Europe, America and the rest of Asia regards the international impact of China’s environmental failure.