I vividly recall a heated discussion I had a year ago with a Pacific Northwesterner about China and pollution.
Her augment was that the environment is so important, China should be go far beyond what the USA is willing to do to protect it. China was being a terrible global citizen by polluting like they do.
My counter-argument was something about the fact that China has 1.3 Billion people and their social stability depends on finding jobs for people so that they can literally survive. I agreed that the environment is important but it seemed a bit hypocritical to expect China, a much poorer country, to do more than we in the USA are willing to do. I think it is hard for us, with our Patagonia's and Subaru wagons to grasp how hard life is for most Chinese.
This is a very interesting article on what they are willing, or at least, trying to do. I certainly hope that I am wrong and China is able to do more than we seem willing to do.
Why Beijing Is Trying to Tally The Hidden Costs of Pollution As China's Economy Booms
October 2, 2006
HONG KONG -- By conventional measures, China's economy is roaring ahead at a growth rate of more than 10%. But an unusual report by the Chinese government suggests the nation's growth -- while swift -- may not be quite as dazzling as it seems.
Last month, Beijing released the results of a two-year "green accounting" study indicating the nation's rampant pollution problem is quietly undermining long-term economic growth. According to the report, pollution cost the country $64 billion in 2004, the equivalent of three percentage points of economic output. The report suggests China's "true" growth rate in 2004 would have been closer to 7% if the costs of pollution had been factored in.
The so-called green gross-domestic-product figures are part of a long-term Chinese government project aimed at quantifying the economic impact of pollution, and may mark a shift in strategy for a regime that has promoted unbridled growth as the key to social stability. The basic idea of green GDP is to subtract the costs associated with environmental degradation from traditional GDP to give a more realistic picture of the health of the economy.
The Chinese report, released jointly by the State Environmental Protection Administration and the State Statistics Bureau, was spearheaded by Pan Yue, SEPA's deputy director. Mr. Pan is in the vanguard of the effort to push environmental issues to the top of the nation's agenda. The "green GDP" concept has been embraced by top political leaders, including President Hu Jintao, who has made "sustainable development" a theme of his speeches this year.
The Chinese Academy on Environmental Planning estimates that more than 400,000 of China's about 1.3 billion people die from air-pollution-related illness each year. About 300 million Chinese lack access to clean drinking water, partly because of pollution from factories, and the central government pledged to spend $125 billion to address the problem.
"China can't go the way of polluting first, and then treating it," said SEPA official Jia Feng, in an interview with local Chinese news media, warning that "the ecological system that shoulders economic development will be crushed."
Green GDP is one part of the budding field of environmental economics, which aims to apply rigorous business-accounting methods to environmental problems. "Green economists" are driven by the notion that typical methods of measuring growth -- namely GDP -- are too crude a way to measure the overall health of an economy, and their work, though controversial, is attracting increasing interest from such quarters as the World Bank, Columbia Business School and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Environmental economists hope solid economic analysis will make the case for protecting the environment harder to dismiss. "This is not some flaky, left-wing offshoot of economics," said Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard University and director of the school's growing environmental-economics program. "It is rigorous economics applied to some challenging and important social problems in the environmental domain...If the way a country is growing is by living high on the hog, and spending down its natural capital, you would want that to be reflected in the country's national income accounts -- if those accounts are intended to be a long-term measure of welfare."
The concept of green GDP and how to calculate it is a hotly debated topic in economic circles, and even some environmental economists find it of limited value. The Chinese report, for example, was criticized by some environmental advocates because it considered only the costs of pollution and didn't factor in the costs associated with overuse or exploitation of resources. Mr. Pan has said the report marks "only the beginning" of his nation's effort to calculate green GDP.
Many economists dismiss the very notion of tinkering with the GDP formula to incorporate environmental costs. They say GDP was never intended to measure anything but cash flows. There are plenty of other things exluded from GDP, they argue, such as contributions made to the economy by housework or volunteer labor. Instead, some economists favor a system of "satellite accounts," alternative growth indicators that can be considered in conjunction with GDP as a way of adding perspective, but aren't meant to replace the usual GDP data.
Still, it is significant that China is reckoning with its environmental problems in this way. "This kind of analysis is usually done by [nongovernmental organizations] or critics from outside the government," said Daniel C. Esty, a professor of environmental law and policy at Yale Law School. "In this case, the Chinese government is doing it itself, and recognizing that there is a real price paid for economic strategies that disregard environmental protection."
