Michigan Land Trustees

The Boston Globe - "China’s Not Alone in Environmental Crisis"


Exerpts -

China is a "country choking on its own 'success,' now producing over 20 percent of global greenhouse gases"

"The West has worked long and hard to transform China into what it is today: an industrial platform for the world where some of the most noxious, occupationally hazardous production processes are concentrated. Western governments and corporations have not only benefited, but have helped lead China down this road of energy-intensive, environmentally destructive development with resulting rapid increases in greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, Western consumers have directly profited from the inexpensive products that pour from China’s factories. Fundamental to the rise of China’s emissions is the rapacious growth of consumption, and the championing of it - especially in the West. The carbon dioxide embedded in China’s exports to the United States in 2004 alone is estimated at 1.8 billion tons, equivalent to 30 percent of the US total.

The World Bank, Japan, and Western donor countries have provided more than $200 billion in loans to China since the early 1980s - the largest global flow of development aid during this period - to create the infrastructure that has enabled China to become the world’s factory. Multinational companies received contracts to help build China’s infrastructure - the power plants, electrical grids, railways for coal transport, natural gas pipelines, highways, ports, and airports. Combined with its large, mobile, low-cost workforce of rural peasants, China became highly attractive to globalizing companies."

"China’s global integration means its footprint of environmental destruction does not stop at its borders. The world’s companies pull global resources through China from far-flung corners of the planet - timber from Siberia, Mozambique, and Burma; petrochemicals and minerals from Sudan, Indonesia, and Bolivia. The impacts on global warming through deforestation, as just one example, are magnified far beyond China itself.

The West must acknowledge its own role in shaping and benefiting from China’s global integration and rapid increase in consumption of resources. Instead of being diverted by the relatively easy and therefore attractive answer of blaming China or any single country for rising greenhouse emissions, we must focus on the real root of the problem: a highly unequal and unsustainable international system of production, distribution, and consumption that insulates winners from losers, and delivers the greatest share of the benefits to a lucky few while jeopardizing the future for everyone else."