MCLC: Devouring Dragon

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Devouring Dragon
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (3/12/13):
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/new-book-tackles-china-and-its
-environmental-exports/

New Book Tackles China and its Environmental Exports
By EDWARD WONG 

BEIJING — The rapid degradation of the environment in China has become a
central topic of discussion this year. Air pollution in Beijing and other
parts of northern China hit record levels in January. Water pollution was
thrust into the spotlight this week when official news reports said that
nearly 6,000 dead pigs had been found floating in a river that slices
through the heart of Shanghai. Meanwhile, environmental advocates are
pressing the government to release data on soil pollution, which officials
have categorized as a state secret.

It is no wonder, then, that delegates to the National People’s Congress,
which is holding its annual meeting now in Beijing, are debating
environmental issues, even if the congress is largely a rubber-stamp
legislature charged with giving Communist Party policy a veneer of popular
legitimacy.

Just as worrisome, if not as hotly discussed among Chinese, is the impact
that China is having on the environment in other parts of the world. It is
not an easy thing to gauge, but Craig Simons, a former Asia correspondent
for Cox Newspapers, set out to do exactly that. He documented his findings
in his first book, “The Devouring Dragon: How China’s Rise Threatens Our
Natural World,” which was published March 12 by St. Martin’s Press. Mr.
Simons spoke recently about his reasons for embarking on this project, how
Chinese officials assess climate change and what the United States can do
to mitigate China’s environmental effects. These are excerpts from that
conversation.

Q. Why did you choose this particular topic on which to focus?

A. I’d lived and worked in China for over a decade, first as a Peace Corps
volunteer and later as a journalist, and I’d seen the costs of its
environmental crisis on the lives of average citizens. Then, in 2005, I
took a job covering Asia and began to travel regionally. In Indonesia, I
reported on how Chinese demands had intensified logging and talked with
experts worried that orangutans might become extinct in the wild. In
Korea, friends told me about huge dust storms that had blown in from
China. In Tuvalu, a tiny, low-lying South Pacific nation, locals worried
that the growth of China’s greenhouse gas emissions could speed global
warming, which looked likely to eventually inundate their country. As I
continued to have such experiences, I began to think that China’s greatest
21st-century impacts are likely to be to the physical planet. I wanted to
understand both how China’s rise had affected environments around the
world and, given that much of China remains relatively poor, what its
continued growth could mean for our shared climate and Earth’s remaining
wildlife and forests.

Q. You’ve said that one of your goals is to put China’s environmental
impact outside its borders into a historical context. Can you tell us more
about that context?

A. The context is simply the tremendous physical changes to the planet
humanity has caused since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
China only began to seek significant amounts of natural resources abroad
over the last decade or so, and those demands are likely to grow
dramatically before they plateau. But unlike for Europe or the United
States, China’s growth curve is rising at a time when the world’s
environments already are severely degraded. Since roughly the beginning of
the Industrial Revolution, humanity has cleared more than one-quarter of
Earth’s forests, set off the world’s sixth great era of extinctions — with
losses occurring between 100 and 1000 times faster than the natural
baseline — and pumped enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to warm
the planet by more than one degree Fahrenheit. Fitting China into that
larger narrative also helps us realize the global nature of today’s
environmental problems: it reminds us that we are all responsible.

Q. What surprised you the most as you were doing your research?

A. The most surprising thing was the reach of Chinese demands. As a nation
with 1.3 billion people, 19 percent of humanity, and three-plus decades of
annual economic growth averaging about 10 percent, it seemed there wasn’t
anywhere that China hadn’t touched. One poignant example I found was a
petition by Arkansas-based environmental groups to ban the collection of
wild turtles because some species faced possible extinction due largely to
Chinese demand for turtle meat. Even though data on U.S. turtle exports is
spotty, they found that more than 256,000 wild-caught turtles were
exported to Asia from the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas airport alone between
2002 and 2005. Another example is that air pollutants from China (as from
other nations) are now reaching around the world. Dust, ozone, carbon
monoxide and mercury polluted into the atmosphere in China are now
regularly settling back to Earth in North America and other continents.

Q. How aware do you think Chinese officials are of the impact that their
policies have on the other parts of the world?

A. While Chinese officials have become acutely aware of the impacts of
China’s development policies on its own environment, there is little
public awareness of the effects of Chinese consumption on foreign nations.
Despite that China is now considered the world’s largest importer of
illegally felled logs, few Chinese have thought about the problems caused
by illegal logging. Likewise, few Chinese think about the impacts on
wildlife of consuming traditional medicines and exotic species. I’ve seen
animal parts, including tiger bone and rhino horn, for sale at Chinese
markets and restaurants. Studies have also found a widespread desire to
eat wildlife: according to a 2010 study by Traffic, the environmental NGO,
for example, 44 percent of people interviewed in six Chinese cities had
consumed wildlife in the previous year; most believed that eating many
wild species should be a personal choice. With climate change there’s more
nuance, since the central government has made a very public push to
improve energy efficiency and to increase the use of renewable energy
sources. But experts believe that at the local level, most officials
continue to focus on economic growth.

Q. Within official circles, how do the Chinese now assess climate change,
and does their assessment differ significantly from that of the United
States?

A. There is agreement among most top Chinese and American officials that
climate change is a serious problem and needs to be addressed. However,
there is significant divergence among experts on what China and other
developing nations should do. China has generally maintained that, to be
fair, any budget for future emissions should account for historical and
per-capita emissions, which would give China a much larger share in the
future. At recent U.N. meetings, Western nations have tried to push
Beijing to accept binding limits to future emissions, but, as we saw
during the contentious Copenhagen climate talks in 2009, Beijing has so
far resisted accepting a quantitative cap.

Q. Chinese officials often say that China has the right to grow its
economy as it wants, and that the United States should not wag fingers
over China’s environmental impact since the U.S. spent many years growing
its economy without thinking of the consequences. Even now, the carbon
footprint per capita in the U.S. is still bigger than that of China. Do
the Chinese have a valid point?

A. Yes, that’s a valid argument. Before the U.S. recession, China’s
average carbon footprint was between one-quarter and one-sixth of the
average U.S. carbon footprint (depending on how one calculates it). More
importantly, Chinese are much poorer than Americans. In 2011, China’s
average per-capita income was less than $4,000, one-eleventh of the U.S.
average. In practice this means that people don’t have many of the things
Americans are used to — private vehicles, heated and cooled homes, the
opportunity to travel internationally — and they’re looking forward to
those things. Another valid argument, however, is that every nation faces
different challenges as they develop. Several experts I talked with
pointed out that dealing with climate change, which might require slower
economic growth, might be the burden China needs to bear.

Q. You’ve said you didn’t want to write a book that had only criticism.
You’ve given some prescriptions on how China can lessen the environmental
impact of its growth. What are some of the more helpful steps it can take?

A. The most helpful step Beijing could take would be to adopt a cap on its
greenhouse gas emissions or to impose a significant tax on carbon. Many
experts now believe that the world will be able to rein in carbon
emissions only if China and the United States, which together produce
almost half of global anthropogenic emissions, commit to limits. Because
China is relatively poor and it is still building much of its national
infrastructure, such a commitment would be challenging.

Q. What are some steps the United States can take in helping limit China’s
impact on the global environment?

A. The more I reported, the more I saw that our environmental problems are
shared. Because China is the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, we all
benefit from its cheap prices. But we also suffer from the pollution
created by our increasing material affluence. China is a big part of that,
but it’s only the front edge of a larger wave of development that includes
India, Brazil, Russia, and many other nations. The most important thing
rich, developed nations can do is to realize that they need to become
better role models by limiting their own global environmental impacts,
including by controlling greenhouse gas emissions. After that, the West
can do more to share the prosperity it has achieved. This could come
partly through making environment-friendly technologies available at
reasonable prices. It could also come through helping pay for the
preservation of the world’s remaining wild spaces, for example by
providing income and opportunities to villagers in Papua New Guinea who
choose to preserve their land or by helping train and equip wardens in
wilderness areas like those I visited in northern India.

Q. If China continues on its current path, what further effects will
people living in other countries feel in the next decade?

A. If the current trends continue, we can expect more of the world’s
remaining old-growth forests — which today make up a small part of
remaining forested areas—to be logged and more species to become
threatened or extinct. Without a Chinese commitment to curb greenhouse gas
emissions, we could also anticipate that the global community would be
unlikely to generate a serious effort to address global warming. China is
thus one key (the United States is the other) to coming together to save
what remains: its impacts are so large and are growing so quickly that
without Beijing’s participation, governments will have difficulty
generating the political will to act.