The color of China #009900
Foreign Policy's web log posted on the environmental movement in China the other week, giving up some links to articles in the current press in the process
Can China go green?.The heart of the piece was the author Blake Hounshell's doubts that a one party state has a citizenry that can put pressure on its leadership to take a direction on environmental concerns. Certainly, as nearly as I can tell, the people and the state stand in a much different relation to each other in a society that has an emerged public sector than where one hasn't. So he might be right. With a major trade and policy delegation from China in town all week it seems safe to say these stories are following an agenda of one sort or another. The main article in Foreign Policy that their web log pointed to, an against the conventional wisdom grain piece, which in its lede paragraph made the assertion that the greatest threat to China's order and well-being will be environmental problems related to rapid industrialism
Foreign Policy - Think Again China . More so than business cycles or other economic growing pains. A CS Monitor piece,
The greening of China | csmonitor.com, I had saved from a few months ago notes a Chinese official making a rare public statement on a missed goals. On pollution discharges and interim goals on increasing the energy effiency of the overall economy. This was followed by statements on moving away from coal as an energy source for steel and electricity production. The BBC piece dealt with displacement of peoples from hydroelectric dam projects
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Paying the price for a greener China. Again part of efforts to move away from coal. Daniel Esty's piece in Fortune features same quotes from officials (Premier Jiabao) on the importance of the problem. Esty's take on this is that "China's pollution problems have become so vivid they can no longer be ignored." Call this pollutions "empirical moments": rivers catching fire, Smog that can settle out of the air and color the ground
Is China turning green? - May 14, 2007. My environmental awareness is not strictly limited to REM songs about the Cuyahoga or the sky falling. I had a subscription to Ranger Rick as a kid, and wrote a paper on pollution when I was in 5th grade. I don't really write any better now than I did then. But I remember my home town, Holliston's, burning dump and the day of the air inversion or whatever it was called. An air mass came through town with a significantly different temperature and air pressure a thousand or so feet up. The smoke from the dump pooled in the ground level air mass. You couldn't stay outside. I believe something like this once killed hundreds of people in London in the 1880's. When you're a kid if two events are more than seven days apart you don't draw connections, but the burning trash dump became a landfill not long after that. Esty had a passing observation at the end of the article on the proliferation pollution abatement start-up's in China. This reminded of a walk to UM one fall day a year or so ago with an Indian Grad student (day before the semester started the campus buses weren't running yet a three mile walk). I forget why but we were talking about this, perhaps Kyoto had been in the news. What I recall was his optimistic sense of a technological "fix" to the problem of environmental damage, and how intertwined this was with a specific national sense of technological prowness or superiority. Irregardless of that within market economies there is a tendency to see environmental stress as essentially, even wholly, a technological problem. The danger a facile fallacy. As this odd piece in the Washington Post from earlier this year attempted to say
5 Myths About Suburbia and Our Car-Happy Culture - washingtonpost.com. Myth 5, the authors deliver up, We can't deal with global warming unless we stop driving. They make two appeals here 1) sure we could undertake measures that would "severely restrict economic growth [but]...Nations such as China ad India were excluded from the Kyoto Protocol." 2) "hurt the most: poor people in developing nations... [Why] "Fragile transportation systems" So build more cars more roads things will get sorted out at some other juncture, because we'll have to then. Bad Subjects I note took this piece up a month or so later
the Congestion Coalition. At one level this is a mere tautalogy of sorts, a reduction of all human life and aspiration not to just techne, but a mere haphazard assemblage of technologies leading from nowhere to nowhere. So many rabbit holes run into and dug out from. A key understanding may be that the size of the current human population and level and acceleration of industralization make today's problems unique historical events References to the past the irresponsibility of the first industrial era a dead end. Regimes still hoping to rely on on a ordered future of managed markets and pliable mutable aquiescient populaces, as this pieces declaims
A Shining Model of Wealth Without Liberty . The Iraq war isn't over, but one thing's already clear: China won. By James Mann.. They may find themselves manufacuring a reason for people to desire rule in thier own name.
11:38:04 PM  ;;
|
|
