China
Issues Warning on Climate
The New
York Times March 1,
2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/world/asia/01beijing.html
China
Issues Warning on
Climate
By ANDREW
JACOBS
BEIJING -
China's environment minister on
Monday issued an
unusually
stark
warning about the effects of
unbridled development on
the
country's
air, water and soil, saying the
nation's current path
could
stifle
long-term economic growth and
feed social
instability.
In an essay
published on the agency's Web
site, the minister,
Zhou
Shengxian,
said the government would take a
more aggressive role
in
determining
whether development initiatives
contributed to climate
change
through a new system of risk
assessment.
Ignoring
such risks, Mr. Zhou said, would
be perilous.
"In China's
thousands of years of
civilization, the conflict
between
humankind
and nature has never been as
serious as it is today,"
he
wrote. "The
depletion, deterioration and
exhaustion of resources
and
the
worsening ecological environment
have become bottlenecks
and
grave
impediments to the nation's
economic and social
development."
His
comments, coupled with similar
remarks by Prime Minister
Wen
Jiabao that
were publicized in the state
media on Monday,
suggest
that China
may seek to embrace tighter
environmental
restrictions
during
legislative sessions that begin
this week in Beijing.
The
meetings,
held once a year, will include
the introduction of
the
country's
latest five-year economic
plan.
On Sunday,
Mr. Wen lowered the target for
average gross domestic
product
growth, to 7 percent from 7.5
percent, and suggested
that
China would
reconfigure the emphasis that
places economic growth
above all
else.
"We must
not any longer sacrifice the
environment for the sake
of
rapid
growth and reckless roll-outs, as
that would result in
unsustainable
growth featuring industrial
overcapacity and
intensive
resource
consumption," said Mr. Wen in an
Internet chat widely
publicized
by the state media.
The remarks
come at a time of unrelenting
environmental
degradation
that has
accompanied double-digit economic
growth. Last year,
China
registered
10.3 percent growth, higher than
its official target.
Mr. Zhou's
vow to weigh factors like climate
change when approving
new
factories would be significant
given that such policies
were
largely the
domain of China's top economic
planning agency, the
National
Development and Reform
Commission, which had been
reluctant
to
sacrifice economic growth for
environmental
protection.
With its
increasing fixation on social
stability, the Communist
Party
may have
come to realize the benefits of
balancing economic
growth
with the
public's demands for
uncontaminated food and water.
In
recent
weeks, there has been a cascade
of damaging news about
the
environment,
from dangerously high smog levels
in the capital to a
study that
found 10 percent of domestically
grown rice
contaminated
with heavy
metals.
China has
also become the leading emitter
of greenhouse gasses,
which
scientists
link to global warming, largely
because of the
country's
dependence
on coal, which feeds 70 percent
of its energy needs,
and
its growing
thirst for oil. Although the
government has an
ambitious
program to
cut energy use for each unit of
economic growth, it
refuses to
place any outright caps on
emissions.
Official
vows to rein in environmental
abuse are frequently
announced,
but many laws and policies are
ultimately circumvented
or
ignored at
the local level, in large part
because of a system
that
encourages
officials to pursue economic
growth over
environmental
sustainability.
Still, the
governing Communist Party has
demonstrated its ability
to
make
significant changes. Last summer,
Mr. Wen vowed to use an
"iron
hand" to
improve his country's energy
efficiency. By the fall,
more
than 2,000
steel mills, cement plants and
other energy-hogging
factories
had been closed.
