BEIJING â€" 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 Paty 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 U.S. can do to mitigate China’s environmental effects. These are excerpts from that conversation.
Why did you choose this particular topic on which to focus
Craig Simons.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 impact 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.
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
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 o! f the Ind! ustrial Revolution, humanity has cleared more than one-quarter of Earth’s forests, set off the world’s sixth great era of extinctions â€" with losses occurring between 100 and 1000 times faster than the natural baseline â€" 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.
What surprised you the most as you were doing your research
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 collction 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.
How aware do you think Chinese officials are of the impact that their policies have on the other parts of the world
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 considere! d the wor! ld’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.
Within official circles, how do the Chinese now assess climate change, and does their assessment differ significantly from that of the United States
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 r! esisted accepting a quantitative cap.
Chinese officials often say that China has the right to grow its economy as it wants, and that the U.S. 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
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 â€" private vehicles, heated and cooled homes, the opportunity to travel internationlly â€" 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.
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
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 nati! onal infrastructure, such a commitment would be challenging.
What are some steps the U.S. can take in helping limit China’s impact on the global environment
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 reasonale 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.
If China continues on its current path, what further effects will people living in other countries feel in the next decade
If the current trends continue, we can expect more of the world’s remaining old-growth forests â€" which today make up a small part of remaining forested areasâ€"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 w! hat remai! ns: 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.
