Decades of extraordinary growth have catapulted China to the top of the world's economic charts, earning the admiration of much of the rest of the world. Indeed, China's continued economic rise has been one of the few certainties of the 21st century. Increasingly, however, the China story is not one of economic miracle but of environmental disaster.Worries over air quality at the Beijing Olympics, tainted products and China's rapidly growing contribution to global climate change have focused international attention on the environmental downside of China's growth. At home, the Chinese people watch as environmental degradation and pollution transform their landscape, and in the process endanger their health and future livelihoods.
In China's cities, merely walking out the front door results in an immediate assault on the senses. The Chinese people complain most often about noise pollution. A cacophony of construction booms and car horns is a permanent fixture of life. The sky is often blanketed in a thick gray haze of pollutants. The culprits are the ever-present coal-fired power plants and giant heavy-industry complexes that fuel the country's growth, and more and more the noxious emissions of automobiles.
The Chinese are in the midst of an American-style love affair with private cars. The country is adding 14,000 new cars to its roads every day and is in the process of laying 52,000 miles of new roadways - 10,000 more miles than the entire U.S. interstate highway system. By 2030, China is expected to surpass the United States as the country with the most cars on its roads.
I read somewhere that extrapolation is dangerous.
More broadly, Chinese consumption patterns are also following those of the West, despite the warnings of prominent Chinese cultural and environmental leaders. The country's moneyed city dwellers desire air conditioners, refrigerators and second homes.
Obama can fix that, too.
Popular leisure activities for the wealthy include carbon-intensive activities such as yachting, golfing and car clubs. In the process, urban residents consume 350 percent more energy than rural Chinese, and more than 70 percent of this energy comes from dirty burning coal. Every seven to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant, big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego, opens somewhere in China.
The environmental toll is enormous. China has five of the world's 10 most polluted cities, and on an average day in China's major cities, 75 percent of the residents are breathing unclean air. The end result: 750,000 Chinese die prematurely every year from air pollution-related respiratory diseases.
For all their wealth, China's cities have yet to conquer the challenge of clean water. Among all of China's 660-odd cities, only one small city of 200,000, Lianyuan in Hunan Province, can claim to provide clean drinking water straight from the tap. In the rest of the country - even the country's capital, Beijing - residents boil their water or buy it in bottles.
Even then, they have no real assurance that the water is safe to drink. And in this desperately water-scarce country, the urban infrastructure does little to conserve. Urban China loses up to 20 percent of its water through leaky pipes. Cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin have sunk six feet over the past decade and a half as precious underground water reserves are drawn down, causing skyscrapers to tilt and encouraging coastal flooding.
Yet tilting skyscrapers are the least of the cities' concerns. In Beijing, factories, buildings and underground pipelines have all been destroyed by the plundering of underground aquifers and the resultant land subsidence.
The environmental costs levied on China's 400 million urban residents pale in comparison, however, to those faced by the country's more than 800 million farmers and other rural residents.
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