Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil and Food | Hacker News Reader

Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil and Food

nytimes.com

51 pointsdanso29 comments

I find it sort of ironic, in a deeply tragic way, that a totalitarian state such as China finds itself incapable of enacting the sort of sweeping environmental regulations which were the linchpin for bringing about vastly cleaner air, water, and soil in the liberal democracies during the mid-20th century. Indeed, it wasn't so very long ago when a great many pundits were crushing on the ruthless efficacy of China's absolutist government.

China is more than advanced enough and more than wealthy enough to solve these problems. But perhaps the government is too corrupt and too disconnected from the value of human life to do what needs to be done.

I agree. I am always sickened by the US politicians pointing to Chinese "regulations" (or lack-thereof) on labor or the environment as competitive advantages to be emulated.

Then I remind myself these are the same sorts of people that have never left the borders of the US and don't understand exactly how wonderfully _clean_ the US is in comparison to those sorts of places.

I hope for the sake of the Chinese people and the rest of the world that they figure it out. We are starting to have similar problems with "unresponsive" governments in the West and it will unfortunately be to everyone's peril eventually.

the story isn't quite as monolithic as that though, in the 19th century America, lawsuits came about as people claimed that pollution from factories caused personal damage and the state courts repeatedly ruled that industrial progress (and the resulting economic growth) were protected interests and put the kaibosh on them - e.g. Lexington & Ohio Rail Road v. Applegate. So having a 'responsive' government can be a problem, depending on exactly whom the government is 'responding' to.

Well certainly, and littering in America was supposedly endemic before the anti-littering campaigns of the 1960s with stiff penalties were instituted.

That is my frustration - that short-sighted individuals don't realize how hard fought and won many of the things they take for granted are.

Private property ownership is essential for anybody to care about environmental issues. If the government owns all the property, citizens don't have any economic or personal ownership stake in protecting it from pollution.

That is quite a bold claim there. Do have any evidence that it is true? Are there studies you can cite or data that you can refer too?

Your claim is that absent an economic or a personal ownership stake then one can not have an interest in protecting the land from pollution. This is a false statement for me personally so on strict logical grounds the claim is false but perhaps I'm an outlier.

You want a study that says that someone cares about things they own?

If the farmers actually owned the land they hopefully would have complained about near by factories, or stopped paying taxes on the land by now.

Nobody owns the air but we all like to avoid lung disease and death.

Many of the Superfund sites in the US were owned by the mining companies that left the extreme levels of pollution. The evidence is clear that ownership doesn't dissuade a company from polluting its own land when it can make a ton of money in the process.

Its actually quite accurate:

https://www.google.com/search?q=economics+private+vs+public+...

Free rider problems, tradgedy of the commons, etc. The best examples are conservation with regards to fisheries and sought-after endangered specifies. You have to give people an economic incentive, which usually includes some sort of privitazaion of the resource (for fisheries, tradable quotas).

I actually just read an entire chapter about this concept last night: http://books.google.com/books?id=lbOkUCVNSPoC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA...

So how do national parks work?

Often times corporations care more about large amounts of money they can make in the short term, not the much lower value of the land over the long term. Read up on the history of mining in the US for a great example.

Talking with Americans that have lived in China, it sounds like the problem isn't the govt, but culture. Like the anti-spitting campaign during the Olympics, the Chinese govt need similar strong tactics to get its citizens to care about the environment. I don't know how successful the anti-spitting campaign worked out, but the West's current love affair with the environment didn't happen over night either.

The West has a love affair with the environment? Maybe about 2-4% do, half of them living in cities and the other half in the countryside (very different lifestyles but similar goals of a minimum environmental impact).

Another 5-10% care enough about the environment to make daily conscious choices for it, but most of those choices amount to lip service or marketing-driven "greenwashing". Most of these people live in cities.

The rest just don't care, and will continue driving their cars and eating >300g of meat per day until they die or become incapable of deciding for themselves.

I think you underestimate the massive changes in attitude that have come about due to the environmental movement. The very fact that your examples are eating meat and driving, and not dumping waste into parks, throwing trash on the ground, pouring used oil into streams, using lead paint, burning leaves and grass, etc is a testament to the changes that have occurred. All the behaviors I listed were commonplace in the 1950s, now they unthinkable and strongly disapproved of.

My father told me that highways used to be lined with trash thrown out of car windows.

The environmentalists got me when I was young. The awareness never left even if it only amounts to taking out the recycling.

Some of my favorite places as a child are still my favorite today - the CA Academy of Sciences and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Those two institutions alone probably have changed Bay Area perceptions of the environment.

China should set up institutions like that, both for research and public awareness. There is so much biodiversity in China that we rarely hear about [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_giant_salamander

From my time in China, I would say that the anti-spitting campaign was either not successful or not long-lived. I would routinely encounter spit on the streets or sidewalks, and would hear the telltale sound of spitting about a dozen times a day. Considering the air quality, I can't really blame them -- I felt the urge to do so quite often, and only held myself back because I didn't want to cultivate a habit that could be potentially embarrassing upon returning to the States.

(I will also mention that of course this is mere anecdote, I was in China from 2011 to 2012 and don't have firsthand knowledge of how much spitting there was before the Olympics, and I was generally in a "third-tier" city in Guangxi province, rather than in Beijing.)

I wish we had an anti-spitting campaign here in Seattle. It's... gross.

And what do you think caused the social change? Did you notice that it came about after the laws were put in place?

The laws didn't come from nowhere, but they certainly had an impact on the majority's way of thinking. Why else would the Religious Right be so absolutely set against laws allowing same-sex marriage? If laws didn't change social values, they'd have nothing to fear from them.

Try talking with someone who grew up in China, not Americans who traveled there. The culture is different, but the government even more so. Remember this is a communist government which none the less worships at the altar of capitalism. A lot of behavior is illegal yet expected or even demanded. Leaders are more interested in getting wealthy or influential or even safe and less interested in wide ranging fixes to the country until there is no other way.

Also realize that most of the population that matters lives in a narrow band near the ocean and sometimes in terrible geography where screwing up water or air is easy. One thing might help in the long run, bad water and air affects everyone including the politicians who might someday realize they have to do something. You can ignore a river of dead pigs if you live elsewhere but choking on air is fairly universal.

China's heavy metal pollution is staggering. The tap water in many areas tastes like heavy metals, or how you might imagine heavy metals tasting. Stick some aluminium in your mouth. Then put a 9-volt battery, with some zinc, in there and gurgle it all with Listerine. It's difficult to describe unless you've tasted it.

And if there is a country that could tackle an issue as immense and demanding as this, it's China.

How China's pollution problem defers from that of US's or UK's, say 100 years back?

Population, population density, automobiles, and lingering effects of recent poverty.

London's metro population peaked around 9 million right around 1940, although it's back up to similar numbers. The population of manhattan peaked around 2.3 million in the 1920s. The population of Beijing, Guangzhou, or Shanghai are all about 20 million plus.

There were fewer automobiles in London even in the mid 20th century than there are in the big Chinese cities today (there are over 5 million cars in Beijing alone). Many of those automobiles are either diesel powered trucks, buses, and cars or 2-stroke scooters and motorcycles, all of them highly polluting. Add to that the heavy reliance on coal for home heating and cooking and you have the pollution nightmare that is now quite evident. The population of the entirety of the UK was only 50 million in 1950, and the population of the US in 1950 was only 150 million.

Today in China nearly 50 million people live in Guangzhao alone, and over 100 million people live in the top 4 largest municipalities, within an area that is in total similar in size to Los Angeles county. And the pollution contribution from the population of more than a billion who often live near the major cities is also not inconsequential.

There's probably little difference, but I'm not sure if that's a legitimate excuse. Is a heavily polluting industrial phase necessary for countries to become developed? I'm not sure if that's true or not; maybe it is and it's acceptable for developing countries to make the same environmental missteps as developed nations had in order to progress to the same levels of development. I would hope, though, that with technological advances there would be a greater ability to be industrial while mitigating some of the environmental issues that plagued the US and the UK during their industrial revolutions.

I don't know if this is a valid analogy, but I sometimes think about what this argument would sound like if it was about something like slavery instead of environmental damage. There was much infrastructure and industry in parts of the US built on the backs of slaves, but I think that if there were modern-day countries with substantial slave industries, we wouldn't find it defensible to say that the US also had slaves too in the past and that developing countries should have a chance to do so as well as a temporary part of their development.

Maybe pollution is a necessary evil for any society, and maybe it's not as bad as slavery. It just seems like placing each society on separate 'tracks' of development for them to go through the same troubles and dangers without criticism both demeans developing societies as "oh, they're just 100 years behind us" and also ignores the sort of "horizontal gene transfer" of technology and social/philosophical/political concepts that can accelerate developing countries' development.

Part of the answer might be that environmental regulation will add costs and regulatory complexity to Chinese manufacturing, and make them less competitive.

Many western manufacturers moved production to China to reduce costs.

Their actions may be similar. What is drastically different than 100 years ago is what we know about global warming and pollution in general.

The time scale is compressed, but China (others soon) is following the US / UK playbook to grow their nation. We have not provided anyone a better roadmap than coal / gas, so that is what everyone else is going to use.

Not at all different, just a question of scale. Life expectancy will shorten, restrictions will be put on importing organics from the country.

You can read about the lakes or rivers in the US or in East German that would spontaneously catch on fire sometimes until changes were put in place.

I find East Germany and the former USSR an interesting data point in governments ignoring the health of the people in pursuit of some national goal. How much of the USSR's dis-assembly came from these sorts of abuses?

Its sad that the government of China, rather than taking an enlightened road knowing where unconstrained industrialization led (they have examples after all) chose to follow in exactly the same footsteps of previous nations in creating massive environmental disasters that will take decades of remediation.

That is the tragedy here, they know what the outcome will be and they are doing it anyway.

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