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China – Desert Threatens 400 Million People & Other Scary News
Well, after my previous post about China’s laudable attempts to develop renewable energy (see below), here’s a darker picture, still taken from the subscription part of the Financial Times: Shifting sands threaten China’s economic march
China as a whole appears to be fighting a losing battle against the shifting desert sands. According to official estimates, China’s deserts are growing by 3,500 sq km a year and now cover 18 per cent of the country. The sand threatens a further one-third of the mainland and 400m people, says Wang Xinjiang, an official from the anti-desertification office of the state forestry administration. The Asian Development Bank says accelerating desertification in China “increasingly threatens the economic welfare of the nation”. It has resulted in the loss of vast swathes of arable land, sinking ground water levels and heavily silted rivers. Mr Wang says China’s expanding deserts have direct economic costs of Rmb54bn (€4.9bn) a year. The problem is largely man-made, with logging and over-exploitation of land aggravating a natural lack of water and rainfall, leading to rapid soil erosion.
from the same article
The government’s drive to become self-sufficient in food led in the past to the cultivation of unsuitable grain crops in desert frontiers.
Critics say China’s dash for growth and rapid exploitation of natural resources has shown little regard for the environmental impact of development. Campaigners have frequently criticised the country’s massive industrial and power projects such as the Three Gorges Dam because of their impact on residents, who have at times been forcibly relocated, and the regional environment.
I am not a specialist of China, I’ve never been there, and you must be getting sick and tired of the topic.
Well, welcome to globalisation, y’know, when decisions made by others impact you also…and China has reached the point when they influence everyone and everything, and I keep bumping on articles about China this, China that on pretty much any topic, usually peppered with superlatives, breathless comments about the scale of the challenge, the growth, the … you get the point.
So here’s a round up of the most striking numbers I have collected recently:
– 30% of mercury pollution in the US (and worldwide) comes from Chinese electricity production;
– China currently consumes almost half of the world’s cement and more than 60% of construction cranes
– China already produces 13.5% (and growing) of worldwide CO2 emissions (with the same emission intensity as the US, i.e. the quantity of carbon dioxide emitted by $ of GDP). It is a signatory of the Kyoto Treaty but is exempted (as a developping country) from any effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
– China has suddenly turned into a massive importer of oil, with obvious consequences on oil prices:
– Chinese demand has caused steel prices to increase significantly in the past 2 years and continuing, with worldwide impact
– China is about to overtake Germany as the third manufacturer of cars worlwide. (Volkswagen has already been selling more cars in China than in Germany for 2 years). And yet – Chinese has ten times fewer cars than the US – for 4 times the population…
– of course, China now holds above 600 billion dollars of reserves, up more than 200 billion from a year ago, second only to Japan.
– maybe the most scary of all: 6 boys are born for every 5 girls (117:100 ratio). There are 12.7 million more boys aged under 9 than girls under 9.
the normal newborn sex proportion is 100:104-107, and if China’s disproportionate figure is allowed to continue unchecked, there would be 30 to 40 million marriage-age men who would be single all their lives by 2020.
Remember the easiest way to keep sex-starved young men busy : war, rape and pillaging.
So, are you terrified yet?
@colman [grin] really, read Diamond’s latest. it is always inconceivable to the denizens of any empire, anywhere, any time, that a collapse is imminent. Because the collapse always occurs at the peak of “power” — i.e. peak of population, peak of resource extraction and consumption. Empires and cultures have exceeded the carrying capacity of their habitat over and over again, and their denizens have been wrong every time in their optimism and faith in the rightness and success and invulnerability of their complex, rich, rewarding and fascinating cultures.
Are we near our limits? agree with slothrop that the received answer is always “no” — even in a time before capitalism — because the intellectual discourse of a complex culture is controlled by the elites, and the elites believe in their power. And their power is at its historic maximum just at the moment when their culture approaches its limits.
What Colman doesn’t seem to understand is that we prophets of Doom — this one anyway — don’t want these awful things to happen. My personal attitude is that of someone watching a train wreck in slo-mo. Desperate to do something to stop it. Apparently powerless to do anything. Surrounded by people jumping up and down and cheering with excitement because the train is so powerful and going so fast and it’s such a Fuuuuuuun Riiiiiiide! Also of course, I’m on the train too so it’s kinda personal as well 🙁
Those who decry the pessimism of a “dystopian vision” forget that for billions on this planet, the dystopia is already real and accelerating in intensity. They want very much to better their lives, indeed — but their lives are worsening daily. In many cases this worsening is a direct result of environmental mismanagement — sometimes resulting from excessive population density compared to habitat carrying capacity, sometimes resulting from excessive foreign extractive activities blighting the local carrying capacity, sometimes from usurpation of resources by a wasteful local elite… and so on. As Diamond writes:
“Environmenal concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent First World yuppies, who have no business telling desperate Third World citizens what they should be doing.” This view is one that I have heard mainly from affluent First World yuppies lacking experience of the Third World. In all my experience of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Africa, Peru and other Third World countries with growing environmental problems and populations, I have been impressed that their people know very well that they are being harmed by population growth, deforestation, overfishing and other problems. They know it because they immediately pay the penalty, in forms such as loss of free timber for their houses, massive soil erosion, and (the tragic complaint that I hear incessantly) their inability to afford clothes, books, and school fees for their children. The reason why the forest behind their village is nevertheless being logged is usually either that a corrupt government has ordered it logged over their often-violent protest, or else that they signed a logging lease with great reluctance because they saw no other way to get the money needed next year for their children. My best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but they can’t afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the US government to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs.
Another view that is widespread among affluent First World people, but which they will rarely express openly, is that they themselves are managing just fine at carrying on with their lifestyles despite all these environmental problems, which don’t really concern them because the problems fall mainly on Third World people (though it is not politically correct to be so blunt).
There’s an intersection between sheer numbers and hyperconsumption. “Reducing numbers” is not necessarily a cure-all. On average a child born in the USA consumes, let’s say, about 17x [in that ballpark somewhere] as much resources over a lifetime as a child born in Bangladesh. A family in the USA, in other words, doesn’t get to point the finger at a Bangladeshi family and say “too many kids” until the Bangladeshis have 17 kids for every one that the US family has. At US consumption levels, one kid may be too many. The question is not so much “are we near our limits” as “how would we have to live to sustain our current numbers (or greater)? and how far are we from living in such a way?” Presently we “sustain” our current numbers by allowing some 30,000 people per diem to die of malnutrition and/or exposure, and by stripmining planetary resources at an ever-increasing rate. And the gap between how we (the elite) are actually living and how we would have to live if we wanted any justice or any comforts for the rest of humanity, is fairly wide. Nor are we eager to narrow it; in just about every country, the gap between wealth and poverty is widening and the number of people “on the top” is shrinking.
We can imagine scenarios where we engineer our society for one goal only: the maintenance of the very largest population possible within planetary resource limits. There are at least two models for this — a tiny elite living off vast slave populations, or a rigorous totalitarian “egalitarianism” (never has been such a thing, but this is theory so we can speculate) in which everyone shares the same highly constrained lifestyle. I don’t think any of us would enjoy living in such a society (China is only a pale preview of the kind of authoritarianism it would require). John Varley explored this theme in his weird and comic Tuf Voyaging, with the allegory of the S’uthlamese.
The question of how many humans the planet can support, with what quality of life, is an urgent one. For those of us who belong to the planetary elite — and that includes by definition everyone with access to this blog I should think — the question is a morally urgent one. For the other 90 percent of the people on earth, it’s even more urgent — a question of survival, dignity, basic freedoms. We don’t “all go together” by any means. The only reason some of us can afford to say “f**k your ecology” is because we belong to the elite who — as JD reminds us — always starve last…
And Colman, off the subject, I’ve been wondering too about those 2 or 3 high rises that have burned to the frame in the last few years, without falling down 🙂
Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 2 2005 19:20 utc | 41
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