China Will be world's biggest polluter by 2020
GUANGZHOU, CHINA Yang Ailun opens the venetian blinds on her ninth-floor office to reveal a curtain of yellowish-grey haze descending over the city skyline.
For the Greenpeace activist, the daily smog is a red flag. Two years ago her environmental group set out to paint Red China green, but a booming economy is pushing pollution into the stratosphere.
"Normally you can't even see the buildings right in front of us," Yang grumbles, peering at the clogged roadways and high-rises sprouting around her.
Second only to the United States in emitting the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, China is destined to become the world's biggest polluter within 15 years. Demand for coal-fired power plants that belch carbon dioxide fumes into the air is soaring faster than environmentalists like Yang can catch their breath.
Seven of the world's 10 most polluted cities are in China, where filth invades your eyes and coal dust clogs your throat. Yet here in the southern province of Guangdong, which bills itself as factory to the world, conservation is a hard sell.
Yang is one of 40 Greenpeace staffers campaigning to raise environmental consciousness across China, where economic growth is surging by nearly 9 per cent a year. Unlike flamboyant Greenpeace activists elsewhere, she can't organize publicity stunts or call public protests lest the Communist government shutter her offices.
"In China we're just at the beginning stages of raising public awareness," the young activist says diplomatically.
If China has been slow to wake up to the fallout from its factories, the rest of the world is watching closely — and holding its breath. Foreign environmentalists always buttonhole Yang at conferences to demand that China be more accountable for its pollution, but she says such attitudes will backfire.
"It's important for Westerners to understand that there are no moral grounds to just say, `Stop developing!'" Yang explains. "If you wag your finger and tell us how to run our lives, China will shut down the conversation and that would be the worst thing." |
Haze in Central China
On May 2, 2007, a pocket of thick haze formed over Sichuan Province in central China. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture the same day. In this image, haze forms between the Longmen Shan and Xiaoxiang Ling mountain ranges in the west, and the Dalou Shan mountains in the east.
Sichuan Province includes panda bear habitat. Pandas rely on temperate broadleaf and mixed forests east of the Tibetan Plateau. By 2005, the Chinese government had established more than 50 panda reserves, protecting almost half of the world’s remaining habitat for these bears. |
ENERGY STAR is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy helping us all save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices.
Results are already adding up. Americans, with the help of ENERGY STAR, saved enough energy in 2006 alone to avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 25 million cars — all while saving $14 billion on their utility bills. |
