Urban environment: China: China's rapid economic growth and industrial development causes widespread pollution
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It's old-hat for North Americans to decry the pollution of their cities, in particular air pollution, and thus to cry out for Clean Air. Particularly, to cry out, as does refWrite periodically, for govt intervention in the auto industry and in driving pollutant-fuelled cars and trucks in our cities. At refWrite, we have pointed out from time to time how disgusting the municipal govt is in not banning autos which create 90% of our unbreathable air, especially on the Don Valley Expressway, which is within walking distance of our editorial offices.
Well, People's Daily, an official state newspaper for mass circulation in Communist China has noted that China's rapid industrial growth is having the same consequence for air-breathability in that country's burgeoning cities:
Almost half of Chinese cities are relatively or heavy pollutedAsia > China > Pollution
The air of 48.1 percent of Chinese cities is relatively severely polluted or severely polluted, mostly by grain-sized particles of dust.
It was predicted that by 2010 coal burning will produce more than 35 million tons of sulfur dioxide across China. The figure will reach 43.5 by 2020.
The sharp increase of soot and dust in the air will put greater pressure on the environment.
The State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) will establish a preventative control system for regional pollution, said Zhang Lijun, vice president of SEPA, at the ongoing International Seminar on Regional Air Quality Management.
SEPA will also strictly control the quantity of discharged pollutants, promote desulfurization at heat-engine plants and improve air quality, said Zhang.
The seminar kicked off in Beijing on Monday, sponsored by SEPA, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the European Commission DG Environment.
By People's Daily Online
I don't think that the State (combined all-levels govt) in Canada and the USA need hold back from intervening unitedly, massively, and coercively in altering the conditions that make the air of all people outside air-conditioned offices and homes--that is, on the sidewalks, on the front porches and in backyards, in the parks, or just generally without air-conditioning indoors--unbreathable. This is massive sadistic torture, health-destruction, medically-costly nonsense. The market economy should be taken over by the State to the extent necessary to stop the production of sickness-automobiles and -trucks, requiring the manufacture of alternatives. The State should stop the sickautos from driving into the cities until such a time as consumers purchase alternatively-energized autos and trucks. Damn the theories of free enterprise that are so absolutiztic they would require a waiting peirod for this change that could, on their polluted terms, make people wait another lung-burnt generation before "market forces" kick in.
Principium Consumers Hub
Economics may construct models of absolutely-free markets, and point to the theoretical truth that eventually markets do adjust as a result of altered consumption habits and the following alteration of manufacturing and retailing. I am not challenging such theoretical absolute free-market concepts in all their disastrous purity. What I am challenging is that economic theory does not necessarily lead to normative politicla economy. And in this case it does not. Any alternative Christian political party in North America must renounce any accomodation to libertarian absolute free-enterprise economics, and call for massive State intervention in the economics of transportation via sickomobiles, sickotrucks, sickoboats and sickoplanes--so that our cities can become free of vehicles emitting oil, gas, diesel, and other pollutants into our air. Clean-air transportation should be our transportation goal! A Christian political party in China, challenging the Communist Party's deadly robber-baron capitalism there should likewise campaign for Clean Air! A Christian political party anywhere in the world it would seem, consistently can have no other transportation policy than one that goes up against both Communism (mainland China) and absolute-free-market capitalism (Michigan and Ontario) and the consumer forces that permit the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction like the presentday American and Chinese mainstream automobile.
-- Owlb
Further Research:
Developmental statism in auto manufacturing [abstract, Cambridge Journal of Economics]
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