As many of the countries around the world continue to grow and develop, they carry a heavy burden in the pursuit of wealth... READ ON!
There
is no serious doubt that the world is getting warmer and warmer, and
there is no doubt either that many once-poor nations — especially China, India and Brazil — are getting richer and richer. Wealth is a very good thing, and every nation has a right to pursue it, but in the 21st century, that pursuit comes with a special moral burden that other industrial nations never faced.
Western Europe and the United States achieved their
economic dominance on the back of a coal- and oil-powered industrial
base, and when that infrastructure was just being built, policymakers
had the luxury of being ignorant of the environmental consequences. The
air in nineteenth century London and twentieth century Pittsburgh might
have been filthy, but while that might have made people cough a bit, it
seemed to cause little other harm — especially measured against all of
the good industry could do.
Now we know better. Human health, of course, can be
gravely affected by such uncontrolled emissions. As we all know, salary
workers are the ones hit hardest by this. But the health of the planet
is suffering too. With 2012 on track to be the hottest year on record,
sea levels rising, the poles melting, an iceless passage suddenly
opening in the Arctic, and the Earth wracked by more-frequent floods,
droughts and storms, we are clearly creating a far sicker world than the
one we inherited.
My own peer group — the college students of China —
faces a special burden. As the generational vanguard of the most
populous and fastest-growing nation on Earth, we are pulled by two very
different imperatives: the desire to keep our industrial base growing
and our consumer sector flourishing, and the equally compelling need to
protect the planet in the process.
There’s no denying that my country’s growth has come at
an environmental cost. China’s consumption of fossil fuels rose from 7.2
billion metric tons in 2009 to 8.3 billion in 2010 — a 15% increase in
one year. We are the world’s largest energy consumer and second only to
the U.S. in consumption of oil. The number of passenger cars per
thousand people in China rose 55% — from 22 to 34 — between 2007 and
2011. While that places us far behind other industrialized countries in
overall automobile ownership, the trend is unmistakable.
But this hardly makes us environmentally heedless — and
we couldn’t ignore the problem even if we wanted to. In Shanghai, where I
live, traffic jams often make highways impassable, and new mass transit
systems have been built in response. The ease and cleanliness of
subways and light rail argue for themselves. While we continue to
produce and explore for more domestic sources of energy, we still must
import a fair share of what we use, and the volatility of global oil
prices — reaching $112 (U.S.) in 2011 — is not the kind of variable any
growing economy wants to have to factor into its planning. Natural gas
is currently responsible for only 3% of the energy generated in China.
That’s not much, but the very fact that the number is so low makes it a
significant area for growth. The government has already stepped up
efforts to build more gas-fired power plants and improve transmission
lines. Four of the world’s top ten wind turbine manufacturers are
Chinese and the Three Gorges dam hydroelectric facility, which has been
in operation since 2003, will finally crank up to full power this fall,
further diminishing the country’s carbon footprint.
Chinese college students are rightly pleased with — and
relieved by — all of these developments and will surely keep the country
moving in that direction. There’s patriotism in that — as there would
be in any nation that takes pride in its progress. But there’s a healthy
sense of self-interest too. No one wants to live in a sickly world —
least of all the people who have many decades of living left to do.
Unlike all of the other generations that came before us since the dawn
of the industrial age, we have the unique opportunity to leave the world
cleaner than we found it. It’s not an opportunity we plan to squander.
