Yesterday (07/10/2013), The Hindu newspaper reproduced
Thomas L Friedman’s OP-ED column originally published by New York Times
News Service. The column titled ‘Too Big To Breathe’ is about the alarmingly high level of pollution of the atmospheric air and water in
China.
Why has Thomas L Friedman written about China’s acute
pollution
China’s development path has taken a turn for the worst. The
material ambition of the Chinese people
had been kindled and therein lies the danger. How to satiate this material hunger?
Without affecting the environment !!!?? China is doomed unless it corrects its
course, and make its people understand the value of a simple and peaceable
living.
India has a lot to learn from this negative experience
of China. Real Indian Values are being
replaced by Material Values. Material ambitions
of ALL can never be satisfied. Imagine trying to provide concrete houses and a
car for 30 crore households . (Total
Population 120 crore / 4 members per
household ).The strain on the resources and environment will be too much that
it will collapse. Therefore the Govt has to encourage simple living by its
citizens. Many of our existing Karmas will thus become redundant.
China produces all those cheap goods sold at the Wal Marts
of US. If the US sincerely want to help the ordinary citizens of China, it
should stop buying all those cheap goods. But the Americans can’t survive
without cheap Chinese products. China is providing these goods on credit. When
viewed from this perspective, the Chinese are real fools, putting in all hard
work and at the same time polluting their commons to maintain the standard of living of the
American people. And China is not likely to get back its principal amount from
US intact.
All these facts should make the Indians long for their own
Karma Theory (karma-yoga). We Indians should not allow politicians and businessmen to substitute our
ancient and time-tested spiritual values, with the worn-out material values of
the rest of the world.
Thomas L Friedman’s
article is fully copied here.
Strangely it is missing from The Hindu electronic Index, so I have copied it
from the New York Times site. Interestingly
there is a media blitzkrieg about China's
pollution woes , and it can be traced to print and blogpages associated with the New York Times. All the links are provided here at the end.
It seems there is a concerted attempt by US
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Too Big to Breathe?
Published: November 5, 2013
SHANGHAI — I arrived here on Oct. 19th and was greeted with
this news: A combination of cold weather, lack of wind, coal-powered heating
and farmers burning off post-harvest debris had created a perfect storm of
pollution in the northeastern industrial city of Harbin, home to 10 million
people. It was so bad that bus drivers were getting lost because the
smog-enveloped roads would only permit them to see a few yards ahead. Harbin’s
official website reportedly warned that “cars with headlights turned on were
moving no faster than pedestrians and honking frequently as drivers struggled
to see traffic lights meters away.”
The NASA Earth Observatory declared that some Harbin
neighborhoods “experienced concentrations of fine particulate matter
(PM2.5) as high as 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter. For comparison, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality standards say PM2.5 should
remain below 35 micrograms per cubic meter.” This means that Harbin would need
a 97 percent reduction in pollution in order to reach the maximum level
our government would recommend. NASA said Harbin hospitals reported “a 30
percent increase in admissions related to respiratory problems, and several
Harbin pharmacies were sold out of pollution face masks.” The American jazz
singer Patti Austin canceled a concert in smoggy Beijing because of “a severe
asthma attack in combination with respiratory infection,” according to the
event’s website.
It was no wonder that at a gathering of environmental
activists in Shanghai I attended, organized by the Joint U.S.-China
Collaboration on Clean Energy, or Juccce, the conversation was
dominated by moms and dads talking about where in China to live, when to send
their kids outdoors and what food and water to trust. While swapping notes on
China’s latest “airpocalypse” a few days later, Hal Harvey, the American chief executive of Energy Innovation,
who is working with China’s government to try to get its air quality back under
control, asked a powerful question: “What if China meets every criteria of
economic success except one: You can’t live there.”
Indeed,
what good is it having all those sparkling new buildings if you’re trapped
inside them? What good is it if China’s rapid growth has enabled four million
people in Beijing to own cars, but the traffic never moves? What good is it if
China’s per capita incomes have risen to a level affording tens of millions of
once-poor peasants diets rich in milk and meat, but they can’t trust the
labels? What good is all that rising G.D.P., if there is no clean air to
breathe?
China has built amazing hardware in 30 years — modern cities,
roads, airports, ports and telecoms — bringing more people out of poverty faster than any
country in the history of the world. The Chinese have much to be proud
of. Every healthy economy, though, depends on a healthy environment. China will
stall if President Xi Jinping and his government do not now build the software
— the institutionalized laws, courts and norms — that can ensure that all this
growth will not be undermined by an epidemic of despoiled land and dirty
air.
That is easier said than done. China is a one-party system
with multiple, competing interests inside. More enlightened party leaders in
Beijing may declare, “We have to clean this up,” but they still have to get the
local bosses — whose
bonuses depend largely on generating economic growth — “to assert
environmental interests at least as strongly as economic interests,” said Harvey. That requires
assigning real value, and giving
real institutional power and weight, to those in the system who believe
that it is just as important to protect the commons — air, water, land, food
safety — as it is to grow the commons, that it is just as important to have
decent ingredients in the pie as it is to grow the pie. “At the end of the
day,” said Harvey,
“if the pie’s not edible, it doesn’t matter how big it is.”
(We can thank our lucky stars that foresighted Americans,
starting around 1970, built the institutions to protect our air and water. Next
time you hear someone beat up on the E.P.A., send them to Harbin for a week.)
Peggy Liu, the founder of Juccce, is working with Chinese consumers,
producers and bureaucrats to define and implement a more sustainable “Chinese dream” that must be different
from the American dream of a house, a car, a yard and a throwaway economy for
all. I think building the institutional support for a sustainable Chinese dream is the most important thing
President Xi can do.
“China doesn’t have to have rivers that run bright red with
industrial waste, or our lakes and beaches smothered by thick, green algae, or
18,000 dead virused pigs floating down the Huangpu River,” Liu recently wrote.
“We shouldn’t have to check our air quality index app on our phone every day to
determine whether we should let our children outside to play. There shouldn’t
be any more Chinese children who, when they go abroad for the first time, ask:
‘Mommy, why is the sky so blue?’... China can be better than this. China needs to
carve our own unique way to a thriving life and stable community — a path that
is a sustainable path. If we don’t do this soon, we will end up with a China
Nightmare. And there’s no escaping that a China Nightmare is a global
nightmare.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 6,
2013, on page A29 of the New York edition with the
headline: Too Big To Breathe?. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/opinion/friedman-too-big-to-breathe.html?_r=0
Other links to reports about China’s pollution problems which appeared within the past one week are provided here
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