Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Friday, December 07, 2007 7:00:00 PM
The chinese told the United States at the summit in Bali that global warming and pollution is a problem for wealthy nations.
Su Wei, a top climate expert for China's government ... said the United States and its fellow industrial nations have long spewed greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while newly emerging economies have done so for only a few decades.
"China is in the process of industrialization and there is a need for economic growth to meet the basic needs of the people and fight against poverty," Su said.
Meanwhile...Environmental activists... labeled the United States and Saudi Arabia the worst "climate sinners," accusing them of having inadequate polices for climate problems while letting greenhouse gas emissions rise. But the activists also said no country is doing enough.
Nothing new there.
But the chinese are killing themselves according to this article in the NY Times.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China's leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country's 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.
Imagine for a moment if we had "hundreds of thousands" dyeing each year in the U.S. because of air pollution. You think your health insurance premiums are expensive now! But even in our industrial age, we didn't pollute on the levels that China is now doing.
Lucky for the chinese though, being communist, the government will decide what is important, and what they consider to be reasonable or not is a matter for the state. If citizens die because of policies it enacts, well, that's the business of government.