China's growing pains call for birth of green revolution
Date: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 @ 19:58:10 UTC
Topic: General
By James Kynge
Published: May 25 2004 5:00 (FT.com)
China's industrial deve-lopment is unsustainable because its people, resources and environment cannot cope.
This assertion, published yesterday, was not the intellectual musing of a green pressure group. It was the conclusion of the State Environmental Protection Administration, a branch of Beijing's Communist government not known for rhetorical bombshells...
Mr Pan said that in the past 20 years the consumption of oil has risen 100 per cent, natural gas 92 per cent, steel 143 per cent, copper 189 per cent and aluminium 380 per cent. But while China has 21 per cent of the world's population, it has only a fraction of its reserves of oil, natural gas, iron ore, alumina and other resources...
If every second Chinese owned a car - the US average - there would one day be 600m cars in China, more than the world total of 540m. The roads, parking lots and petrol stations required for those vehicles would consume much of China's scarce agricultural land, making the country dangerously dependent on foreign food sources. Mr Liang said: "If Chinese wanted to live like Americans, we would need the resources of four worlds to do so."...He said: "We should give full play to the government's green guidance, smash the monopoly interests of some powerful ministries and enterprises and invest large-scale government funds on the development of new energy sources and a recycling economy."
Read the whole article here: StoryFT_China
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