Doesn't this simply remove some of the symptoms instead of working with the root cause?
[1]: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china_anti-pollution_efforts__l...
Make no mistake, China's pollution problem is very much a political one.
The central governments' inability to enforce local municipalities to do whatever they want, is actually result of the shifting political structure from a single autocratic ruler during Mao's era to a more technocratic/autonomous style of ruling. This is a good thing, although it does create inefficiencies when central government interests conflict with local ones.
While this at least sounds encouraging, it masks regional variations, and perhaps most glaringly the impact of China:
China’s poverty rate fell from 85% to 15.9%, or by over 600 million people China accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty Excluding China, poverty fell only by around 10% """
There has indeed been a tradeoff with pollution here which they need to fix. However, I don't see why income inequality is a problem here. If you are starting from massive amounts of extreme poverty, then how would you possibly alleviate that without making some people wealthy?
Reply to sean as out of posties: You want transparency in decision making? The west pretends it has it, but in reality even on matters of fiscal policy it doesn't. For example, look at central bank interest rate setting. It's done by secret departments. As another example, I asked Australia's body why it didn't embrace the IBAN like Europe, Israel and a growing list of other countries. I got no reply. Pot, kettle, black.
China is not a dictatorship, but it is definitely autocratic even if the autocracy is distributed. Local party leaders are just as autocratic as central party leaders, and generally are more corrupt (getting more for their family, for example).
Why does that matter? Because India has roughly the same population size as China, but pumps significantly less C02 into the atmosphere.
As to why that's the case - again, this could be attributed to a political issue - government looks aside as BigCo craps on the country's environment, as long as it fuels the massive economy, keeping everyone optimistic.
Birth defects have increased about 70 percent in China over the past two decades, now reaching about 900,000 per year, according to the country's Ministry of Health.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soot-and-smog-put-...
Study Links Polluted Air in China to 1.6 Million Deaths a Year
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/asia/study-links-pol...
Air pollution is killing about 4,000 people in China a day, accounting for 1 in 6 premature deaths in the world's most populous country, a new study finds.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/air-pollution-kill...
A "mist cannon" isn't helping with this.
edit: I have made fair cites and laid out my argument. Driveby downvotes just show how biased HN is towards China.
http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/epa-history-1970-1985
China isn't doing much of the above, if any.
Excerpt:
During this period a great many new environmental laws were passed and some old ones resurrected and refurbished as well as energy legislation that impacted on the environment. Other environmental type laws were enacted, such as the Coastal Zone Management Act (1972), the Marine Protection Research and Sanctuaries Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1976), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Deepwater Ports and Waterways Safety Act (1974), the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act (1974), the Water Resources Planning Act (1977), the Water Resources Research Act (1977), the Environmental Quality Improvement Act (1970), several amendments to the Food Drug and Cosmetics Act, and the Environmental Education Act. There was renewed enforcement of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899.
The Rules and Regulations issued under these laws numbered into many thousands. In its early years EPA alone placed about 1500 rulemaking notices in the Federal Register annually.
> This is absolutely untrue. Even in the US's manufacturing heyday we had strict environment laws.
Which, combined with wage laws, resulted in the offshoring of dirty industry. We still produce nearly as much as China, but our industries of choice are generally cleaner industries. It is cheaper to pollute China than to adhere to US manufacturing laws. We could not produce the same quantity of "dirty" goods here for prices that would allow for current levels of consumption. Arguing otherwise is a bit like saying manufacturing moved to China for no reason.
http://www.wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-graphs-explain-world%E2%80...
The US is still in the top "energy use per capita" countries.
Of course it is, the US is responsible for a huge percent of the world's output. How could you create things without energy?
But since you're here: what's the US GDP per capita, compared to other less polluting countries?
> There's no democratic element to demand a higher level of service, say with how the US had its environment movement which led to many laws protecting the land, air, and water and ultimately culminated into several state agencies, federal guidelines, the EPA, etc.
So you've very effectively slaughtered that strawman detailed in your claim about the original claim.
China's got a twofold problem: They pollute a lot, and that pollution happens over a much smaller area of land, while the USA has it spread out a lot more. Per capita emissions doesn't tell us if the air in the largest cities is going to be the consistency of pea soup...
I'm not saying the US is worse than China. Parent poster said that the US's democracy meant that it wasn't a big polluter, but that's clearly bollocks, the US has been, and is, a huge polluter.
sigh
As you said China has decided that financial growth beats the consequences of pollution. You can discuss that direction as much as you want but that's the direction of overall Asia. It has nothing to do with forward vision or full-assed solution.