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Comment by unquietcode | Hacker News Reader

There are health and environmental costs to fracking which are not being adequately addressed, and which are unsurprisingly ignored by this article. China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but there are consequences to this. Some of their cities are today near uninhabitable, some are just unbearably smoggy. We definitely do not want to pat ourselves on the back for an economic boom that scars our country's land and water resources and affects the air water of countless individuals (citizens!). If we're going to build our economy on fracking, it should be heavily regulated. No entity should have the right to pump unknown chemicals into the ground with impunity and without oversight. And even with oversight--BP Horizon and every other avoidable oil disaster of the last 10 years.

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> China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but there are consequences to this. Some of their cities are today near uninhabitable, some are just unbearably smoggy.

There is some interesting reading regarding China's "green GDP" accounting project. Here is one recent account:

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/4/9/china/c...

Here is my brief summary:

1. pick a relatively simple yet crude (or perhaps misguided) metric of progress - GDP

2. reward / punish regional leaders for their ability to maximise this metric

3. spend effort creating a more accurate metric of progress - "green GDP" - that accounts for the costs of pollution

4. trial the new metric and observe that the more accurate indication of progress reveals much less progress than the original metric - perhaps negative progress in some cases!

5. regional leaders are deeply resistant to introduction of the this new, more accurate metric, as it shows they have not actually being doing a great job

6. adoption of the new accurate metric fails for political reasons, as it is very unpopular!

You have to laugh, otherwise you might cry. The article above ends with a few positive notes, so there may be some positive change looming in future!

I personally think there is more potential for China to make dramatic, sweeping positive changes than certain other countries (e.g. Australia, where I live).

You forgot the part where layers upon layers of Chinese managers and bureaucrats cook their books to a crisp to keep their careers in motion.

> Some of their cities are today near uninhabitable, some are just unbearably smoggy.

I remember hearing about an 8-year old girl suffering from lung cancer. This is very sad

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/chinas-choice/2013/no...

Recently read a story in Rolling Stone on pollution in Vernal Utah from fracking.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/fracking-whats-...

Many high risk wells in the US are not being inspected. And the fracking industry doesn't want anyone to.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/23/3451919/high-ris...

Rolling Stone has less than zero credibility at this point.

Your talking about the rape story? I have a weird feeling they are making sure this will never happen again? At this point, I'm not willing to write off the publication, but I do look at who's authoring the article--more than before.

> China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but there are consequences to this.

No different to anywhere else in the world, just that it happened more recently.

Source?

I am honestly curious. I know for example that the US was very dirty in the early 1900s, but we had 100 million people. If China was dirty in the 2000s with 1.3 billion people, it stands to reason that China was more dirty, no?

Technology has helped curb the absurd pollution that was the product of older processes. We don't have data from industrialization in the US, because we didn't have the tools to measure precisely the pollution at that time. But based on verbal descriptions of the pollution, China today might be similar to the US when it was industrializing. Specifically, historians note the frequency of days where pollution is so bad you can't see across the street, which used to happen in the US regularly yet infrequently, which is the same narrative description you'd see in China today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

Surely it's the opposite. China pollutes far less per capita than the US.

Less per capita can still work out to more in absolute terms.

It doesn't make it any less dangerous for public health.

Postulating that this was a necessary step to industrialization might require some strong evidence.

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