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Let's hope China leads the new green revolution

By Mark Hughes (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-11 07:46

As I look out over Beijing from my 10th floor balcony, there is barely a cloud in the cobalt blue sky. A gentle, fresh breeze takes the edge off the sun's warm rays. In the distance I can see the mountains, and the Olympic Green stands out like an oasis. It is as nice a day as any I have experienced in the city but it is not always thus.

All of us residents know there are still gray days when a dense smog cloaks the capital and visibility is reduced to a few hundred meters. We shudder at the thought of what noxious substances we may be inhaling.

The World Bank ranked Beijing as the 13th most polluted city in the world in 2004. Linfen in Shanxi province was the worst. Sixteen of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. Others in the top polluted cities are in India, Russia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Peru and Zambia. The one fact that unites them is that they are all in developing countries.

Filthy air has traditionally run hand in hand with industrial development. Because China's growth economically over the past 60, especially in the past 30, years has been extraordinary, so has the pollution that accompanied it.

Western countries only imposed pollution controls after they became developed. In the early 1950s the warm sandstone blocks used in the construction of much of the English university city of Oxford were black with the carbon from coal-burning fireplaces in thousands of homes. Since the introduction of smokeless fuel and central heating it has been possible to restore them to their former glory. London was once famous for smogs so thick they were known as pea-soupers. At one stage, fish could not survive in its river, Old Father Thames. Now there are hopes that salmon, a fish that reflects the purity of the water, will return in a handful of years.

A similar process of "greening up" is happening here but on a much larger scale.

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The government spent $17 billion on environmental clean-up to prevent last year's Olympic Games from being a gray affair. It was a tense countdown to the Opening Ceremony but the day was blessed with blue skies and many an official breathed an unpolluted sigh of relief.

Government decreed industrial and traffic crackdowns had done their stuff.

The Olympics were just the start of an ongoing process that is seeing the nation move to greener forms of energy and away from burning fossil fuels that foul the atmosphere.

Wind turbines now festoon the plains of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. New buildings sprout solar panels soaking up the sun's rays and turning them into electricity.

Thousands of homes benefit from hydro-electricity. There's even an organic farm producing eggs for the Beijing market just over the Great Wall that is self-sufficient in power thanks to the methane it extracts from chicken manure.

In addition, China is leading the way in producing an electric car that runs on environmentally friendly batteries. It has also been at the forefront of the carbon trading business.

Just as the rest of the world is looking to China to pull it out of a painful recession, so it is looking to the Middle Kingdom to lead the way on the environmental front.

As the United Kingdom's sustainable-environment.org.uk website puts it, "The environment is our life support system. It includes everything that we rely on during our lifetime such as air, water, metals, soil, rock and other living organisms. It is important to remember that the state of our environment is influenced by our behavior and that we have the opportunity to either nurture or mistreat it."

An increasing number of people are tending to the view that we are mistreating it in the pursuit of growth for growth's sake, placing GDP on a pedestal and worshiping it. God is dead, long live money. Some take an Apocalyptic view that mankind is rapidly destroying the Earth and that we should be constructing bicycle factories rather than auto plants.

Let us hope that there is a middle way that benefits all of society, that innovation through science and technology enables us to live more harmoniously within the ongoing richness of our environment.

Let us hope that China can, indeed, lead the way.