On China Beat, Alex Pasternack looks at the environmental implications of China’s economic stimulus package:
Much of the reason for China’s dirtier stimulus is clear: the country is still developing, and still depends largely on dirty industry and manufacturing for growth. It’s aiming to be more like developed countries, which rely more heavily on cleaner service sectors, like banking or retail. But on the way there, it’s still dirty. And China’s leaders don’t seem to be showing much interest in making that path — and its end result, for that matter — much cleaner right now.
A message released during the ongoing annual session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), said, according to Xinhua, that ”saving energy and protecting environment is a big government agenda, though keeping a ’steady and relatively fast’ economic growth is a paramount task amid the global economic crisis.”
That sounds like a pretty blunt dashing of the hopes of environmental groups like the old Beijing NGO Friends of Nature, which sent a letter to the NPC this week urging a clean stimulus.
