The New Republic looks at various efforts to slow China’s environmental degradation:
At U.N. conferences, officials keep pushing the country to take stronger action on climate change. Europe and Japan have helped fund clean-energy projects in China, largely through the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. In the United States, it’s become common to hear politicians say that Beijing needs to be strong-armed into action. “If we do not act [on global warming],” Virginia Senator John Warner said recently, “China and India will hide behind America’s skirts of inaction and take no steps of their own.” Warner’s cap-and-trade bill, which would limit U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions, even had a provision to slap carbon tariffs on Chinese imports if the country didn’t take steps to tackle its emissions.
These ideas aren’t without merit. But they also miss a key point: China’s central government is well aware that its blackened rivers and sunless skies are a problem, not just because they’re sparking riots and social unrest, but because out-of-control environmental degradation is imperiling the country’s economic growth. Lately, Beijing has issued a slew of bold–at least on paper–environmental regulations. But the laws are doing little good because the central government can barely enforce them in its own provinces. This structural problem will remain the key to China’s environmental dilemma, and, as countries attempt to push Beijing toward a cleaner future, they’ll discover that the capital is the least of their troubles.
