Instead of being diverted by the relatively easy and therefore attractive answer of blaming China or any single country for rising greenhouse emissions, we must focus on the real root of the problem: a highly unequal and unsustainable international system of production, distribution, and consumption that insulates winners from losers, and delivers the greatest share of the benefits to a lucky few while jeopardizing the future for everyone else.

The Boston Globe

By Joshua Muldavin  |  December 19, 2007

BEIJING

LEADERS FROM around the world gathered these past two weeks at the Bali climate change talks to chart our collective future. Looking out my window in Beijing through the dense haze that envelops this powerful city with world-record levels of smog, dust, and deadly pollution, it is easy to understand why many there perceived China as the Godzilla of global warming. As a country choking on its own "success," now producing over 20 percent of global greenhouse gases, China makes for easy scapegoating. However, targeting China does little to address the fundamental causes of climate change, mitigate its consequences, or provide lasting solutions.

The West has worked long and hard to transform China into what it is today: an industrial platform for the world where some of the most noxious, occupationally hazardous production processes are concentrated. Western governments and corporations have not only benefited, but have helped lead China down this road of energy-intensive, environmentally destructive development with resulting rapid increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition, Western consumers have directly profited from the inexpensive products that pour from China's factories. Fundamental to the rise of China's emissions is the rapacious growth of consumption, and the championing of it - especially in the West. The carbon dioxide embedded in China's exports to the United States in 2004 alone is estimated at 1.8 billion tons, equivalent to 30 percent of the US total.

The World Bank, Japan, and Western donor countries have provided more than $200 billion in loans to China since the early 1980s - the largest global flow of development aid during this period - to create the infrastructure that has enabled China to become the world's factory. Multinational companies received contracts to help build China's infrastructure - the power plants, electrical grids, railways for coal transport, natural gas pipelines, highways, ports, and airports. Combined with its large, mobile, low-cost workforce of rural peasants, China became highly attractive to globalizing companies.

Simultaneously, Western leaders have promoted neoliberal economic policies increasing capital mobility. For 25 years, corporations moved factories to China, often partnering with local companies and subcontractors to take advantage of lax environmental and occupational conditions and achieve higher profits. In moving manufacturing jobs to China, footloose corporations have de-industrialized other parts of the world.

China's global integration was further enabled by Beijing's own devotion to rapid growth at any cost, averaging more than 10 percent per year for over two decades. Paradoxically, the resulting environmental destruction threatens that very growth, with hundreds of protests around the country every day reflecting the big divide between those who reap the profits and those who suffer the consequences of China's far-flung production networks. While the greatest benefits fill corporate coffers in China and abroad, the real costs are imposed upon local environments and Chinese workers' bodies.

The long-term destructive environmental consequences of China's development path are well known to the country's leadership and citizens. Official statistics point to pollution as the primary cause of death. And global warming's catastrophic consequences for China provide strong incentives for action. The rapidly shrinking Himalayan water tower foretells a dire future for billions in China, India, and Southeast Asia as Asia's rivers dry up. This helps explain China's increasing engagement with the international community at the Bali talks.

But China's global integration means its footprint of environmental destruction does not stop at its borders. The world's companies pull global resources through China from far-flung corners of the planet - timber from Siberia, Mozambique, and Burma; petrochemicals and minerals from Sudan, Indonesia, and Bolivia. The impacts on global warming through deforestation, as just one example, are magnified far beyond China itself.

The West must acknowledge its own role in shaping and benefiting from China's global integration and rapid increase in consumption of resources. Instead of being diverted by the relatively easy and therefore attractive answer of blaming China or any single country for rising greenhouse emissions, we must focus on the real root of the problem: a highly unequal and unsustainable international system of production, distribution, and consumption that insulates winners from losers, and delivers the greatest share of the benefits to a lucky few while jeopardizing the future for everyone else.

Joshua Muldavin is a professor of geography at Sarah Lawrence College.

The title of this entry comes from the UN Environment Program's fourth Global Environmental Outlook report since 1997, officially released yesterday. According to IHT (the report won't be posted on the UNEP website until later today), this report prepared by 388 "experts and scientists" announced itself as "the final wake-up call to the international community" about the environmental dangers that humankind (or, I would say, our global economic and political rulers in particular) are causing for our own survival as a species.

[O]ther tipping points triggered by climate change could occur in areas like India and China if Himalayan glaciers shrank so much that they no longer supplied adequate amounts of water to populations in those countries. [...]

This particular report on the UNEP's study seems to derive entirely from a phone interview with only one of the 388 people who contributed to the report - I look forward to seeing the report itself when it becomes available. The analysis suggested by this journalist's account, however, seems to attribute the main cause of this crisis to population growth, a la Malthus, accompanied by the expansion of "flows of goods, services, people, technologies and workers" - "even to isolated populations," the author adds significantly, apparently paraphrasing the analysis of his key informant. If only only those isolated populations remained isolated, he seems to imply, and if only those workers and people (I'm curious what this distinction between "people," "workers," and "isolated populations" signifies, even if it's only a slip of the pen ) stayed in their proper places, and, of course, if they all just learned to control their reproductive habits a little better. (He doesn't spell this out here, but this logic seems consistent with the common complaint that the previously "isolated" people have improved their life expectancy (due to the economic development and modernization imparted graciously by first-world advisers and entrepreneurs, of course) without similarly adopting the first-world self-discipline of having fewer children.) No mention is made of the fact that these migrating workers and recently globalized populations consume only a fraction of the resources consumed by a few hundred thousand people living the high life in a few rich countries (how many earths is it they say we'd need if everyone consumed as many resources as Americans do? 5?), and that, even in these select populations, only a fraction of them do most of the most serious consumption and pollution - to say nothing of the more important question of who has the power to decide how resources are used. If you live in most parts of the US, for example, you simply cannot live without driving a private automobile, powered on gasoline and emitting pollutants, many miles every week. On the other hand, most people in the world could not afford to buy, maintain, or fuel a car even they wanted to. And even if your average SUV-driving American managed to turn off Fox News long enough to learn about this UNEP report, and then decided to try to save the planet by cutting down on consumption and pollution, how would he get to work, or the store, or anywhere else for that matter? I guess he could write a letter to his political representatives and ask them to reorganize the city, create a practical mass transit system and bicycle lanes, support the development of alternative energy sources, and make the companies that produce everything he uses accountable for the environmental (and social) damage they do in other countries. But meanwhile, while he's waiting for his representative's secretary to throw his letter in a landfill (or a garbage boat bound for some third-world country), how big a dent can he make in this global crisis by buying more expensive energy-saving lightbulbs or driving a few old newspapers and bottles across town to a recycling center? And of course most people in other countries have even less control over the forces that are destroying our planet (what, they don't have energy-saving lightbulbs? Try: a lot of people don't have electric lights (or, like many parts of China, they've got electricity but can't afford to use it, or they're never home to use it anyway because they're out working in strange cities all the time, and staying in dorms where one light suffices for twenty or thirty people, or maybe sleeping outdoors and relying on the moonlight).

In short, this account seems to blame our environmental crisis on population growth and increased mobility rather than on an economic system whose health depends on constantly expanding the amount of resources extracted from the earth (and value extracted from people) and pollutants returned to it, and which can, for the time being, outsource some of its most obvious forms of environmental damage to places far from the homes of the people controlling the system. At least the Financial Times, being more familiar with how these things work, points out the connection in the first sentence of their report on the UNEP study, but in a way that seems perfectly to illustrate the idea that capital is antagonistic to the earth and humankind, and that the bourgeois journalist, as one embodiment of capital's logic, writes as if she were a mirror reflection of me, an embodiment of the humankind attempting to free itself from capital's suicidal rollercoaster and return to the bosom of the earth. Whereas it seems perfectly obvious to me that our environment is being degraded and jeopardized by the course of capitalist growth throughout the world, FT opens its report by saying, "The world's future economic growth is being jeopardised by the extent of environmental degradation."