We want! We want!
* Encourage expansion in China
* Prepare for the coal rush
* Get round fortnightly collections: send your recycling east
Far, far away there is a middle kingdom, a vast beguiling land which any dedicated student of the apocalypse would be advised to embrace. It is a big country with big problems, but for your purposes it brings big opportunities. China’s insatiable appetite for expansion is fed by coal-fired power stations, the belching behemoths that stand proud as peerless contributors to carbon-dioxide emissions. These gases are responsible for 80 per cent of human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions. Most derive from coal. China, it seems, is a powerhouse!
Global coal consumption has risen, and China is responsible for 90 per cent of the increase. But to those for whom gloomy warnings on climate change are never quite gloomy enough, the news only gets better. China is opening coal-fired power stations at the rate of two a week. It has plans to build another 550 on top of the 2,000 already cooking the atmosphere. In comparison, Britain has a measly eighteen. Driving this growth is growth itself. Already there is a coal rush the like of which has not been seen anywhere since the nineteenth century. By encouraging China’s rampant economic expansion, you can ensure that the planet slides inexorably into climatic chaos. Praise must be extended to one of the shrewder observations of Mao. This son of a farmer may have been a lot of things: prime motivator of the Great Leap Forward; architect of the greatest famine in history; instigator of a peacetime death toll running into tens of millions but, in the canon of anti-environmentalists, Mao is a true hero. Man, he observed, must ‘conquer nature and thus attain freedom from nature’.
Make no mistake, encouraging China to expand is one of the most powerful methods of conquering nature. By doing so, the facile lifestyles of those ethical types will be readily exposed. Are you listening, do-gooders? It doesn’t matter if you cycle, recycle or plant a windmill on your roof. Events in the Orient will cancel everything out. Even if the rest of the world limits carbon-dioxide emissions to current levels for the rest of the century, projections indicate that China’s growth alone will ensure global temperatures rise 6°C by the start of 2100. It will never come to that, though – the earth will be long gone. China is forecast to hurl more carbon dioxide above us during the next twenty-five years than the best efforts of Europe and America managed in a century. By most reliable estimates, China has already eclipsed America as the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases. China is the number-one threat to the planet.
Without question, your ultimate objective should be to encourage enough growth that the entire population of China enjoys the same living standards that you currently accept as given. Dismantling the planet is one thing, but keeping alive economic apartheid is really rather distasteful, a touch last-century if you like. Your goal is to emancipate the millions of Chinese enslaved in agrarian poverty. You want them driving Hummers, vacationing in Blackpool and impulse-buying electric teasmaids for brewing not Chinese tea, but leaves from Sri Lanka. Get them to drive when they can walk, fly when they can drive. The carbon footprint of the average Chinese last year was little more than a third of the average Briton. If China’s 1.3 billion people consumed like the residents of the UK, the planet would need to burn an extra 5 billion tonnes of coal, double car production and increase the world’s meat supplies by 80 per cent. Let the Chinese have what they deserve. In this selfish world, there are pitifully few gestures of equanimity. China, what is ours, is yours.
A sublime image to move the hardiest soul. Teetering slagheaps tower above clanking factories, everything blanketed with a smog so thick the sun is barely visible at midday. It is perhaps the furthest scene from environmental bliss to be found anywhere in the world. The city of Linfen, 300 miles west of Beijing, makes Dickensian London look like a country park. Suffocated in a spectral smog, hundreds of smelting and coking plants loom through the fug. Watching the city’s 3.5 million residents wander like ghosts through the soup of industrial blitzkreig is heart-warming stuff, the holy grail of those who court the lofty ambition of planetary destruction. The World Bank agrees, awarding Linfen the coveted gold medal for best city around in terms of planetary pollution five years running.
Even the worst ecological degradation can be made worse. Linfen might be an inspirational icon underscoring the side-effects of China’s courageous attempt to provide teasmaids to its populace but, as always, things can deteriorate that little bit more. Thankfully, the British government is as keen to help China extract coal as you are. A delegation of British mining-equipment companies was recently dispatched to Beijing to lend its support and expertise in everything from mine exploration to coal transportation.
Analysts predict that China’s growth will continue to burgeon at an eye-watering pace. China’s economy has been expanding at 9 per cent a year. Linfen brags a phenomenal 12 per cent rate. In less than a decade, the Chinese economy has tripled. Growth, growth, growth. Gotta keep growing. More buildings equals more skyscrapers equals more concrete, the production of which creates 8 per cent of greenhouse gases worldwide. China’s new captains of black industry – the mine bosses of Linfen – flaunt their wealth with private fleets of Rolls-Royces. China’s nouveaux rich have become the world’s biggest market for the venerable old lady of British car manufacturing, never famous for her green credentials. And just to make doubly sure that Rolls-Royce ramps up China’s carbon-dioxide emissions, the Derby-based company recently agreed to supply a hundred aircraft engines to the country. To environmental hell in a very stylish handcart. On the all-important environmental-damage front, several other British companies have already done you proud. Among the list of polluters are Panasonic and Associated British Food and Beverages, based in Shanghai. The message couldn’t be plainer if scrawled in tar on a pristine icecap. Fed up with adhering to all those tiresome green regulations back home? Pack your bags and head east. Let’s be honest, nobody’s going to make too much of a fuss. In Linfen they might not even see your convoy of petrochemical lorries through the miasma.
The huge acreage of China holds another fine purpose for the dirty men of Europe. China can be viewed as one giant wastebin. By recycling, you could in fact be helping to accelerate climate change. Tootle around the Chinese villages that process international garbage and you’ll find British crisp packets and plastic bags originating from UK supermarkets. Goods manufactured in China are being shipped to the UK and then, once used, returned to China for disposal, a deliciously carbon-dioxide-rich round-trip of 12,000 miles. All in the name of the environment. Under EU regulations, member states are not allowed to dump garbage overseas but are permitted to send sorted waste for recycling. Despite attempts by both countries to halt this perverse but perfectly formed loophole, the trade continues. China sent £12.6 billion worth of goods to the UK last year and received an estimated 1.9 million tonnes of rubbish in return. Investigations found that many of the small-scale Chinese-based recycling firms pay little attention to environmental concerns. All the time, Britain supports the recycling business, arguing that it allows for a more sustainable use of world resources. Yet little is known of the rich environmental cost of China’s recycling business.
Alas, nothing lasts for ever. Worrying signs are emerging that China may have passed its nadir. A growing Chinese middle class is showing concern for green issues. Mutterings about clean energy have been voiced by its government. Dark rumours persist of China building model ‘eco-cities’. Can you trust no one these days? In Linfen itself, latest data reveals that residents breathed 163 days of unhealthy air, fifteen days fewer than the previous year. A China with a responsible stewardship of the environment is a heartbreaking prospect, although unlikely when all the trends point to continuing growth and an increased courtship between her and the UK. The British government will no doubt push measures to improve coal efficiency and carbon storage to justify its trade, but you can expect most new coal power stations to ignore these completely. China hosts a thousand environmental protests a week but effortlessly shrugs them aside. So you can cling to the hope that its authoritarian system, with no real environmental checks or balances in place, will continue to embrace disaster. And why not? Most of the world’s greenhouse gases were ejected by the West. It would be immorally objectionable to deny the Chinese their chance to heat us up for a change. One day, you might even trust them to warm the planet by themselves.
* China’s burgeoning middle class realizes that destroying their land is not the ideal future for their children. Inevitable.
* Chinese government resent being portrayed as the ‘bad guys’ of the planet and ratify international climate-change agreements. Unimaginable.
* Majority of coal-fired power stations built without new clean technology despite offers of help. Feasible.
* Britain continues to encourage Chinese economic resurgence as climate change spirals out of control. Certainty.
* As Arctic ice sheets and Himalayan glaciers melt causing untold misery, international community announces a boycott of China until it reduces reliance on coal. Never.
Likelihood that China keeps growing as an environmental nightmare: 87%