China minister warns pollution, waste imperil growth
By Chris Buckley; Editing by Ken Wills and David Fogarty
28 February 2011 BEIJING (Reuters) – China faces acute environmental and resource strains that threaten to choke growth unless the world’s second-biggest economy cleans up, the nation’s environment minister said in an unusually blunt warning. In an essay published on Monday, Zhou Shengxian also said his agency wants to make assessing projected greenhouse gas emissions a part of evaluating proposed development projects. That could give China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection more sway in climate change issues, an area dominated by agencies whose main interest is shoring up industrial growth. Zhou set environmental worries at the heart of China’s next phase of economic development — a theme in focus at the country’s annual parliament session starting on Saturday. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humanity and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” Zhou said in the essay published in the China Environment News, his ministry’s official newspaper. “The depletion, deterioration, and exhaustion of resources and the deterioration of the environment have become serious bottlenecks constraining economic and social development.” … “If we are numb and apathetic in the face of the acute conflict between humankind and nature, and environmental management remains stuck in the old rut with no efforts in environmental technology, there will surely be a painful price to pay, and even irrecoverable losses,” said Zhou. China is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and other human activities that scientists say are causing global warming. It is the world’s biggest polluter and biggest consumer of resources across a range of other measures. In 2009, nearly 20 percent of the length of China’s monitored rivers and lakes had pollution worse than Grade 5, making the water officially unfit for even irrigating crops, according to government statistics. … In January, more than 200 children living near battery plants in eastern China showed elevated levels of lead in their blood — the latest such outbreak to prompt an outcry. …
