The Hypocrisy of Outsourcing Pollution
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12.21.07
Joseph Kahn and Mark Landler of the New York Times do a great job of reporting on the dirty little secret: the west is getting cleaner air and generating less greenhouse gas because we have outsourced it to China. They follow a major steel plant in Dortmund, where ThyssenKrupp sold it to the Chinese, who came over and dismantled it, and reassembled it in Handan. “They worked day and night,” said Erwin Schneider, a spokesman for ThyssenKrupp. “They could never have done it that fast if they were governed by German labor laws.”
coal mine turned into park with lakes, Goitzsche
Now Dortmund, which went through a bit of a recession as it lost 40,000 steelmaking jobs, has a performing arts complex being built out of two old blast furnaces, and the Ruhr is a capital of culture. In Essen, a depleted coal mine has been converted into a museum and performing-arts center. In Bochum, a 105-year-old gas-fired power plant is now used as a concert hall, its vaulted roof providing professional-quality acoustics.
In Handan, citizens "live in a miasma of dust and smoke that environmental authorities acknowledge contains numerous carcinogens....People do not eat outdoors, to avoid having black briquettes flake their rice.“Hangang knocks 10 years off people’s lives.”
The next time we pat ourselves on the back for reducing carbon emissions or complain about China, we should look in the mirror first; on a global scale we haven't reduced anything, we just moved it. ::New York Times
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hey, it's not just China.
check out what Los Angeles has been doing for decades:
1. stealing water from outlying areas
2. belching smog which blows inland and is devastating Joshua Tree National park (worst air quality in entire Park system, plus creating nitrogen soil conditions which kill off native landscape and encourage non-native grasses, which fuel massive wildfires from which the desert never recovers)
3. filling the desert with their trash (see Eagle Mine)
4. and the latest? the deceptively named "Green Path" which will obliterate hundreds of thousands of acres of beautiful, fragile wilderness in the Joshua Tree area, to add to the LA McMansion power gluttony.
Once this wilderness is destroyed, we can never get it back. greenhouse gases are only one part of the environmental crisis we are facing, and you cannot destroy wilderness to try and compensate for other destructive policies also pursued for Big Power's profit.
We need to lobby for GREATLY INCREASED incentives, grants, subsidies and financing for DECENTRALIZED, URBAN PV AND WIND as well as steeply tier utility pricing so that consumers pay the true costs of their consumption. it is well beyond time to stop outsourcing excessive power needs to innocent ecosystems.
out of site, and out of mind.
Well said. And in the meantime our governments point their finger at China as an excuse for not committing to proactive climate change prevention measures.
Hi, there is China, not only polluting, but also not signing the Kyoto Protocol. What are we waiting for?
When are we going to face that consumerism is the road end?