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Q: Is China's population to blame for all the pollution?
I hear about population this, population that. Whenever I complaiin about pollution in China, a Chinese person is always there to tell me that the reason is because of China's population, and that it can't be helped. The population isapparently the #1 reason cities are so polluted in China, but Is this true?
Beijing, one of the most heavily-polluted cities in the world, has a population of less than 21 million people. Beijing is consistently topping the charts, and sometimes achieves an AQI of 900. By contrast, the Greater Tokyo Area boasts a population of about 36 million people -- quite a bit more than Beijing.
However, Tokyo is consistently in the green/yellow AQI range. Very rarely does it hit orange, and that's only because of Chinese smog affecting Japan.
Is it population, or lack of regulation? What else contributes to the pollution here?
11 years 5 days ago in Health & Safety - China
No. Each time I hear the population used as an excuse for poor health system, lack of democracy etc my bullshit detector goes off. Bigger population means more people to fix problems.
Naturally, when it comes to pollution, more people pollute more. And China's transition from being a medieval society to being a modern society could not have been done without any environmental impact. However, now that the country does have financial resources and the technology is present there is little excuse anymore.
If the people in charge had been up to the challenge they could easily regulate on some key areas to prevent further pollution.
China's problem is weak leadership and poor morals.
Corruption, lack of regulations and non-enforcement of the few existing regulations.
1. Lack of regulation.
2. Fierce competition to offer things as cheap as possible without regard to environmental impact. ie: If nobody can afford what you sell, then you can't sell it. If you try to be environmentally friendly, then you won't have many people buying it because being environmentally friendly like Japan tends to be expensive since it involves spending a few bucks here and there to prevent bad things from happening to the environment.
I think part of the problem is that if the Chinese government came in and started throwing down regulations, a lot of Chinese companies will just simply die off, leaving a small handful of powerful companies which will then just abuse their power to make a monopoly/oligopoly and charge people a lot more money to provide essential services, making the poor more poor and pushing the middle class further down...
It's a hard economics problem to solve because capitalism typically leads to monopolies which are inherently harmful to the poor and middle class. You can sort-of solve that by having a lot of government intervention, but then the risks of that, is the government people get too close to the money and then you have corruption up to whazoo as we see in China..
Karl Marx was a rather smart guy in that he already knew / saw these kinds of problems with Capitalism. Even in the USA, the way we fix some problems of capitalism (monopolies) is with communist style solutions (government power to break them up). Even though we Americans don't like to admit that sometimes a tiny bit of some Communist ideas can be a good thing and vice-versa for Communism.
Population density has a role to play of course, but there are so many other factors,
Commercial greed, by the international companies and, the local companies.
Exponentially increasing demand for energy as the nation 'modernises'.
Corruption, (in government, enforcement, business, the whole range).
Education (SOME idiots don't realise what damage they are causing).
Government policy, (the race for economic growth regardless of the consequences).
Blind, arrogant, naked greed.
The population plays a small role yes. I wouldn't say it's the main cause, but it does play a small role in the pollution. The more polluters there are the more polluted a place will become.
Scandinavian:
It's just like if you have a bag of chips, if there is one person eating them they will last for 10 mins, but if there are two people, then they will last for only 5 mins
TedDBayer:
Don't be silly, who shares chips, you wait for the other person to go.
Industrialisation. With that kind of mass production, factories are probably rolling shifts 24/7
Same happened in UK, USA, Japan, Germany etc... during their own industrialisation.
Surprisingly, even though it is industrialising and also producing for the whole world, China currently still emits a lot less pollution per capita than USA.
mattsm84:
The per capita number is a little crooked, at least in so much as China produces less CO2 per capita than Sweden. Remember, 3/5th of the country lives in largely undeveloped, rural areas, so they don't consume a lot of energy, especially those that live in the southern half of the country. As the divide between urban areas and rural areas becomes less pronounced and more people are permitted to move to urban areas, those numbers will rise dramatically.
JustinF:
http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6131/economics/list-of-co2-emissions-per-capita/
I will definitely get downvotes from sensitive minds for that, but notice how an American pollutes our planet three times more than a Chinese.
Traveler:
So using your logic, and that link, Australia is more polluted than China and USA? Any rational person can see that is not right. Overall pollution output is all that matters. China is the world's biggest polluter.
JustinF:
@Traveler, you misunderstood. That's not at all what I mean.
When mentioning pollution, you cannot simply put on your on your horse blinders only blame the nations that emit the most CO2 overall at this precise moment. There are much more factors to consider, first, like I previously mentioned, one American contributes much more to green gas than a Chinese. You obviously cannot simply neglect this since we are talking about an environmental behaviour that would impact anybody in any other country. Second, China is undeniably the world's most polluting nation, but it's not only because of the way Chinese individuals live, but also because China is industrialising and accepting outsourced production from foreign countries at a fee. Indirectly, Western companies that invest in factories in China are indeed contributing to world pollution. Those gases that come out of those factories would on the long term have an impact of the environment of other countries. China is still far from what Western countries have produced during their industrialisation history when it comes to overall green gas emission. Since you worked in an environmental organisation, you should be aware that the CO2 that UK, USA, Germany etc.. produced since they started industrialising over two centuries ago is what has been damaging the environment the most. Sure China is catching up quickly in terms of overall damage to worldwide environment, but they are still very far from what western countries already did and are still doing.
Traveler:
CO2 emissions are only a small part of China's pollution, though China is the world's greatest offender today. What happened 100-200 years ago is irrelevant.
China has also poisoned much of it's land and water so badly that it is toxic to come into contact with, let alone drink or grow food in. You have to look at China's environmental assault overall, not just CO2. No other country has that problem, nor ever did to the extent that China has today.
mattsm84:
There is a lot more that China should be doing to deal with its own problems with pollution. It should stop throwing pile and piles of money at its domestic coal industry, as Hu Jintao did while enacting the scientific development theory. It should stop importing more coal than the rest of the world combined. It should enforce its existing laws rather than allowing the regulators to look the other way because the polluters and regulators both belong to the same special club. I mean there are dozens of villages here were everyone has cancer. If this happened in the developed world it'd be a huge deal, people would go to jail and businesses would fail. In China, its suppressed.
You weren't down voted because Americans were sensitive about what you wrote--although calling out America specifically when its bunched together with Canada and Australia on that list would have been reason enough. You were down voted because it was spin designed to obfuscate the truth.
like mr 99 said it does play a small role, in china they always use the population excuse, look at a place like hong kong densely populated yet they have a very good system and everyone follows the "rules", i would say that its harder to maintain a city that is densely populated, its just a matter of enforcing laws
