By Chris Williams
As the final harmonies of the Live Earth concert in Shanghai
faded, Western journalists started singing their predictable songs
about China's environmental problems. The lyrics are now very
familiar - filthy factories, coal-fired power stations, glaciers
melting, pollution affecting Seoul and Tokyo, and rivers too toxic
to touch.
For balance, the journalists usually provide a sentence
reminding us that China's environmental footprint is still below
that of the United States and other industrialized nations. The
first half of the next sentence then accepts a theoretical right
for China to equalize pollution to equalize wealth but after a
comma, the right is revoked.
Western journalists miss a significant problem. Using
nation-based statistics to argue about the environmental impacts of
a globalizing world is intellectual deceit.
Even if it were possible to calculate accurately the CO2
emissions from electronics factories in China, does that mean that
Chinese electronics companies must bear full responsibility for
these emissions? If we think the "polluters" are only those who
directly create the pollution, we could simply blame welders and
lorry drivers, not factory owners or governments. But if factory
owners and governments also carry some responsibility, so too do
those who purchase and use the products from those factories
anywhere in the world.
The concept of "polluters" must include all those who benefit
from the production of a product and many, often most, of the
consumers of Chinese products will not be in China.
?
Western analysts are now becoming more careful about applying
simplistic nation-based standards to the re-cycling of discarded
electrical goods.
Local Chinese people may benefit from the jobs this creates, but
it is realized that they also suffer the resultant health problems
and toxic air and water. The important point is, where do the
discarded electrical goods come from, and who benefits from using
and then discarding them? It is not just China.
A similar logic applies when wealthy countries import cheap food
and flowers from less wealthy countries. They are, in effect,
stealing water and soil nutrients from the poorest people in the
most ecologically fragile parts of the world.
Many companies are now transnational, and that further
obfuscates responsibility.
America has exported at least a grubby toe of its environmental
footprint to Mexico, via the filthy US-linked factories in the
Maquiladoras region just over the border. Should England or China
be responsible for the environmental emissions from the new
Shanghai Motors factory in Birmingham UK, or the dealers that will
sell the cars in Europe and America? Should China be blamed
entirely for the emissions from using imported oil, or the Arab
states that make massive profits from extracting and exporting
it?
What of the responsibility of those who benefit from investing
in transnational companies, through the international financial
markets? And what is America's responsibility for the pollution
from the Chinese factories that created the wealth that is now
invested in US Treasury bonds?
For two millennia, Western civilizations have claimed that the
best political leaders are those who benefit their citizens by
importing "goods" and exporting "bads". The "goods" may include
material resources, ideas, and talented people. The "bads" range
from smoke, or effluent from public sewerage systems or factories,
to convicts.
Plato's vision of a republic and its laws, only worked if
unwanted people - such as criminals, orphans and widows - could be
exported to his hypothetical "colonies". The Western colonial
rulers implemented the inequitable transfer of human and material
"goods" and "bads" on a global scale during their colonial
expansionism, including the export of criminals to populate and
build their actual colonies. But the world has now run out of
"colonies".
China seems to be continuing the tradition as it builds
industrial complexes, staffed by Chinese workers, near the sources
of raw materials in Africa and elsewhere. The manufactured "goods"
are imported to China or elsewhere, but there are also "bads", such
as factory pollution.
Forgetting Western history, the Western press is starting to
notice and condemn these recent practices.
Journalists point out that Liberia, for example, should not be
responsible for the pollution caused by the new Chinese rubber
factories there. But who will benefit by using those rubber
products? It is not just Liberia or China.
In 1997, I proposed to Britain's cabinet minister, Mo Mowlam,
that the "polluter pays" principle is only a starting point, even
at a local level. It is a convenient but lazy notion of
responsibility. Any regulatory or legal system must, of course,
recognize direct blame and liability for environmental problems.
But there must also be a concept of the "implication" of all those
who intentionally benefit from any activity that harms the
environment.
The manufacturer of a plastic bag certainly carries primary
responsibility for its production, but you and me are also
implicated if we use it. So similarly, the Westerner with the
Walkman is partly responsible for the global impact of its
production and disposal, wherever that happens.
Environmental problems are not unique in their potential for
deceit through nation-based statistics. We are told that the
percentage of the Indian population that is illiterate has
decreased over recent decades. Yet the actual number of illiterate
people in India is greater than the total population of the
continent in 1947. If measured in terms of the number of illiterate
people per sq km, there has been a rise in illiteracy.
If calculated as a percentage of the world's population, India's
decline in literacy is dramatic, notably in comparison with China.
And whatever the statistical tricks, the true outcome is that an
increasing number of Indian people are excluded from the benefits
of global interaction.
Evolution has given the human brain two exceptional abilities.
One is to input and process very large amounts of information. The
second ability is to process and throw away very large amounts of
information. If we did not have this second ability, we would
suffer from something like autism, a mental disability typified by
excessive information processing and attention to unnecessary
detail.
But the downside of this ability to discriminate and discard is
that we are programmed not to think too much about what we throw
away - whether in the form of people or pollution. If evolution has
not programmed us to perceive the throw away problem globally,
statistical methods should be deployed to improve our global
perception not to make it worse.
Aware of the growing rich-poor gap, President Hu Jintao wants to
build a more "harmonious society" in his next term of office.
Hopefully that principle can be extended internationally, and China
can demonstrate to the world that the old Western-style
colonial-inspired trade in "goods" and "bads" is no longer
viable.
Harmony must resonate with its environment, and that environment
is now global and connected. However beautiful the music, there can
be no harmony in a vacuum.
The author is based at the Centre for International
Education and Research, University of Birmingham, UK.
(China Daily July 12, 2007)
