Green Leaf Report

An old classmate of mine sent me an email the other day, following his return from a business trip this past week to Beijing; I should note that this man is an engineering manager, and does not agree with man-made climate change or any of that tree-hugging stuff (the email was a bit of a surprise):

“Coming back from China – article attached is old but relevant. I have never imagined such a polluted environment in all my life, it’s like a post-apocalypse movie – the air smells burnt, the sun is blocked out and you can see less than a mile in a brown haze, the ash falls from the sky and coats the car overnight, your throat and your eyes burn. What an atrocity. “

The article he sent was from last year: Pollution from Chinese Coal Casts a Global Shadow.  It’s a very interesting article, but he and I have been somewhat debating the situation over the last few days.  Sure it’s easy to worry over the large Chinese population suddenly starting to adopt wasteful western energy production practices: coal fired power plants supporting multiple air-conditioners in every household and such, but I can’t believe the majority of that Beijing pollution is related to the average Chinese person, or even to their growing middle-class population. 

For years now we’ve seen companies putting their manufacturing in Asia, and I’ve complained in the past about the dangers associated with this practice, from an end-product standpoint.  But the reasons companies put so many manufacturing plants in Asia is because it’s cheaper than in the US or Europe.  Why is it cheaper?  No labor protections like in the western world, no air-quality standards that the west has to deal with- governments willing to trade their environment and public health for economic gain. It is almost impossible to find an end product now that isn’t made in China in any of our stores– our costs seem lower with these cheap Chinese goods.  But the end cost is much higher than we realized, as clouds of Chinese pollution are even reaching the western US from China, and are polluting the seas in between.