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China’s Green Revolution is Quietly Succeeding
By
Donald Donato
Jan 10, 2020
![](images/images_06_02_2023/pic3.jpg)
A worker listens to radio on his tricycle cart
parked next to a billboard with the slogan "Environmental protection
begins with you and me," at the Central Business District of Beijing,
Monday, June 5, 2017. | Andy Wong / AP
As a testament to the growing momentum for the
Green New Deal, over 900 people gathered in the small town of Acton,
Massachusetts, on a frosty Sunday night, just five days into the new
year, to hear from U.S. Senator Ed Markey, its sponsor in the Senate.
Markey, himself a little surprised by the popularity of the GND town
hall event, remarked that he was gratified by “the 900 plus people who
are engaged and willing to show up and demand bold, progressive action
on climate from their leaders.”
While growing public interest in the GND here at home is laudable, the
momentum of looming climate catastrophe is already slaughtering
millions of animals and humans in places like Australia and Indonesia.
Support for bold, progressive action on the climate emergency
underscores the reality that we are in a race with time to stop the
suicidal destruction of the ecosystem that sustains us all.
The Green New Deal and initiatives like it throughout the world are
essential parts of that race, but there are some examples that may be
more worth studying than others. There is also a social system better
equipped than ours to rapidly respond to the dangers we face. To
efficiently accomplish the broad goals of the GND, the U.S. must
engage in comparative scientific prioritization and planning which
works for both the people and the land.
China’s Green Revolution
The Chinese leadership have achieved nearly miraculous environmental
goals in just a few years, while maintaining economic growth of over
6% in 2019, while the U.S. struggled to achieve 2.1%, according to the
Bureau of Economic Analysis. As Dean Baker, senior economist at the
Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. wrote,
“Rather than spending so much effort worrying about what China is
taking from us, we should be thinking about what we can get from
China.”
The ways in which China is leading the green revolution are many.
China has become the world manufacturing leader of electric cars. It
has invested heavily in a national fleet of electric buses for public
transportation. The People’s Republic has the highest afforestation
rate of any country or region in the world. It leads in the research,
development and manufacture of renewable energy sources and is the
world’s top electricity producer from renewable energy sources, with
over double the generation of the second-ranking country, the U.S.
As a follow-up to decades of progress on environmental concerns, this
past October, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
adopted a policy framework to “promote highly efficient utilization of
resources, improve institutions for ecological restoration and
conservation, and strengthen the accountability system.” This
framework is meant to expand China’s two-pronged approach to clean up
its environment, including the strict regulation of pollutant
discharges and cleaning up existing pollutants.
To help us understand how China’s environmental policies are
performing, a report was released in November 2019 by the Ministry of
Ecology and Environment. The report estimates that in 2018, China’s
carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced by 45.8% compared to 2005,
which is equivalent to 5.26 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
An important factor in this reduction has been the growth of
non-fossil energy, which accounted for 14.3% of primary energy
consumption.
China has been able to turn its environmental situation around by
adjusting its industrial structure, conserving energy and improving
energy efficiency, optimizing the energy structure, controlling
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from non-energy activities, increasing
carbon sinks by planting millions of trees and designating millions of
hectares of conservation areas, strengthening coordinated control of
GHG and air pollutants and promoting low-carbon pilots and local
actions. But none of this would have been possible without a
governmental system that is devoted to prioritizing human and
ecological needs over profits. Of course, there is waste, profit and
corruption in China, but the overarching goal of the government, like
the motto which hangs outside the central government headquarters in
Beijing, is to serve the people.
Planning for the future
Another important part of the Chinese approach to environmental policy
is spatial planning, referred to commonly as “the three red lines.”
Three red lines aims to accelerate the creation of a spatial planning
system for national territory and map out ecological protection areas,
permanent farmland and urban zones.
“The spatial planning system plays an important role in the country’s
management system and will be crucial in promoting the efficient, fair
and high-quality use of the territory,” said Zhang Bing, deputy
director of the National Territorial Spatial Planning Bureau of the
Ministry of Natural Resources.
“The core principle of the three red lines is making protection a
priority,” said Zhang, who took pains to emphasize that economic and
social development must be integrated into ecological concerns.
Comparing the two approaches
China’s complex strategy has quickly addressed several factors that
are contributing to ecological collapse around the world. The model is
far from perfect, but the Chinese approach is far more comprehensive
than any other country of comparable size and impact. Critical to the
struggle of American workers and environmentalists is the fact that
the GND is still in its formative stages and there is still time for
significant detail to be added to future legislation.
Another enabler of China’s green revolution is the political reality
that modernization and scientific progress are part of the guiding
principles of a state established by a socialist revolution. This is
something the U.S. cannot replace with half-measures. Land use,
resource allocation and re-allocation, national planning, investment
and regulation, are but a few of the vital elements necessary to
ensure an equitable, efficient and sustainable future.
That is not to say the environmental situation in China is rosy, it is
not. Costly pollution in air, water and soil must be addressed, and
one of the stumbling blocks to progress is the framework created by
market-style agriculture and industry. In a era when humanity needs to
retool its habits to conform to ecological needs—from how we farm,
commute and work, to dissolving the exploitative divisions between
town and country, and manual and intellectual labor, China’s embrace
of market mechanisms, in farming especially, may pose significant
difficulties in years to come.
These future perils aside, the Chinese Communist Party has led the
world’s most populous nation to make gargantuan leaps in afforestation
and to become the world leader in energy production from renewable
sources. It has increased its budget for environmental protection to
about 1.2 per cent of its GDP, which represents a $130 billion green
investment, annually. By the government’s own accounting, that figure
will need to rise to a whopping $350 billion per year until 2030.
In the U.S., the media focus on the GND goal of net-zero greenhouse
gas emissions in 10 years does not address many important social,
economic and physical needs that appear in the GND Resolution. We
should remember that while China turned its environmental emergency
around, it was also raising 700 million people out of poverty.
Feeding the people
We need to contextualize the purpose of the GND and other ecological
efforts around the globe. What are we really trying to do? Perhaps the
most important objective is to transform the way we live in such a way
that allows nature to thrive and us along with it. To do that, we
have to figure ways to feed ourselves without exploiting and
oppressing people, poisoning the air, water and soil, as well as
protecting the biodiversity that makes agriculture possible.
Agriculture is therefore central, not peripheral, to building a
sustainable future.
As we reported in a previous article on the GND, the U.S. government
insists on providing us with a misleading statistical look at
greenhouse gas emissions, claiming that agriculture accounts for a
mere 9% of the national carbon footprint. Chemical and food production
in the agricultural sector cannot be separated from the food system,
from pesticide manufacturing to transportation of produce to market.
Worse still, our food system can no longer be separated from the rest
of the world, as much of our produce is grown in other countries and
shipped to our markets.
This false information is obscuring the whole, terrifying picture we
face. The combination of pharmaceutical overuse (especially
antibiotics for farm animals and humans), wasteful supply channels,
environmentally destructive chemicals (including pesticides),
over-fishing, over-grazing, CO2 emissions and methane emissions (which
are 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide emissions),
constitutes the blueprint for the end of our species. According
to Oxford University data, food production is responsible for
one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. That number
speaks for itself.
To reverse our course toward oblivion, those who are suffering the
brunt of the climate emergency need to learn to operate together
politically, and as efficiently and globally as the oil companies,
petrochemical giants, agricultural conglomerates, their owners and
their toadies in all three branches of the U.S. government. Given the
stakes, it is not an overstatement to consider there has never been a
more important task for working people here and around the globe.
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
Spokane, Washington. 99212
www.exactrix.com
509 995 1879 cell, Pacific.
exactrix@exactrix.com
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