With great manufacturing, comes great pollution

By Ben | Thursday, November 1, 2007 | 2 Comments

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The Chinese are overtaking the US in many things. As said before, one was manufacturing. What’s interesting is that with all this manufacturing requires a lot of power. LOTS of it.

And thus, they’re building about one coal plant every week. That’s some crazy stuff. What’s even more thought provoking is that the energy consumption and energy creation is documented in a range that I can’t even begin to comprehend. Thus, it’s really interesting that there are two different conflicts going on when it comes to environment and pollution. The first is this little bit on how even more well-known sites such as TreeHugger continue to make the play that China is the big bad wolf and how it’s so bad for even teachers’ pension funds to invest in Chinese power.

Granted that China is not only overtaking the US in total greenhouse emissions, there’s no stopping this train from steamrolling. But let’s look at a small thing called the Kyoto Protocol. This treaty was to decrease greenhouse pollutants to a collective average of 5% below the 1990 levels. What’s interesting is that China ratified this treaty, while the United States did not. Go figure that one out. While this is due to expire in 2012, there is already a successor drafted called the Washington Declaration that was committed by the G8+5 conference back in February. This non-binding agreement was an acknowledgement by the leaders of these countries that something must be done about the man-made pollution and that we should have a goal of cutting it in half by 2050.

All in all? Will each country stand by their word? Who knows. China doesn’t seem to be stopping their building of power plants and their energy production has skyrocketed. On the other hand, they are putting their name and reputation on the dotted line where other developed countries are not.

(Photo Credit: Brett Arnett)

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Rob

I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel called "China Rising" and the country's thirst for energy is so high that if it continues on the same rate of consumption, it'll take the resources of two planet Earths to keep it running in the year 2040.

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