China and India are paying a high price for the industrial revolutions that have recently propelled them to positions of economic heavy hitters. In China, an estimated 1.6 million people die prematurely each year from air pollution. That's about 4,400 each day and 17 percent of total deaths in the country.
Twice in this month, Beijing officials have put the city on red alert, the most severe alarm, for the first time since the colour-coded warning system was introduced two years ago. A red alert is disruptive to the economy, requiring vehicles to be taken off the roads, factories shut down, and schools closed.
Breathing conditions are barely any better in New Delhi, capital of the world's seventh largest economy. (China's GDP is now second only to the United States.)
People in New Delhi, population 16 million, are forced to wear face masks to alleviate some of the choking thick smog in recent weeks. The city has ordered that as of January 1, motorists will be permitted to drive only on alternate dates depending on their odd- or even-numbered licence plates.
The industrial revolutions in China and India have occurred at lightning speed compared with Western industrialization. In China the transformation dates from 1978 and in India from 1991. Western-style market liberalizations in each country have lifted hundreds of millions of people from peasantry into the middle class. At about 400 million people million people, the Indian middle class alone exceeds the total population of the U.S. That milestone in history explains why the number of people in poverty worldwide peaked about three years ago.1
But China's incredible economic growth - GDP has risen 48-fold in less than four decades - has seen the West offshore not only low-wage jobs to China, India, and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim and South Asia, but a share of its air pollution as well. Current research indicates that more than two-thirds of the estimated seven million deaths worldwide from air pollution each year occur in India and China. Unless there is strict government intervention, the death toll is expected to double by 2050. Most of the additional deaths are expected to happen in Pacific Rim and South Asia countries, most notably China, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. All of these are major suppliers to the West.
The science journal Nature recently identified the chief cause of deaths from air pollution as particulate matter.' This is tiny airborne bits of coal, used extensively in electric power generation; wood particles used in heating people's homes; and excrement from widespread household use of dung-fired stoves. Those and other contaminants combine to cause premature lung cancer, heart failure, stroke, and life-threatening asthma attacks. Even those people not coping with severe respiratory disorders are at high risk.
Officials are not blind to the threat. Last year Li Keqiang, China's new premier, described pollution as nature's red-light warning against the model of inefficient and blind development.' What Li was condemning was precisely the fast-paced economic growth model by which China overtook Japan this decade to become the world's second-biggest economy.2
But China is a leader in solar power, in which it held the lead until the Obama Administration committed the U.S. to robust alternative energy development. China is also a leader in wind power. A country widely chastised for its reliance on coal-fired power plants has also increased its wind-power capacity 20 times between 2003 and 2008, and raising that higher level of wind generation another eight-fold by 2020 is well underway.
Experts claim that pollution is the worst of what have become China's many problems. "The Chinese government is working very hard to deal with its air, water, land, food supply and other sustainability problems," writes veteran China watcher James Fallows, who has long lived in that country. "So it's a race between how hard the country is trying and how dire the situation is."
An autocratic China is better able to impose environmental reforms than a raucously democratic India. The planned USD90 billion Delhi-Mumbai Corridor of new, environmentally smart cities' has been brought to a standstill by activists warning of potential environmental damage, cost overruns, and displacement of farmers.3
A tale of two cities: Linfen is a Chinese town so blighted by industrial pollution that journalists worldwide routinely file reports on its pollution-spewing steel mills, coal mines, and oil refineries. Linfen is often described as having the appearance of a post-apocalyptic nightmare.'
Conversely, there is Masdar, a model of advanced 21st-century urban planning that is rising on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi city. The new town, which will become home to about 40,000 residents, is to be car-free, powered exclusively by renewable energy, and use light-rail commuter transit to achieve the goal of a zero-carbon' city.
While many Masdars will be built worldwide this century, practically speaking, the substantive task will be to bring about a renaissance in existing cities much larger than Linfen. That will require trillions of dollars' worth of construction, since retrofitting an existing city is a far more complex challenge than building one from scratch.
That being said, economist and urban planners see enormous potential in the slums of Mumbai, Mexico City, and the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. In the eyes of planners, something like 70 percent of the places where people now live have yet to be built. They are in need of decent housing, potable water supplies, hospitals, decent schools, shops and light manufacturing. Slums are 21st-century cities waiting to be built, planners say.
In the eyes of planners, something like 70 percent of the places where people now live have yet to be actually built. They are in need of decent housing, potable water supplies, hospitals, decent schools, shops, and light manufacturing. Slums are 21st-century cities waiting to be built. This may be overly optimistic because the trillions of dollars needed to take on such megaprojects have not been made available or even at the committed stage.
Then again, reinvented communities would reduce both air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. It would also provide more able workforces by providing leading-edge healthcare and education services. In addition, crime rates would drop, which would be a by-product of poverty eradication and foreign investment would be attracted to ease the cost to municipalities of the needed transformation.
There is that progressive option, or the status quo. The latter retards global economic prosperity, and in certain jurisdictions provides a breeding ground for embittered residents who become radicalized. For now, it's bad enough that on many days the people of New Delhi cannot even make out their landmark buildings in the toxic fog. And the outline of Mao Zedong's enormous portrait in Tiananmen Square is only visible within a few yards of it. A wake-up call is desperately needed. 4
1 David Olive, "In China, India, pollution is price of growth," Toronto Star (January 2. 2016): B2
2 Ibid
3 Ibid
4 Ibid
