An Ugly Confluence

Governments have particularly nasty habits of lying and hiding behind official powers under the guise of doing their jobs. They make up words that give constituents relief – like “clean coal” – which are nothing more than sugar-coating mendacity. Shoving coal effluents into the earth for future generations to deal with doesn’t “clean” coal; it hides the problem for a while. And making the political machine look good in the short term by creating problems for generations to come is standard operating procedure, especially when growth is the expediency. Let the next administration deal with it. Or the next. And the easiest short-term sacrificial lamb has been the environment.

According to a recent report, global temperatures are the highest in four thousand years. The study was incredibly rigorous. “In the new research…. [published] in the journal Science, Shaun Marcott, an earth scientist at Oregon State University, and his colleagues compiled the most meticulous reconstruction yet of global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, virtually the entire Holocene.” New York Times, March 7^th. Wow!

The problem is that when the consequences are finally bad enough to draw massive attention to the dangers, screams for making it right, the solutions are often unsolvable or at best, morbidly difficult to achieve. We all know the big picture of our having ignored (and continuing to ignore) the consequences of global climate change and are watching as nature storm-surges, tornadoes, flood and then desiccate our lands, harming people, livestock and crops forever. We’ve taken in the “view” of Beijing in the beauty of a sunny day, watching people wearing breathing masks and not being able to see more than a hundred feet in any direction because of air pollution that cannot be measured as it pins the needle of the devices designed to monitor the air “quality.”

But what happens when you aggregate an overflowing but thirsty population, many years of punishing drought that has drained water supplies to critical levels and prioritized industrial production with cost-saving manufacturing that deals with waste by dumping it untreated into the local waterways? My description probably says more than enough, but this is the story of most of modern China, particularly in the parched northern regions. The specifics are not for the faint of heart.

Start with a notion of scope, hundreds of factories along a typical PRC river, many sucking thousands of tons of water per hour and while they are supposed to treat the resulting effluents before discharging the resulting “treated” waste back into the flowing water supplies, spills are more the rule than the exception. And if Party officials can ignore the air quality of the city from which they administer the nation, think of how unimportant water quality in the surrounding area must be to them. So let me tell you a story that is repeated almost every day all across the Peoples Republic of China.

Changzhi is an urban administrative district a couple of hundred miles south of Beijing. Though founded millennia ago in pre-dynastic China, it got its name – meaning long-term peace and stability – in the Ming Dynasty and is today home to over 3.2 million residents. Like so many in the PRC, the city generates electrical power primarily from coal-fired plants along the local river and is into some heavy manufacturing as well. You don’t read about it, unless you prize their famous donkey-meat delicacies, but when it does make the headlines, it generally isn’t for any particularly good reason. Like the almost unreported spill of many tons of toxic effluent into the river by theTianji Coal Chemical Industry Group, a factory which, among other products, produces fertilizer.

Local residents were warned that a spill on December 31^st from this fertilizer plant had taken place, and officials were forced to “shut off the tap water, which sent residents into a scramble for bottled water. In the countryside, officials also told farmers not to graze their livestock near the river… The spill…affected at least 28 villages and a handful of cities of more than one million people, including Handan. Officials here were irate that their counterparts in Changzhi, where the polluting factory was located, had delayed reporting the spill for five days…

“The results of an official investigation into the Tianji spill were announced on Feb. 20 by Xinhua, the state news agency, which reported that a faulty hose had resulted in the leakage of about 39 tons of aniline, a potential carcinogen, from the fertilizer factory. Thirty tons were contained by a reservoir, but nearly nine tons leaked into the Zhuozhang River, which feeds into the Zhang River that runs to Hebei Province, where Handan is, and Henan Province. The Xinhua report said 39 people had been punished, including Zhang Bao, the mayor of Changzhi, who was removed from his post. But the party chief, Tian Xirong, the city’s top authority, was recently promoted to deputy director of the provincial Parliament.

“Some critics say officials may be slow to divulge information because the acting governor of Shanxi Province, where Changzhi is, is Li Xiaopeng, the ‘princeling’ son of Li Peng, a powerful Communist Party elder. At a news conference in January after news of the spill had emerged, the younger Mr. Li urged officials to make safety a top priority…

“The conflict over the Changzhi spill has drawn attention to the growing problems with water use and pollution in northern China. The region, which has suffered from a drought for decades, is grappling with how industrial companies should operate along rivers. Local officials are shielding polluting companies and covering up environmental degradation, say environmentalists.” New York Times, March 5^th.  

With vast portions of inland and western China still not enjoying the prosperity of the coastal and southern parts of the country, there is a strong national priority to extend growth and prosperity to regions that have heretofore missed the boat. But with people suffering and clearly very angry at a government that has allowed such environmental toxicity to impact their health and shorten their lives, Xi Jinping’s newly installed administration knows that the problem cannot be shoved under the rug anymore. But how China can insure the growth she craves while cutting back on killer pollution generates a set of issues for which no clear answers exist. Can China slow growth to grapple with these life-threatening issues, or is growth destined to continue its environmental damage, spilling over not just in China but into the air and water all over the earth?

And before we cast disparaging eyes at China, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why were are prioritizing using our coal resources to manage our own growth ambitions or why we allow companies who use fracking technologies to extract fossil fuels (like natural gas) from being responsible for or even fully disclosing the chemicals they insert deep into the environment to achieve their goals? “In a typical fracking job, water blended with lesser volumes of sand and chemicals is pumped down a well to release oil or gas trapped in the pores of hard rock. The use of chemicals has stirred fears of spills and contamination, especially because companies keep some of the chemicals secret.” NY Times. Premature death, lingering illnesses and a degraded quality of life are the cost of ignoring these issues and lying to ourselves… and then there are the macro-issues of climate change.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am ashamed at the world I have left for my son and the subsequent generations of Dekoms to follow.