01/12/2024 06:27:00 PM 
Some of the problems highlighted in the article include:
Soil Erosion
" American environmentalist Lester Brown, a longtime student of China, says that there are 339 million goats and sheep in the country, compared with seven million in the United States. "I've been in areas where the farmers have to put human clothes on their mohair goats to keep them from grazing one another", he told me. "There's nothing to eat". Without roots to hold the soil, much of the countryside has simply turned to sand."
Lack of water
"China's north is simply parched. As the flow of the Chao and other rivers has been siphoned off by the cities growing alongside them, Beijing has been drawing more and more of its own water from an underground aquifer - half or more of the water it uses comes from underground, and as a result the water table is sinking by meters every year. "Some northern cities will simply be out of water in eight or ten years", Ma Jun, author of China's Water Crisis, the one great environmental book China has yet produced, told me over lunch in Beijing one day. The earth subsides into sinkholes in dozens of places every year now, and fissures yards wide suddenly appear like earthquake faults."
Coal Pollution
"In 2004, China added fifty billion watts of generating capacity to its electric grid. In 2005, it will have added another 65 billion watts. You can do the math any number of ways - they're adding two New England's to their electric system annually, or half of India, or a Brazil. No power grid on earth has ever grown anywhere near that fast. Almost all of the new power comes from coal, which China has in cheap abundance; Party officials have announced ambitious plans to build two nuclear reactors every year until 2020, but even if they manage to pull it off, only about four percent of their electricity will come from atomic reactors. Essentially, China is going to burn coal - it will have passed the two-billion-ton mark this year."
Everyone recognizes the power of China as an economic powerhouse, but this is not without consequences. The Chinese are not blind to the problem and are creating masses of initiatives to try and combat the impact like tree-planting and the building of sustainable cities.
Because of this, China is likely to emerge as a leader in environmental technology, perhaps even in hybrid cars. However, this might not be without a significant cost, the overarching question is will China's environmental problems simply make its own growth targets unattainable and knock the country off its trajectory?
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