The China Syndrome
By Coco Tanaka
All is right with the world.
Ha! Weren’t expecting that, were you? No doom and gloom, no carcinogenic dildos, no ranting about how the 5.8 quake was just prologue to The Rapture, no whining about how god-awful the human race has been for the planet. The only races I care about are going down now in the tiny parish of Beijing, where the 29th Olympiad is uniting the world’s most ass-kicking HGH-free athletes. And in the “one world, one dream” spirit of the special family-reunion feelings that fill my heart just once every four years (because the Winter Olympics are lame), I request a 16-day moratorium on China-bashing, at least where their crap environmental record is concerned.
This will be difficult for diehard greenies, to whom the Chinese population may as well be a vast conspiracy of baby-seal-clubbers, their exhaustively documented mass consumption all the more irritating because they stay so thin. And no, their eco-record hasn’t exactly been Grist List material. Though their ecological footprint is below the per capita world average, China is the world’s largest CO2 offender, having nearly doubled its emissions in the last decade. They use 15 percent of the planet’s resources, make half the world’s cement and build two coal-fired generators a week. Breathing in Beijing is roughly equivalent to sucking on a Harley exhaust pipe.
Ordinarily, I’d be decrying these “Green Games” as anything but. I’d question the appropriateness of granting the honor of hosting Heracles’s celebration of all things swifter, higher, and stronger to a country so insensitive to its impact. But here’s the thing: I think they really are trying. One-third of China’s emissions are thanks to manufacturing exports (like, say, your Nikes, or my new MacBook), their recycling businesses are among the world’s largest, and they deployed more wind turbines than any other country last year. Also, Michael Phelps might win eight freaking gold medals. Eight! So, because I have a fiery Olympic fever, part of me – the part that prioritizes superhuman feats of athletic prowess over the fate of mankind – is cutting Beijing some slack.
The world did us such a favor 24 years ago, when all eyes were on the sickeningly unyielding first-stage haze threatening the ’84 Los Angeles Games. Civic leaders took the same steps that Beijing is now taking to a much higher degree: asking factories to cut production (forcing tens of thousands of workers to go on compulsory vacation with reduced pay, by the way), shifting commercial traffic to off-peak hours or eliminating it altogether, and prematurely promising the rest of the world that all was peachy keen. Beijing has the hard luck of hosting the Olympics at a time when eco-insensitivity is the hot new sin. Every athlete that shows up wearing a gas mask or crimson contact lenses is one more blow to the city’s literally murky image.
Clearing the air has been anything but simple, despite China’s spending $17 billion on antipollution measures in recent years. Greenpeace reported that the smog level is still twice as high in the city as the maximum recommended by the World Health Organization – the grime blanketing the Olympic stadiums is what depression would look like if it were weather. The city of 17 million strong went into emergency mode two weeks prior to kickoff, yanking half its cars off the roads, closing down factories, opening new subway lines, hiking up gas prices, and discounting mass transit tickets. Their public transport puts most U.S. cities’ to shame.
Beijing has even outlawed smoking in public areas, fining the bejesus out of the rebels who insist on lighting up. Granted, in the face of the worst air quality this side of a gas chamber, banning smoking to ease Beijing pollution is like Chili’s refusing to serve ranch dressing with an Awesome Blossom – it might be less deadly, but death will still follow. Anyway, it’s a step in the right direction, and that’s not the only upside: Toxicologists are flocking to the capital to test just how much we can change air quality, as well as the impact of pollution on a baby’s lungs and the economic costs of paralyzing industry. Those toxicologists have all the fun.
After Aug. 24, I’m all for picking up where we left off on knocking China for its shoddy treatment of the planet. But until then, let’s call a onetime truce. I know I’ll shed a tear when that torch blazes up – a torch whose relay covered 85,000 miles, most of them on its own private jet, meaning that it spews about as much greenhouse gas as 311 Angelenos do in a year. That’s about twice the carbon footprint of the average Chinese national, by the way. So please, give Beijing a break. A little doom and gloom never killed anybody.
Published: 08/05/2008
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