Alex Knapp at OTB this morning, [1] notes that China’s pollution situation isn’t good [2]:
China’s massive Yangtze river, a lifeline for tens of millions of people, is seriously polluted and the damage is almost irreversible, a state-run newspaper said Monday.
More than 370 miles of the river are in critical condition and almost 30 percent of its major tributaries are seriously polluted, the China Daily said, citing a report by the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The pollution, along with damming and heavy use of boats, has caused a sharp decline in aquatic life along the Yangtze.
The report said the annual harvest of aquatic products from the river has dropped from 427,000 tons in the 1950s to about 100,000 tons in the 1990s.
“The impact of human activities on the Yangtze water ecology is largely irreversible,” Yang Guishan, a researcher at the institute, was quoted as saying.
Alex notes, correctly:
You have to wonder that if this is the extent of the damage that the Party-controlled media is willing to report, how bad must the damage really be?
To this, I would add, that we saw similar problems in the old Soviet Union . They, too, were quite reluctant about revealing the problems that they were having, environmentally speaking. For all that the enviro-whackos in this country tend to lean socialist, I have to wonder if they’re ready to acknowledge this evidence, or if they’ll play the Soviet, (and apparently, Chinese) ploy of simply pretending these problems don’t exist.
(Edit:Bit, repaired link)