The Pollution induced death of the Yangtze River

Quotes taken from:

WWF Says Pollution, Dams Threaten Rivers

China is already suffering from serious water shortages and desertification of certain regions. These quotes give a little flavour of the problems caused by China's break neck growth.

The Yangtze River gets more than half of China's industrial waste and sewage.

In China, pollution in the main stem of the Yangtze River has increased by more than 70 percent over the last 50 years. Almost half of the country's industrial waste and sewage is discharged in the river, the report said.

Garbage heaps, pig waste and discharge from factories, hospitals and mines -- possibly including radioactive waste -- lie at the bottom of the reservoir at the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project, the WFF said.

We will post regualary on the impact of economic growth on China's environment. For numerous articles on this topic see the China category on "Globalisation and the Envrionment blog".

Breaking Environmental news:

US's Paulson Sees More China Environment Talks

LIMA - US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said on Wednesday discussions about ways to improve China's environment will become a more prominent part of his US-China "strategic economic dialogue".


Paulson told reporters on a visit to Peru that a key focus for such discussions is clean coal technology that could help slow the rapid growth of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions from China's power generation sector.

"This is a key part of our dialogue and I think it will be increasingly clear to you," Paulson said.

The dialogue was launched in December to bring together top US and Chinese economic and finance officials, partly as a means to persuade Beijing to be more flexible in the valuation of its currency, the yuan .

But Paulson has also used the dialogue as a forum for promoting liberalization of China's financial services sector to open it to more foreign competition.

He said China in 2009 will produce more greenhouse gas and carbon emissions than any other economy and is the only one where the growth in such emissions is exceeding the nation's overall economic growth. Much of that is due to coal-burning power plants.

US President George W. Bush has taken a particular interest in improving the health of China's environment.

"Whenever I talk with him about the strategic economic dialogue in China, he pushes me pretty hard in terms of getting some results there (on the environment)," he said.

But Paulson also said that economic growth, globally, was important to sustaining the environment. Poorer countries that fall on hard times economically tend to put more pressure on their environments, he said.