China culls plastic but kills rainforests

The lets wait for chaos while we make some more cash brigade always point to China. 'China must act first', 'Chinese pollution will wipe out our cuts so lets do fuck all about climate change'. 'We industrialised first...they can pick up the bill'.


I guess some people in China who also like cash and don't care about the chaos make similar claims about Britain, the US and the rest of world.

The green battles in China are the ones to watch, so I am pleased they are going to crack down on plastic bags:

The ubiquitous plastic bag, found floating in the murk of the Yangtze river, scattered across tourist spots and abandoned in numbers on every street, is symptomatic of wider problems in China. With hundreds of millions of urban residents enjoying the fruits of consumerism, the government is struggling to bring a sense of the environmental costs of breakneck economic growth. It has tried to rein in industrial polluters by cutting off credit, suspending licences and jailing repeat offenders, but officials bemoan the failure of ordinary people to be green.
Pan Yue, the crusading deputy director of China's state environmental protection administration, has acknowledged that public awareness of the problem remains poor: using three layers of plastic to package eggs not only connotes hygiene in a food industry dogged by safety scandals, but also appeals to a sense of luxury.

From an excellent Guardian article here


However if they keep consuming they are going to wipe out the forests of Asia just as surely as a fleet of biofuel boats:

Among China's leading wood importers, Thailand and Philippines have already been stripped of their natural forests, while Indonesia and Burma are projected to lose theirs within a decade. Papua New Guinea's will succumb within 16 years, and the vast forests of the Russian Far East will survive no more than two decades.

Even so, Washington, D.C.-based Forest Trends estimates China's wood imports will probably double within 10 years, with manufacturers already developing replacement sources in Africa.

South America's forests are also threatened, but for a different reason: China's growing consumption of pork and chicken is fed by soybeans grown on newly cleared Amazonian land. By one estimate, 30 percent of the jungle could eventually be transformed into soybean fields.

Plenty of green activity though in China, the classic case is that of peasants fighting land enclosure and challenging polluting development....protesters using a text campaign seem to have prevented the construction of a polluting power plant click here



Green protest is everywhere and needs to be everywhere!