Cleaning Up China

September 24
NYT Editorial

In 1991, Lawrence Summers — then the World Bank’s chief economist and later Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary — wrote a memo suggesting that the bank should encourage the world’s dirty industries to move to developing countries. The forgone earnings of workers sickened or killed by pollution would be lower in low-wage countries, he noted, while people in poor countries also cared less about a clean environment. “The economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable,” he wrote.

Mr. Summers later apologized, saying his words were “sardonic counterpoint,” meant to spur new thinking about the environment and development. In any case, the World Bank’s encouragement wasn’t needed. In the 16 years since, a large share of the world’s polluting industries have migrated to the largest low-wage country of all, China, helping to turn big swaths of its landscape into an environmental disaster zone.

China makes more than a third of the world’s steel, half of its cement, about a third of its aluminum. It also consumes more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. Its environmental degradation is a match for Dickens at his bleakest: airborne pollution causes more than 650,000 premature deaths a year.

The problem doesn’t stay there. China is about to surpass, or has already surpassed, the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

China’s government bears primary responsibility for failing to address the devastating environmental consequences of its breakneck growth. Industrialized countries, whose companies and consumers have benefited from China’s cheap labor and polluting industries, also bear responsibility and must work to fix this mess.

Beijing has begun to realize that its current path is not cost-free. A study commissioned by the government conservatively estimated that costs imposed by environmental degradation added up to 3 percent of G.D.P. in 2004. The government has since set targets to reduce energy use and cut emissions. China’s authoritarian leaders, however, are fearful of anything that might require slower growth and have strangled most domestic debate about the environmental disaster. After the first report they dropped the effort to measure pollution’s economic impact, and the targets are unlikely to be met.

Beijing could start investing some of the hundreds of billions of dollars China earns on exports in social and environmental programs at home. Foreign companies could help by requiring their suppliers in China to adopt best environmental practices. Western governments can also help by explaining how pollution could threaten both China’s growth and social stability — the two things its authoritarian leaders worry about most.

Perhaps the most important thing the United States could do is to set a strong international example, by dealing with its own environmental deficit. Instead, the Bush administration has been hiding behind China’s recalcitrance — allowing China to do the same.