Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
If only . . . If only America could be China for a day—just one day.
Just one day!
. . . [A]s far as I'm concerned, China's system of government is inferior to ours
in every respect—except one. h at is the ability of China's current generation
of leaders—if they want—to cut through all their legacy industries, all the
pleading special interests, all the bureaucratic obstacles, all the worries of
voter backlash, and simply order top-down the sweeping changes in prices,
regulations, standards, education, and infrastructure that refl ect China's
long-term strategic national interests—changes that would normally take
Western democracies years or decades to debate and implement. . . . What
would be so bad? China? Just for one short day?
3
Friedman admires the increasing attention that the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) has paid to environmental industries, particularly the 2004-
2006 project known as “Green GDP.” h is project was an eff ort to create an
environmental yardstick for project evaluation and to recalculate gross
domestic product to refl ect the cost of pollution. Friedman writes, “h is
could be the greatest show on earth.”
4
He exemplifi es the Western fascina-
tion with the “good” side of China's political authoritarianism: admiration of
its ability to implement sensible environmental policy by fi at, with no con-
sultation with communities or process to hold up benefi cial environmental
policies, investments, and practices. He's right; Green GDP
would
have been
a big deal if it hadn't been almost immediately scrapped as a political night-
mare (adjusting for pollution reduced red-hot growth rates in some prov-
inces by 3 percent).
5
I call Friedman's attitude “eco-authoritarianism,” and it is a highly
developed form of eco-desire. Western environmentalists can be captured
by this eco-desire, convinced that the ecological ends justify the authoritar-
ian means. But aren't environmental problems and solutions supposed to
transcend nations? After all, pollution from Asia, particularly from China,
moves, often across epic distances, traveling across the Pacifi c Ocean to the
western United States. On some days, a third of the air pollution over Los
