Dirty joke

The Economist on China's pollution:

...progress on pollution is unlikely to be as rapid or uniform as the government and environmentalists desire.

Nor should it necessarily be. China's need to lift so many people out of poverty (the country's average annual income per head has only just breached $1,000), holds the edge over long-term considerations like sustainable development. The priorities of environmental activists, both foreign and Chinese, almost never reflect this. Greenpeace lobbies for China to invest in wind farms, an unrealistic answer to the country's power needs, while environmentalists from rich countries naively tell aspiring Chinese to eschew their new cars and air-conditioners...

Per head, China's water resources are among the lowest in the world and concentrated in the south, so that the north and west experience regular droughts. Inadequate investments in supply and treatment infrastructure means that even where water is not scarce, it is rarely clean. Around half the population, or 600m people, have water supplies that are contaminated by animal and human waste...

...According to the World Bank, China has 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities. Estimates suggest that 300,000 people a year die prematurely from respiratory diseases.

The main reason is that around 70% of China's mushrooming energy needs are supplied by coal-fired power stations, compared with 50% in America. Combined with the still widespread use of coal burners to heat homes, China has the world's highest emissions of sulphur dioxide and a quarter of the country endures acid rain. In 2002, SEPA found that the air quality in almost two-thirds of 300 cities it tested failed World Health Organisation standards—yet emissions from rocketing car ownership are only just becoming an issue. Hopes that China will "leapfrog" the West with super-green cars are naive, since dirty fuel messes up clean engines and the high cost of new cars keeps old ones on the road. Sun Jian, the second-ranking official at Shanghai's environmental protection bureau, estimates that 70% of Shanghai's 1m cars do not even reach the oldest European emission standards.

So those Tough Fuel Economy Standards won't make that much difference.

"The legacy of the old, centrally planned economy is that electricity and water are treated as free goods or goods to be provided at minimal cost," says the [Asian Development Bank's Bruce Murray]. Since the utilities cannot pass on the costs of cleaner water or lower power-station emissions to consumers, they fight any drive for higher standards and conservation tooth and nail. Even the central government is unwilling to impose price rises in basic services that could spark public unrest.

Water is an example. While customer tariffs have been raised in showcase cities, such as Beijing and Dalian in the north-east, water remains stunningly cheap in China. According to the World Bank, water for agriculture, which makes up three-quarters of the total used, is priced at 0.03 yuan (0.4 cents) per cubic metre, or about 40% of cost. More than half is lost in leaky irrigation systems. Meanwhile, the cost of more modern services, such as Guangzhou's solid-waste disposal, is entirely borne by the government.