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Public needs to know true costs to environment
By Wan Lixin |
August 4, 2012, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE past decade has been an age of soaring growth for China.
As growth comes into its own, it is glorified, admired, recklessly pursued, and ruthlessly maintained.
In an age of crass materialism based on cutthroat competition, the magic growth figure exemplifies something of rarefied purity and ethereal beauty.
Although real incentives for official obsession with this economic metric can be more individualized, one of the widely advertised reasons for growth promotion is its potential for creating jobs, and with jobs, stability.
Similarly as growth and employment have been quantified, some innovative cities are now taking steps to index "social stability."
In theory, high growth leads to high employment, which then leads to high stability.
In reality, officials tend to go for growth in spite of stability.
Take the many confrontations between residents who refuse to be relocated for GDP-boosting projects, and local governments that insist on evicting them.
The latest instance is the confrontation last weekend in Qidong, Jiangsu Province, between the local government which approved the building of a 110 km pipeline to dump waste water from a US$1.95 billion Japanese-invested paper mill, to the sea, and angry residents who protested in fear of pollution.
The crisis was defused only when beleaguered officials announced on the spot their decision to halt the project permanently.
While some media commentaries call this a win-win solution and the triumph of reason, it is thought-provoking why and how a local government can kick off a project of this magnitude without properly consulting the public.
This instance also provides a new perspective in discussing "Risk and Reason: Safety, Law and the Environment," by Cass R. Sunstein.
Sunstein writes that people act irrationally and tend to over-react to minuscule risks and ignore massive risks.
Instead of considering probabilities, people see events as more probable if they can recall occurrences and as less probable if they can't, in a phenomenon psychologists call "availability heuristic."
The author also believes that social networks can magnify the fear of low-likelihood events and minimize the role of reason in risk-assessment.
Public hysteria about risk has costly consequences.
Misunderstandings about risk have brought down whole industries, throwing thousands of people out of work, the author points out.
Unfortunately, much of Sustein's analysis does not apply in the Qidong case.
In the Qidong incident, anyone familiar with the situation would agree that the real challenge in promoting social harmony is for the local government to win people's trust.
For that to happen, the local government needs to create a project approval mechanism that promises to take into consideration prevailing public sentiments about that project.
The locals' readiness to take to the streets to air their discontent speak volumes for the amount of distrust they felt about their representation in public decision-making.
There might be many cases of irrational exuberance or fears of risks that turn out to be minuscule, but the minimal risk assumption simply cannot apply here.
Costs of growth
Paper making is known to be one of the most polluting industries on earth, and the mulled waste water project has the capacity of transporting and discharging 600,000 tons of waste water to the sea - every day.
The risk for a waste water pipeline to go through one of the most heavily populated areas in coastal China cannot be minuscule.
What is needed here is common sense, rather than any official assessment results.
Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants were all deemed highly reliable before their explosions and meltdowns.
The much touted "long-range economic impact" mentioned favorably in the book is exactly the excuse favored by big interests and pro-growth policy makers.
The general environmental degradation we see today proves that any growth extracted at the expense of environment would be too costly for the long term.
Officials would generally proceed with any such projects because the party that pays the costs - the people and the environment - and the party that reaps the benefits are not necessarily one and the same.
While the coal bosses are snapping up LV bags in Paris with their ill-gotten fortune, villagers in the coal-rich areas are coping with air and water pollution, soil erosion and surface subsidence for generations to come.
When policy makers talk about vaunted growth, they need to make clear who benefits from the growth and at whose expense it's extracted.
It does not take sophisticated cost-benefit analysis for the author to realize the environmental mess we are in.
Common sense would suffice.
For too long, arcane economic metrics and parameters have blinded the people to things vital to their wellbeing: clean air and water.
The author should realize that no risk can be minuscule when it comes to the environment.
As growth comes into its own, it is glorified, admired, recklessly pursued, and ruthlessly maintained.
In an age of crass materialism based on cutthroat competition, the magic growth figure exemplifies something of rarefied purity and ethereal beauty.
Although real incentives for official obsession with this economic metric can be more individualized, one of the widely advertised reasons for growth promotion is its potential for creating jobs, and with jobs, stability.
Similarly as growth and employment have been quantified, some innovative cities are now taking steps to index "social stability."
In theory, high growth leads to high employment, which then leads to high stability.
In reality, officials tend to go for growth in spite of stability.
Take the many confrontations between residents who refuse to be relocated for GDP-boosting projects, and local governments that insist on evicting them.
The latest instance is the confrontation last weekend in Qidong, Jiangsu Province, between the local government which approved the building of a 110 km pipeline to dump waste water from a US$1.95 billion Japanese-invested paper mill, to the sea, and angry residents who protested in fear of pollution.
The crisis was defused only when beleaguered officials announced on the spot their decision to halt the project permanently.
While some media commentaries call this a win-win solution and the triumph of reason, it is thought-provoking why and how a local government can kick off a project of this magnitude without properly consulting the public.
This instance also provides a new perspective in discussing "Risk and Reason: Safety, Law and the Environment," by Cass R. Sunstein.
Sunstein writes that people act irrationally and tend to over-react to minuscule risks and ignore massive risks.
Instead of considering probabilities, people see events as more probable if they can recall occurrences and as less probable if they can't, in a phenomenon psychologists call "availability heuristic."
The author also believes that social networks can magnify the fear of low-likelihood events and minimize the role of reason in risk-assessment.
Public hysteria about risk has costly consequences.
Misunderstandings about risk have brought down whole industries, throwing thousands of people out of work, the author points out.
Unfortunately, much of Sustein's analysis does not apply in the Qidong case.
In the Qidong incident, anyone familiar with the situation would agree that the real challenge in promoting social harmony is for the local government to win people's trust.
For that to happen, the local government needs to create a project approval mechanism that promises to take into consideration prevailing public sentiments about that project.
The locals' readiness to take to the streets to air their discontent speak volumes for the amount of distrust they felt about their representation in public decision-making.
There might be many cases of irrational exuberance or fears of risks that turn out to be minuscule, but the minimal risk assumption simply cannot apply here.
Costs of growth
Paper making is known to be one of the most polluting industries on earth, and the mulled waste water project has the capacity of transporting and discharging 600,000 tons of waste water to the sea - every day.
The risk for a waste water pipeline to go through one of the most heavily populated areas in coastal China cannot be minuscule.
What is needed here is common sense, rather than any official assessment results.
Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants were all deemed highly reliable before their explosions and meltdowns.
The much touted "long-range economic impact" mentioned favorably in the book is exactly the excuse favored by big interests and pro-growth policy makers.
The general environmental degradation we see today proves that any growth extracted at the expense of environment would be too costly for the long term.
Officials would generally proceed with any such projects because the party that pays the costs - the people and the environment - and the party that reaps the benefits are not necessarily one and the same.
While the coal bosses are snapping up LV bags in Paris with their ill-gotten fortune, villagers in the coal-rich areas are coping with air and water pollution, soil erosion and surface subsidence for generations to come.
When policy makers talk about vaunted growth, they need to make clear who benefits from the growth and at whose expense it's extracted.
It does not take sophisticated cost-benefit analysis for the author to realize the environmental mess we are in.
Common sense would suffice.
For too long, arcane economic metrics and parameters have blinded the people to things vital to their wellbeing: clean air and water.
The author should realize that no risk can be minuscule when it comes to the environment.
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