Economy or Environment?

It took awhile for the Industrial Revolution to transform the world. That industrial evolution succeeded in providing for those living in developing economies a transformative social change, where gradually equality of opportunity to own needed elementary goods and desirable objects that were once the purview of the aristocracy over time became available to all.

The revolutionary change in industrialization did quite a number of things; it provided employment, opportunities for entrepreneurship as never before, and made once-scarce commodities so relatively large in numbers of availability and so relatively modest in price that the separation between the wealthy and modestly-achieving wage-earners narrowed appreciably. What it also did was to cast a lingering pall of dirty air over the environment where coal was being fired to produce energy to enable manufacturing during the industrial revolution.

James Watt: Scottish inventor James Watt's improvements to the steam engine were instrumental during the Industrial Revolution. (Photo Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS)

In Europe and North America broadly speaking, those opportunities accelerated, the drive for new energy sources with water-power, natural gas and petroleum led to more manufacturing and more acquisitions and a wealthier society.

Africa and Asia were a lot slower to catch the industrialization train that huffed and puffed through the more advanced countries of the world, and while Africa is running after that train, Asia has stopped the train and informed the conductor that henceforth it would become mandatory that it stop there, first and foremost because it was the the new manufacturing venue.

The "Father of the Railways": In the 1820s, English engineer George Stephenson built the world's first steam-powered public railway line. (Photo Credit: Adam Woolfitt/CORBIS)

In a far shorter time than it took Europe and North America to harness the promise of the Industrial Revolution, China took the grips of opportunity and in 35 years eclipsed all their manufacturing to produce cheaper and quite desirable products, even those designed with a shorter life through built-in obsolescence, ensuring that purchases themselves accelerate and never quite stop, since items do, of course wear out and must be replaced.

China's dependence on energy sources (and raw materials) makes it a voracious consumer of fossil fuels to keep growing its enormous appetite for production and export, while at the same time hauling its immense 1.3-billion population out of once-endemic poverty.

China was enchanted and even mesmerized, brought to full attention by the success of Hong Kong as a British protectorate which embraced the Western free enterprise system and grew its economy like nothing China had ever imagined possible. When China signed the agreement with Britain that released Hong Kong back to its rightful geographic allegiance, Hong Kong's capitalist system was guaranteed for 50 years. And inspired by Hong Kong's raging success, China did the practical thing, holding on to its system of government, but relaxing it sufficiently to embrace economic opportunities by seeking to emulate its special 'province' for whom investment and free trade was a byword of world enterprise.

And so, how's China doing? It welcomed the world to have a look around when it hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics, wowing the world with the sumptuous splendour and glitz of the fireworks that it had itself gifted to the world along with gunpowder. Embarrassed by its perpetual smog, it ordered factories to shut down operations in Beijing temporarily to clear the air.

Now, it not so much initiates new discoveries as copies the patents and enterprise of other countries' enterprising inventors and entrepreneurial class. But it has given itself a new lease on life, as it were. Greater numbers of its population are gainfully employed, the standard of living has skyrocketed, and Chinese newly-acquired wealth has permitted more Chinese than ever to see the world.

When they do go abroad as tourists they're able to breathe clean air, for one thing, temporary as that is. They get the idea that other countries exercise far more stringent laws on industrial effluent and its disposal, and the responsibility of governments to ensure that manufacturers clean up their messes rather than dump them into area rivers, polluting and poisoning fish and the people who eat them, farm animals and the people who raise them.

Hungry for all kinds of energy it imports from sources abroad, the Chinese still avidly mine the Earth's crust for coal, and are 70%-dependent on coal; dirty coal at that; for their energy needs. Chimney stacks proliferate in China's unbelievable number of mega-metropolises. And the consequences? Pollution is endemic. The skies are perpetually grey; the sun rarely manages to shine its beneficent gold illumination over Chinese towns, villages, farmlands, cities.

Traffic is congested not only because crowded city-dwellers can increasingly afford to own vehicles, but because the drivers of those vehicles are unable to proceed with safety when they cannot even see traffic signals clouded behind masses of environment-circulating particulate matter.



China, through determination, perseverance, cleverness and enterprise, has managed to surmount all the difficulties leading to economic success. It represents a huge success story. It is breathing hot down the neck of the United States as the number one world representative of political power and economic clout. And its people crowd hospitals, suffering from chronic asthma, congested lungs, and lung cancer; an eight-year-old child was recently diagnosed with lung cancer, resulting from constant exposure to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at catastrophic levels.

What price success?