China - green leader???

Green GPD - taking environmental damage into account when measuring economic growth - has for a long time been a pet cause of the environmentalist fringe (including adbusters, and almost nobody else. Recently, the Chinese government announced that green GDP calcultations would be required of an initial 10 provinces, and eventually of the entire country. Looking out my window, it's not hard to see where the urgency behind this initiative comes from. Beijing is coloured, as it is most days, a foggy poluted gray. There are areas in China where the child mortality rate approaches 50% due to dioxine poisoning in the water. China's impressive and unprecedented economic growth has been accompanied by an equally unprecedented amount of envioronmental destruction. It's perhaps one of the few benefits of one-party rule, or perhaps the millenia-long solid administrative tradition of this country, that when China moves - it moves decisively. When the Beijing government finally admitted to the SARS problem, it spent less than a week building an entirely new hospital with room for 1000 SARS patients. Such a feat would simply not have been possible in the West. The Green GDP initiative is even more significant in China than it would have been in a Western country. GDP growth is the single most important measurement in the meritocracry of the Communist Party. Promotions are generally given to officials who can show impressive increases in the GDP of their village / county / city / province. The switch to green GDP implies a paradigmatic change in the entire mind-set and focus of the Chinese Communist Party. Green GDP has it's difficulties , but despite those the very principle of applying green GDP will likely leed to great improvements in the Chinese governments handling of the environment. Recently, for example, the central government halted the construction of 32 out of 35 new power plants - since provincial governments had failed to sufficiently account for the environmental impact of these. The radical changes that Western environmentalists desire, such as a shift away from carbon-based fuels in cars and power plants, may seem utopian in the West but may conceivably become policy in China in the near future. The sheer power of China's administration can carry through such projects as the construction of a hydrogen fuel infrastructure far more rapidbly than any Western government. Hopefully, China's new policy will make some governments in the West re-think the way they measure the economic development of their own countries. And hopefully, China's next step will be to accede to the Kyoto protocol.