BEIJING, Aug. 25 — No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.
China’s industrial growth depends on coal, plentiful but polluting, from coal mines like this one in Shaanxi Province behind a village store.
But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents.
Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.
Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.
China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source.
“It is a very awkward situation for the country because our greatest achievement is also our biggest burden,” says Wang Jinnan, one of China’s leading environmental researchers. “There is pressure for change, but many people refuse to accept that we need a new approach so soon.”
China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
WASHINGTON — The United States lost a years-long battle when Russia delivered nuclear fuel on Monday for an Iranian power plant that is at the center of an international dispute over Iran's nuclear program. Iran, for its part, rejected the idea that the delivery might mean it no longer needed to do its own uranium enrichment to make fuel, citing work on a second power plant.
In announcing that it has delivered the first fuel shipment to the power plant at Bushehr in southern Iran, Russian officials said that the fuel would be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency while it is in Iran, and that the Iranian government had given guarantees that the fuel would be only be used for the power plant.
The Bush administration, for its part, took pains not to publicly criticize the Russian move, and said that the fuel delivery means Iran should suspend its nuclear enrichment program. “If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there’s no need for them to learn how to enrich,” President Bush told reporters on Monday.
“There is no doubt that Russia and the rest of the world want to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” a White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said. “And today’s announcement provides one more avenue for the Iranians to make a strategic choice to suspend enrichment.”
But Iran said that it needed to enrich uranium for another new nuclear power plant in the south of the country. That announcement came through the Fars news service.
Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran’s Atomic Organization, said that Iran needs to produce fuel for a second plant under construction. “We are building a 360-megawatt indigenous power plant in Darkhovin,” Mr. Aghazadeh said.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House must release its visitor logs and cannot hide behind a shield of privilege, a federal judge ruled Monday. The Bush administration has resisted public disclosure while it fights a lawsuit over alleged political influence by conservative Christian leaders.
The Bush administration has been fighting the release of White House visitor logs.
U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth concluded the information is part of the public record and is subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act as "agency records."
"Because the Secret Service creates, uses and relies on, and stores visitor records, they are under its control," said Lamberth.
He ordered the Secret Service to produce records within 20 days.
The White House claimed exclusive control of the documents, subject to the complete discretion of the president over their release.
Secret Service records have been an important tool for advocacy groups and members of Congress seeking information on the inner workings of the executive branch.
Congressional investigators used the records a decade ago in their investigations of the various Whitewater scandals involving President Clinton and his associates, as well as allegations of influence peddling by the Clinton campaign in the 1996 elections.
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