Chapter 9

Dragon on a Diet

In the spring of 2011 Old Zhang limped out of his ramshackle homestead, a long fishing pole in hand, just as he had nearly every morning of the past twenty years of his retirement. He picked his way down to the Nanpan River. Born and raised in Luliang County, Yunnan province, he had always had the Nanpan as a constant companion: as a child running along the shores of the mighty offshoot of Himalayan glaciers, shouting rudely at fishermen; then, as a husband and father, plying a fishing boat in the Nanpan’s swells. Over the last handful of years, though, along with some of his elderly neighbors, the Nanpan had passed away. Still, every day, Zhang went down to visit what remained of a reservoir of the once-mighty tributary. When he was younger the reservoir had held over more than 1.5 million cubic meters of water. Luliang had for decades been the province’s most water-rich plain, providing irrigation resources throughout the state. The only reminder there had once been a reservoir in Luliang were the small cigar-sized fish, flash-dried in the cakes of mud hardened by sun and wind.

Zhang now was no longer sure where the bank ended and the riverbed began. The entire area was terra-cotta red, the land so dried and cracked that spaces had opened up in the ground that could fit a big man’s hand, fingers splayed wide. Some crevasses ran as deep as a meter. The breadbasket of Yunnan Province had not seen rainfall for more than four months. Luliang had fallen on hard times. He knew from TV and from friends and neighbors that other parts of the country were in the same dire straight. Shandong province, in north China, was threatened with the greatest drought the region had seen in 200 years. Aggressive industrialization and urbanization in China was sapping the country dry.

After 2005 China’s dearth of water resources was set to derail all of the gains the country had made in its economic development since the early 1980s. Privatization of agriculture, just after the death of Mao Zedong in the late 1970s, saw an explosion of the agricultural use of water. Farmers were the first to realize the wealth born of entrepreneurship when the Communist Party grudgingly gave its stamp of approval to those first sprouts of enterprise. The trickle of enterprises became a flood of trade with the cities, based on a natural resource the Communist Party had not pinned to economic realities: the cost of water lost to indiscriminant waste.

On average, China has just one-third the water resources of other countries. Water availability in the nation, however, is unevenly distributed. While south China has just over half the population of the country, it has nearly 85 percent of the nation’s water resources. The south supports 40 percent of China’s croplands. The north, by contrast, has only about 15 percent of the country’s water, 55 percent of its population and 60 percent of its cropland.1 For instance, the citizens of the sea port city of Tianjin, which faces the Korean peninsula, can only provide its population of 10 million with one-tenth the amount of water of the average citizen in the world.2 The per capita share of water in Tianjin municipality in northern China is only one-10,000th of that in Tibet.3

To rectify what is at heart a systemic issue, the Chinese leadership is falling back on technology to address its shrinking water tables. The extinction of water in the country presents the single greatest threat to the country’s growth and stability. Aggressive urbanization of 20 percent of the world’s population and the development of mass consumerism, bolstered by globalization, are exacerbating the problem. To its credit, China’s leadership was not debating whether there was a water problem and where the fault lay and who was to pay the bill. Instead, the clique of technocrats swiftly took to engineering approaches to ensure the nation’s water security. Policy directives saw the greatest water works ever built diverting water from the water-rich south central part of the country to the city-provinces of Beijing and Tianjin in the arid north. Desalinization plants came online to supply much-needed water to municipalities. Local governments were also gradually raising water rates to reflect just how precious water had become in the country. Water use, however, is more nuanced than engineers and economists reckon.

Watergy

The leadership was not taking into account a simple, yet fundamental equation in addressing the nation’s increasingly dire water challenges: the relationship between water, energy, and food. The constraints on the relationship became more restrictive with high-speed urbanization. It takes relatively little energy to take the water from its source and use it to irrigate fields in a country in which clean, drinkable water is plentiful. Growing food, feeding livestock, quenching thirsts, washing clothes, and taking showers take relatively little energy. As fresh water becomes more difficult to find and extract and then to distribute, costs mount as the society needs to generate more energy to meet its needs. Requirements for water grow as the population increases and/or the society becomes richer. For example, urbanites eat more meat than their cousins in the countryside, and take more showers and drink more soft drinks than country folk. Analysts call the relationship between water, energy, and food “watergy.”

In 2004 China consumed eight times more water in generating 10,000 yuan (about US$1,500) of wealth than more advanced countries like the United States, and four times the global average. The country’s industrialization drive saw China using four times more water for every 10,000 yuan of value-added industrial output. During the early 2000s, factory products were mostly low-end commodities—sneakers, toys and textiles—while infrastructure projects like building bridges, roads, and high rises took up the simple majority of economic output. While modern economies in the West recycled as much as 85 percent of the water used for industry, China recycled as little as 60 to 65 percent of its industrial water.4 The most intense use of water for industrial purposes, however, laid in the production of energy.

Turning Water into Oil

The dearth of water for industrial use poses a huge problem for China’s energy generation sector. With about 70 percent of China’s electricity produced through the burning of coal, China will have to make crucial trade-offs in how it uses water in perpetually drought-stricken regions. In areas where coal mining is prevalent as well as in coal-burning plants, water is processed in abundance. In some instances, coal lays buried in deep-seated aquifers, from which the water needs to be pumped to enable the miners to do their job of clawing the coal out of the ground.5 Further, coal mining itself requires that each ton of coal extracted from the ground be washed with four- to five-cubic meters of water. Each year, China consumes 40 million cubic meters of water alone to wash the coal it exhumes. The waste water the process leaves behind is laced with poisonous heavy metals, salt, and sulfates.6

The copious, unregulated use of water in coal mining in China is resulting in ground water drying up and water tables dropping across the country. Water shortages are prevalent in the towns that rely on wells and ground water in their daily businesses. Land erosion and desiccated farmland are becoming an increasing problem. About 75 percent of the nearly 100 state-owned coal mines faced water shortages in 2008, with 40 percent saying they faced serious water shortages. Most dramatically hit have been the coal-mining centers of Shanxi, Shaanxi, and the western part of Inner Mongolia.7 Homes have slid into great sink holes that spontaneously appear. The shelves of earth that had been supporting the dwellings have been knocked away through the siphoning of water tables and hollowing of earth below.

In a well-meant but ecologically disastrous approach to alternative energy sources, Chinese coal companies in the mid-2000s developed coal-to-liquid (CTL) technologies. CTL is more popularly known as coal gasification. The technology turns coal into liquid either before or after mining. The liquid coal can then be refined into diesel fuel to run cars. Coal gasification can take three to five tons of coal to convert it to one ton of diesel for cars. The intention was to help China wean itself from oil imports.

China became a net importer of oil in 1993, after it was unable to produce more than 3 million barrels per day. The International Energy Agency projected in 2009 that China’s net oil imports would top 13 million barrels of oil a day by 2030, more than China’s total output in 2008.8 The primary cause for the dramatic leap in oil consumption in China was the country’s adoption of the automobile as a right of private consumption. China actively sought to develop its automobile industry and cultivate a strong urban consumer base from the early 2000s. For nearly ten years car sales grew by double-digits annually. Second to its explosive automobile market was a domestic petrochemical industry deeply invested in the refinement of oil for plastics and fertilizers, among other uses.

The growing requirements of modernization in China for oil—especially foreign oil imports—made energy security a centerpiece of government policy. The country’s leaders have always been of the mind that their country would never fall prey to another country holding it ransom over energy supplies. Still, China’s leadership found importing oil unavoidable once domestic supplies had clearly peaked in the late 1990s.

In 2008 the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) called a halt to all CTL projects in China except two. The NDRC wrote on its website that CTL was “a technology-, talent- and capital-intensive project at an experimental stage with high business risks.” CTL technologies also required ten tons of water to produce just one ton of oil products.9 The two projects the NDRC permitted were already underway by the Shenhua group, in Inner Mongolia and in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Ironically, the regions in China with the greatest reserves of coal—Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, and Sha’anxi—are historically amongst the most arid in the country. Mining operations that had been running full-tilt in the region for decades wasted vast amounts of water. In China, technology may not be able to skirt around a profound constraint of Nature itself.

Manufacturing Water

The immediate thought that comes to mind in a region that is chronically and increasingly without water is to manufacture potable water. The ocean, of course, is the greatest source of water, however unfit for human consumption and land-based life it might be. Desalination is the process by which great air compressors suck sea water up huge pipes to essentially evaporate the salt from the water. China’s first desalination plant went into operation in 2010, in Tianjin, a city-province on China’s northeastern coast. Tianjin’s water supply was in crisis. Urbanites and industry had overused and polluted and wasted most of its natural potable water resources. Desalination was seen as a key to the region’s water and energy dilemma.

The Beijiang desalination plant was a 1.2 billion RMB (nearly US$200 million) project that was as much a coal-fired power plant as a source of fresh water for residents of Tianjin. The project had the capacity to produce 200 million cubic meters of water each year. The associated power plant that produced the energy to separate the salt and other minerals from the water produced 400 megawatts of electricity annually.10 However, Tianjin said it didn’t want the water from the desalination operation.11 Tianjin residents balked at having to pay ten yuan (nearly US$2.00) per cubic meter to pipe water from the desalination plant. Residents had grown used to paying half that rate to tap into nearby rivers and lakes. City leaders also took issue with the electricity the plant generated.

The local power grid announced it could take no more than a third of the power generated by the coal-fired station, despite the city’s growing energy requirements. Tianjin illustrated the paradox of China’s model for urbanization: China needs the majority of its population to move to the cities to leverage economies of scale in resource usage. However, China’s cities are the single greatest source of rapid increase in electricity use, and the most reliant on subsidized, cheap energy.

Building Sustainable Cities

By 2011 the urban population was nearly 700 million people, nearly double the figure in 1990.12 About 70 percent of China’s population will likely live in cities by 2035.13 With urbanites in China consuming nearly quadruple the amount of energy of their countryside brethren,14 Chinese cities consumed 75 percent of the energy its power stations generated in 2010. By 2030 cities could be siphoning nearly 85 percent of the energy the country produces.15 Though the central government claimed to have achieved the energy efficiency goals of its 11th five-year plan of nearly 20 percent from 2005–2010; overall energy consumption may double from the current 1,000 gigawatts in 2010 to more than 2,000 gigawatts by 2020.16 The leadership clearly understands that the more energy a society generates to meet its needs, the more its requirements will swell to even greater levels.

In an attempt to take a more holistic approach to energy efficiency and to reduce air pollution levels in cities, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) launched a low-carbon pilot program in August 2010. The Commission identified five provinces and eight cities in China that were to lead the country in reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions as a proportion of local GDP. The program promised support of Guangdong, Liaoning, Hubei, Shaanxi, and Yunnan provinces and the cities of Tianjin, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Nanchang, Guiyang, and Baoding. The cities were all charged with reducing their carbon “footprints” substantially before 2015 by drafting low-carbon development plans, establishing low-carbon industries, and promoting low-carbon lifestyles. A carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) individuals, animals, and industries release into the atmosphere over a period of time. Carbon dioxide is a primary cause of climate change. Some of the cities were chosen because they were already industrial centers of cleantech, or had been ecologically focused for some time.

Hangzhou, for instance, is home to the famous tourist destination West Lake, about which Chinese philosophers and poets have waxed lyrical for more than a thousand years. Hangzhou is a two hour drive southwest of Shanghai. The West Lake Ecological District has been charged since 1992 with ensuring the air and water quality around the lake are high despite the rapid growth of the city. The municipality is also host to several economic development zones that pride themselves on promoting services and high-value manufacturing industries that produce little pollution.

In 2008 the Singaporean government and corporations invested in the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city. The Eco-city would be part of the Tianjin Binhai New Area, ostensibly a new city that will one day merge with the old Tianjin. The intention of the Eco-city was to integrate with the surrounding ecology. The new city sought to recycle waste, while a state-of-the-art public transport system would whisk residents throughout the area in lieu of automobiles.

I asked Richard Brubaker, an American professor at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai, if the efforts of cities like Hangzhou and Tianjin would actually create sustainable cities in China. Brubaker is a relaxed, thoughtful academic and industry consultant with an ironic sense of humor. Could there actually be such a thing as a sustainable city? I wondered. He told me:

“Well, this is all about context really, and unfortunately, a ‘sustainable city’ is never really considered to be ‘realistic,’ because it is a city that does not offer 5% economic growth in perpetuity. It is a city that requires an investment, but also should be measured by returns other than simply economic output.” He continued, “In the ‘realistic’ world though, I would say that the critical items I am looking at environmentally are buildings, transportation, food safety and water; socially I look at education, crime, and community service; and economically, it is about offering economic opportunity and a mixed economy that provides white and blue collar jobs.”

Ultimately, however, the challenge of building new cities or retrofitting old ones for sustainability is successfully weaning residents and industries from the fossil fuel diets our modern societies are based on. Brubaker went on to say:

“The reason the economy will move away from both is economic as inflationary pressures will force the prices of both up and industry will look to make demand side efficiency gains to reduce long term spend. The hurdle, at this moment, is that both coal and oil are heavily subsidized resources, and there are two pressures on each: supply side pressures from finding/extracting/transporting these resources is getting more difficult; and externalities are harder to keep off balance sheet. For instance, BP [British Petroleum] will have to pay the ‘full cost’ of their next platform upfront; also, coal mines are having to spend more to rehabilitate the land they destroy and are losing lawsuits. It seems to me there is a general trend in which externalities that were once so easy to pass on are growing more difficult to ignore.”

Shanghai, in particular, as one of richest and fastest growing cities in China, is also one of the first to feel the weight of unsustainable economic and social development growth models.

Shanghai, compared to other metropolises in the world, is in a unique position to undertake sustainability initiatives. The centralized brand of governance backed by clear central government directives means the city could quickly undertake initiatives that other metropolises outside China may need years to start. Brubaker further explained:

“Shanghai is deploying a varied strategy that looks to leverage economic incentives, new regulations, and government investments. Many will point to big ticket items like the metro system, and new water distribution investments. But the district of Minhang has put up 500,000 m2 of green roofs, and is on track for another 500,000 m2 by 2013. However, more fundamentally, the urban planning of Shanghai allows for a very efficient system that reduces many of the inefficiencies that dog western economies. Districts are integrated, communities are planned, and cars are largely unnecessary here.”

However, an aspect of China’s urban development model that is hemorrhaging energy involves one of its most fundamental assets: its buildings.

Building Energy Efficiency

Without fondness I recall standing in the middle of the living room of a Suzhou Chinese family’s home, coat zipped up to my neck, cupping a glass of hot water. Still, my teeth chattered. Two of my hosts invited me to sit down on the worn, leather couch, stiffened by the pervasive cold. They stood with me. They themselves seemed as incapable as I of bending at the knees. We all tried to watch a little television while the mother of the family and her husband cleared the table away of the leavings of the Spring Festival meal. The apartment of the middle class family had no heat. Each room of the flat had boxy air conditioning units that could be used to heat spaces. However, it was clear the family wanted to save money by not turning on the units. Instead, they preferred bundling up in layers of long underwear and padded coats.

Increasingly, though, families and businesses are turning on their heating and cooling, if only during the coldest or hottest weather. In addition, new hotels, boutiques, spas, restaurants, and other amenities of modernity are sprouting everywhere in Chinese cities. Customers expect temperatures inside the establishments to be at comfortable levels. The number of apartments and businesses in China’s cities is adding up to make the country the largest energy consumer in the world. Fuel bills are also revealing its buildings to be amongst the least energy efficient of any modern society.

Lighting, heating, and ventilating buildings are using more than a quarter of the power China generates, according to Li Bingren, chief economist of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.17 The country uses an additional 15 percent of its energy on manufacturing and transporting building materials, and for constructing homes and offices, according to the Worldwatch Institute.18 Li also acknowledged that daily energy consumption per capita in rural areas nearly doubled in the seven years since 2000.19

Li admitted that building efficiency was relatively low at 50 percent. “Even if the standard rises to 65 percent by 2020, the energy consumption for heating in China’s buildings will still be 50 percent higher than the average in developed countries with the same climate,” he said.20

Energy efficiency matters to a country that is one of the largest importers of coal and oil in the world. With its use of coal set to double within the next ten years as the size of its economy balloons, China already has the means of reducing its dependence on fossil fuels without the heavy layouts in alternative energy sources its leadership is promoting. As early as 2006 the central government was convinced it could not meet the energy demands of its buildings in 2020.21 China’s energy development plan as of 2011, with its emphasis on the supply side of the energy equation, was akin to pouring an increasing amount of water into a bucket full of holes while the bucket was getting larger. The Natural Resources Defense Council believed increased energy efficiency in China could cut the nation’s growth in energy demand by half of current trends by 2030. Barbara Finamore, founder and director of the Natural Resources Defense Council China program, calculated that saving a kilowatt of power costs just a quarter of the amount used to generate a new kilowatt.22

China has the biggest construction volume in the world, though, with 2 billion square meters of floor area being constructed annually, according to Dr. Liu of the Energy Research Institute—a department in China’s National Development and Reform Commission—at a talk he presented in Bangkok in 2010. Certainly, China’s go-go approach to building construction does not lend construction efforts to considering energy efficiency, even when building designs required it. Energy conservation in some buildings actually dropped as much as 6 to 7 percent of the specifications in original designs, according to Qiu Baoxing, vice-minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.23 Of course, unregulated property developers are in part to blame; however, prospective buyers themselves were loath to buy property that cost an extra 100 RMB to 150 RMB per square meter for things like additional insulation, properly installed heating and air conditioning (HVAC) conduits, and double-paned glass.24 Even though salespeople could show potential customers that while energy efficient buildings may add 2 to 5 percent to a property’s purchase price, the return on the investment could be as much as 10 times the difference spent when considered over a 20 year period.25 Franz Lang, a German energy efficiency engineer in China, was not optimistic about the longevity of Chinese buildings, though.

I asked Lang what Beijing might do to completely restructure the energy efficiencies of the country’s buildings. “In about five years,” he said, only half-joking, “governments will realize the buildings won’t be standing much longer [because of poor construction quality]. They’ll acknowledge that their buildings are completely inefficient, tear them all down, and then start all over again.” Nevertheless, Lang was excited to introduce me to an energy efficiency project in Suzhou, about an hour-and-a-half drive from Shanghai. Lang had advised on the implementation of energy-saving designs and technologies for a factory in the city limits. He insisted that many approaches to energy efficiency in urban settings in China were easily achievable, mostly common sense adjustments.

I met Austral Refrigeration’s general manager, Johann Wiebe, on the sun-drenched third floor of the factory. Wiebe is a cherubic, good-natured man with nearly ten years’ experience in China. He explained to me that local tax incentives encouraged the company to lease the three-story, 10,000 square meter facility. He told me that staff never had to turn on the lights in the open office space because a southern exposure pours through the large windows to keep the area brightly lit. “It was my belief from the beginning of this project that we were going to be energy efficient.” Wiebe started the business in February 2010, and was in production by July of the same year. The factory shipped its first container of refrigeration units for supermarkets in Australia by the end of the summer of 2010, and by the end of the year saw its first profit. Since the company produced energy-efficient refrigeration units to keep meats, vegetables, milk and other dairy products cold, Wiebe believed it was important for the factory itself to be energy efficient. “My bosses in Australia would not have signed off on the investment in energy efficiency if the return was going to take more than a year,” he added.

Lang attributed the company’s rapid realization of its investment in operational efficiency to the processes the company put in place to make the business more self-contained and less dependent on electricity to generate its lighting, heating, and cooling. The company sourced all of its components and equipment from suppliers based in China, some of which were foreign-invested.

The key to the energy efficiency gains at the operation were more down to creating a “circulation” of thermal energy throughout the plant. They used very few hi-tech gadgets to achieve energy savings. Processes and alternative ways of looking at how consumers typically waste heat, in other words, were more important to establishing energy efficiency than new technologies. Wiebe showed me the nine solar water heaters arrayed in large gray square-meter tiles on the nearly flat roof, just opposite his office suite. “We can add more panels as we need,” he explained. The panels took up a mere 5 percent of the space available on the rooftop.

If there was no sunshine for the panels to generate heat for use to mold large sheets of steel, then heat from the air compressors used to cool equipment was diverted to the jigs. The company also used heat recovery techniques to catch the heat radiated from ovens. The system distributed the heat from the ovens throughout the factory floor to heat the area during winter. The factory floor had dozens of large, 446-watt lights suspended from the dropped ceiling. They created a lower, false ceiling to trap heat closer to the ground to save on heating bills.

The weak link in the system, however, was the human factor. Wiebe explained to me that the Chinese staff was not interested in establishing habits and procedures that would save the operation a great deal of energy and money. So, management created a set of incentives and disincentives to let the staff know the company was serious about energy efficiency and to shape their habits. “Just switching off the lights as necessary required an education,” Wiebe said. “We had to build bonuses and penalties around energy efficiency goals. Some staff didn’t like the new system, so they left when we implemented it.” However, the company was able to quickly replace staff who adapted to the mindset of the company. Educating consumers in Chinese society on sustainability issues, however, is far more challenging, as the owners of the green business Bambu discovered.

Green Shoots

Rachel Speth and Jeff Delkin started their sustainable business Bambu in the early 2000s. Bambu produces kitchenware made out of bamboo, coconut shells, husks, and cork. The products include bowls, plates and utensils, large and small. Styles are minimalistic, organic, painted in bold, energetic colors. Bambu takes bamboo materials from forests in China and Thailand and engage local communities that have little industry to hand-make and lacquer their beautiful kitchenware and accessories. Currently, according to Delkin, “sustainability is an option of the affluent” in China.

Businesses that work to be sustainable from the ground up are inevitably local in focus. They take it upon themselves to educate their local community of designers and craftspeople with the methods, requirements, and expectations of the international marketplace. They also work to keep alive and build on the traditional craft techniques of the local communities to maintain a competitive advantage that helps keep residents from suffering sub-standard qualities of life that are difficult to reverse once the traditions are lost forever. However, sometimes, the communities just don’t understand commerce.

Speth explained to me how Bambu had worked closely with a village in Thailand that excelled in a special weave of bamboo into baskets. “No matter what we did and how we walked them through the production process, they just didn’t get it.” Especially problematic for the company was painting the baskets, which Western buyers preferred over the natural color of the baskets: spraying, catching and recycling paints that were inherently chemicals was problematic in the remote village. Eventually, Bambu gave up after more than two years of effort and retrenched in China. Another major challenge to their goal of developing a truly environmentally responsible business was addressing export markets.

Most of the customers for their products in 2011 were countries outside China. Speth told me, “We spend all this time and effort making ‘green’ products only to put them on stinky ships in the end.” By “stinky” she meant the huge carbon footprints of diesel-powered cargo ships, as well as the waste crews dump overboard with each voyage. In 2012 they began changing their business model to develop what they called “local products for locals,” to further reduce the carbon footprint of their products. In other words, products for the Asian market would be solely produced in Asia, while products for the American market would be produced in the United States. Packaging presented another obstacle to fully realizing their green credentials in China.

Chinese government regulations required a certain kind of plastic be included in the packaging of the wares they sold in the Chinese market. The plastic’s manufacture is not based on a sustainability model, and it is not biodegradable. As a result, Speth and Delkin spent more time designing sustainable packaging than on actual product design.

Nevertheless, Bambu and other companies based on sustainability models found it important to their brands to educate buyers about the richness of craft traditions of the villages in which their products were made. Ultimately, what Bambu and other companies created was an ecosystem of local producers. Local companies became part of communities, contributing to the sustainability of the villages and their customs. Globalization, though, blows that model wide open.

Speth identified globalization as the Achilles Heel of sustainability models for societies. Nowadays consumers depend on the ready availability of products from around the world. Speth proposed, “Stop relying on other countries for what you’ve run out of.” The proposal is based on a statement made by renowned architect William McDonough. McDonough’s simple observation made a major impact on Speth’s worldview: “There is no away.”

“Dunno Where It Came From”

Globalization and urbanization have contributed to the rise in the wealth of developing countries in a way never before seen in human history. The Age of Cheap Stuff has provided all but those in abject poverty the opportunity to consume products that define “the good life” in higher-income societies they will never have the chance to visit, except through the sights and sounds and tastes they buy at their local shops. Globalization has provided the means by which so many dreams have come true that would have been impossible to realize before the turn of the new century. An axiom of modernization is that there is an infinite amount of resources with which to make stuff and an infinite amount of space in which to dispose of the waste.

Our consumer societies believe that when we “throw something away” it disappears from the Earth, vanishes from existence. McDonough’s point is that the waste products—especially packaging—continue to live on, in some instances, for generations. The United States, with its relatively low population and great expanse of land in relation to China’s, believes it can still afford unsustainable production and consumption patterns because, for the most part, the waste does not end up in “someone else’s backyard” within the continental United States. The country is blessed with an abundance of land in relation to its relatively low population density. China, however, has four times as many people in about the same amount of area as the continental United States. America also has far more clean-water and clean-air resources than China. To its credit, the United States, since the 1970s, has worked to preserve its ecosystem and even reverse some of the adverse effects of past industrialization. Europe and Japan are certainly leaders in the area of environmental protection, since neither has the sort of space America does to dither with the issue. Further, the United States—and other Western countries—ships some of its most toxic waste to China.

Chinese buyers trade in disused computers, televisions, radios, and other electronic appliances that Westerners have disposed of. It is recycling at its crudest. Great hills of hardware dot China’s east coast from which peasants and children—without protective gear—sift for parts that contain valuable metals and components that can be re-used in other manufactures. Toxins from decaying gadgets settle into the soil and enter the streams and water tables of the area. The toxins the derelict machines release are carcinogenic and are a leading cause of disabilities and deformities in the villages near where the mounds are excavated. This trade is one of the uglier faces of globalization. The effects of the dumps on the environment and local communities will never go away.

Globalization enables consumers to trump local constraints placed on supply and demand. Buyers can obtain material goods, food, and even energy from regions far from their homes. However, the traditional trading system is heavily subsidized by governments and their citizens. The subsidies provide food, energy, and water in abundance. Consumers do not realize the true price of the goods we are purchasing, though. A true price would consider the impact global supply chains are having on our natural resources and our environments locally and globally. Central to the concept of watergy is that societies may be able to import food and energy from abroad; however, they cannot economically import potable water in the quantities to which we have grown addicted. The misalignment between the globalization of trade in goods and the availability of water at a local level in China threatens to bring the society to a standstill.

I propose a corollary of “There is No Away” is “Dunno Where It Came From.” Though the affluent might know their Louis Vuitton bags are “French” and their Ferragamo shoes are “Italian” and their iPads “American,” consumers in a globalized world actually don’t know where their wares were made. Plastic components may have been cast in Malaysia; leather shorn from cattle in America; labor supplied by Bangladeshi children; and products delivered on Chinese-made ships. There is no true accounting of the origins of the natural resources and energy inputs that go into many of our consumer products nowadays. Because we “dunno where it came from,” we don’t care where it came from, just as long as we can get it. With each acquisition we burden our local environments and resources further. We are spending our inheritance from the Earth with abandon.

The bill for basing modernization on an unsustainable Industrial Revolution model will come due one day, however. That is undeniable. One could say that, metaphorically, we all see the waiter coming to our table, flashing a ticket we all know will be far greater than what we brought along in our collective hip pocket. It’s the price we’ll all have to pay for presuming the Earth to be inexhaustible in its plentitude. However, the Earth is a closed system.

The Earth’s ecosystem is closed to the extent that only sunlight is allowed to pour in. Everything else remains within its gravitational field. It doesn’t have clean air or clean water pumped in from outer space. And the dirty air and dirty water are not pumped beyond the stratosphere, either. The lands upon which we live are the lands upon which we will pass away for the foreseeable future. There are no new spaces to which we can move away to escape our own waste. Policies that reshape our consumption behavior and re-establish our relationships with our environment are what we need to sustain modernity. Technology fixes are not sufficient, just as in the small laboratory of Austral Refrigeration in Suzhou.

Sustainability is a frame of mind; not just another marketplace in which to make profits. At the start of 2012 the European Union implemented a “carbon tax” on international flights into and out of the region. It was the sort of policy adjustment at the outset the world needed to ameliorate the effects of globalization on our home countries. The United States, China, and more than 20 other countries balked at the policy purely on the basis of traditional fossil fuel economics. The mantra of globalization has become a means of escaping our responsibility as stewards—and not masters—of the planet.

This is a revolutionary concept in China, which has always believed deeply in its responsibility to master its geography. Since the days thousands of years ago when Chinese engineers built dams, levees, and other great engineering controls to mollify the flooding of its great rivers, China has believed that the triumph of its masses over Nature took primacy. China’s brand of rapid modernization, though, has tipped the global environment and national economies into a condition of instability perhaps never before seen in human history. Now, with the country coming against a hard ceiling to future growth and sustainability, it will have to develop new institutions and come to a new understanding with its environment. As drought, climate change, energy constraints, and a rapidly aging population change the complexion of the society, China may well come to sign a new social contract.

Notes

1. Sun Wukong, “Thirsty China Launches Water Saving Plan,” Asia Times, March 7, 2007. Available online at www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/IC07Cb03.html.

2. Jonathan Watts, “Can the Sea Solve China’s Water Crisis?” The Guardian, January 24, 2011.

3. Sun Wukong, “Thirsty China Launches Water Saving Plan,” Asia Times, March 7, 2007. Available online at www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/IC07Cb03.html.

4. Ibid.

5. Mao Yushi, Sheng Hong, and Yang Fuqiang, The True Cost of Coal, September 2008.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Bill Dodson, China Inside Out: 10 Irreversible Trends Reshaping China and its Relationship with the World (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 93.

9. Zhang Qi, “Is it the End-of-the-Line for Coal-to-Oil in China?” China Daily, October 9, 2008. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2008–10/09/content_7090441.htm.

10. Jonathan Watts, “Can the Sea Solve China’s Water Crisis?” The Guardian, January 24, 2011. Available online at www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/24/china-water-crisis?CMP=twt_fd.

11. Ibid.

12. Jamil Anderlini, “China’s Rapid Urbanization Could Prove Illusory,” The Financial Times, July 20, 2011. Available online at www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6bca8058-b2d4–11e0-bc28–00144feabdc0.html#axzz1o9D6y89R.

13. Wang Hongyi, “Builders Follow Environmental Approach,” China Daily, January 9, 2012. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/business/2012–01/09/content_14404733.htm.

14. Lin Boqiang, “Powering Future Development,” China Daily, January 20, 2012. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/business/2012–01/20/content_14480632.htm.

15. “China Clean Revolution Report III: Low Carbon Development in Cities,” The Climate Group, December 2010.

16. “Country Analysis Briefs: China,” United States Energy Information Administration, November 2010, 17.

17. Jin Zhu, “Rising to the Challenge of Conserving Energy,” China Daily, September 21, 2010. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2010–09/21/content_11331549.htm.

18. “China Pushing for Energy-Efficient Buildings,” World Watch Institute, January 2010.

19. Jin Zhu, “Rising to the Challenge of Conserving Energy,” China Daily, September 21, 2010. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2010–09/21/content_11331549.htm.

20. Ibid.

21. “China Launches Massive Reconstruction of Buildings for Energy Saving,” Xinhua, March 29, 2006. Available online at http://english.people.com.cn/200603/29/eng20060329_254429.html.

22. Li Xing, “Keeping in Step to Cut Carbon Footprint,” China Daily, January 18, 2011. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/2011–01/18/content_11873641.htm.

23. Jin Zhu, “Rising to the Challenge of Conserving Energy,” China Daily, September 21, 2010. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2010–09/21/content_11331549.htm.

24. “,” People’s Daily, January 18, 2010. Available online at http://env.people.com.cn/GB/5300758.html.

25. “China Pushing for Energy-Efficient Buildings,” World Watch Institute, January 2010.