The Wall Street Journal reported today that the government in China is finally getting serious about the horrific air pollution in China.
Pollution in Beijing is so bad that a year of no traffic, no industry and a monsoon season worth of rainfall was needed to clear out the air for the Beijing Olympics. Most major cities in China are just as bad, if not worse.
Companies who moved all their fabrication facilities to China made easy money on their policy of pegging their currency at 40% of its true value versus the dollar. China has been growing four times faster than the U.S. and adding ten times more jobs each month for years.
Now all those companies can look forward to is the huge cost of cleaning up the air in China – and the water – and the land – not to mention the astronomical healthcare cost of a billion Chinese workers with emphysema and lung cancer by the time they are age 45.
The worse part of all this is that OUR companies who sent all OUR jobs to China will have to pay for all this, the same companies who already destroyed America’s economy by sending millions of jobs and a hundred thousand factories to China.
I suppose they will expect a bailout from Uncle Sam.
They say living in Los Angeles, America’s most polluted city, is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day every day since you were born. Think 3 packs a day for people unfortunate enough to live and work in a big city in China.
What does this mean in practical terms?
China will need California-style automobile pollution standards, on a billion tin-can vehicles, motorcycles and scooters that emit 60s levels of pollution. Ditto for water pollution and cleaning up massive landfills stuffed with toxic chemicals out the wazoo.
Then there is the vast floating plastic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean the size of Mexico, refuse from China’s shores. Ditto for the Atlantic (Brazil’s waste products), the Indian Ocean (India and Pakistan), and so forth.
You think America’s unfunded healthcare liability of $84 trillion is bad? Multiply that times three for a billion Chinese and that times for two for the severity of the symptoms (air, water and food toxicity) and you have an unfunded liability of $600 trillion – ten times the total annual output of the whole world.
Ditto for India and Brazil and Vietnam and every other “emerging economy” in the world that investors are going gaga over in their extravagant lust for the highest profits around. They’re all groveling in filth neck deep, and the evil companies who caused all this are going to have to clean it all up.
This is bad folks, real bad. Not just the environmental problem but the way Wall Street has covered up the problem for a whole generation in ravenous pursuit of easy money.
Excuse me, I’m gonna be sick.
UUrrrggggaauuggghhh….
