As the world hurtles towards environmental oblivion, China is leading the charge. The nation’s CO2 emissions are more than twice those of the US with a GDP just two-thirds as large. China leads the world in renewable energy yet it is building new coal-fired power plants faster than renewables. The country’s lakes, rivers, and farmlands are severely polluted yet China’s police state can’t suppress pollution, even from its own industries.
This is the first book to explain these contradictions. Richard Smith explains how the country’s bureaucratic rulers are driven by nationalist-industrialist tendencies that are even more powerful than the drive for profit under ‘normal’ capitalism. In their race to overtake the US they must prioritise hyper-growth over the environment, even if this ends in climate collapse and eco-suicide.
Smith contends that nothing short of drastic shutdowns and the scaling back of polluting industries, especially in China and the US, will suffice to slash greenhouse gas emissions enough to prevent climate catastrophe.
Table of Content
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Names of Rivers in this Volume
Introduction: China as an Environmental Rogue State
1. The “China Price”: Police-State Capitalism and the Great Acceleration of Global Consumption
2. “Blind Growth”: Scenes of Planetary Destruction from the Twelfth Five-Year Plan
3. The Damage Done: The Poisoning of China’s Water, Soil, and Foods
4. Cooking the Planet for What End?
5. China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse
6. Guanxi and the Game of Thrones: Wealth, Property, and Insecurity in a Lawless System
7. Grabbing the Emergency Brake
8. The Next Chinese Revolution
Appendix
References
Index
About the author
Richard Smith wrote his Ph D thesis on China’s economic reforms and has written extensively Chinese issues for New Left Review, Monthly Review, Real-World Economics Review, and Ecologist. He has also written essays collected in Green Capitalism: The God that Failed (2016) and in The Democracy Collaborative’s Next System Project (2017). Smith is also a founding member of the US-based group System Change Not Climate Change.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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