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China Outlines Modest Environmental Goals
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Ma said that better forest management between 1990 and 2005 has resulted in the capture of about 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide. In heralding China's environmental achievements, he said that even China's family planning policies deserve credit, since they have prevented the births of 300 million people.
"If you multiply that by the global per capita consumption or emission of carbon dioxide, it would mean that every year there is a reduction of 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide as a result of our family planning policy," Ma said.
Experts caution against relying too much on China's statistics.
While Beijing has set impressive targets -- such as a 10 percent reduction in overall pollutants and a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product -- corrupt local officials routinely report false information in order to win promotions and raises, China's State Environmental Protection Administration has said.
Officials say it is precisely because China is still trying to modernize that it will not consider environmental measures that are not in its interests.
"It really baffles me to see some people say that China is a major threat" with regard to global warming, Ma said. "People are not putting the blame on those countries with large historical emissions, high per capita emissions . . . to say that these countries are the major threat to global environmental security," he said.
Steven Knell, a London-based energy analyst for Global Insight, a private financial analysis firm, was sympathetic concerning the difficulty of balancing development and environmental impact.
"It's a quagmire that we find ourselves in because their position is morally defensible," he said. "At the same time, it's environmentally indefensible."
