Posted on 07/23/2007 7:08:51 PM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
BEIJING: China has stopped the public release of an official study adding up the cost of the nation's environmental damage, a government researcher told a Chinese newspaper, blaming official reluctance to confront pollution.
The Beijing News reported Monday that the release of a "green GDP" report computing the cost of pollution and ecological degradation in 2005 had been "indefinitely postponed."
Wang Jinnan, a senior expert at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning who was technical head of the project, said that publicly spelling out the cost of bad air, water and soil had drawn fierce opposition from local officials eager to maintain growth.
"Taking out the costs of environmental damage would lead to a huge fall in the quality of economic growth in some areas," Wang told the newspaper.
"At present, many areas still place GDP above all else, and when such thinking dominates, the size of resistance to a green GDP can well be imagined," he said.
Wang said some provincial governments had lobbied the State Environmental Protection Administration and the National Bureau of Statistics not to publicly release the latest data.
A previous report for 2004 had calculated that environmental degradation that year cost 511.8 billion yuan, currently worth $67.7 billion, or 3.05 percent of gross domestic product - a figure one environmental protection agency official said at the time was "shocking." That report was issued last September with official fanfare and wide domestic media attention.
The report for 2005 shows "losses from pollution and reduction in the GDP indicator even higher than the 2004 report," The Beijing News said, citing a weekend seminar on the study.
The report would also have computed economic losses from pollution for each province - a sensitive step in a system where economic growth can be crucial to officials' promotion prospects.......
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
well at least none got shot
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