Tiananmen Square

Don't expect any protests from groups such as Greenpeace in Tiananmen Square as the Olympics open. China doesn't allow open protests, and environmentalists are quietly ignoring China's new status as the world's biggest polluter. But at these Olympics, oxygen tanks will be an essential piece of athletic equipment.

Desperate not to be embarrassed in their golden moment, Chinese authorities have imposed draconian restrictions on Beijing residents. The plan includes suspending production at 105 factories and 56 coal-fired power plants, chemical plants and other industries in nearby Tianjin.

On July 1, more than 300,000 high-polluting vehicles were barred from Beijing streets. On July 20, motorists were assigned odd or even days on which they could drive, based on the last digit of their license plates.

China has overtaken the U.S. as the world's top polluter, according to a University of California, Berkeley, study published this year in the Journal of Environment Economics & Management. The evidence is seen daily in the skies over Beijing.

The Berkeley researchers say China's emissions are growing at an annual rate of 11%. In 2006-07, China added 186,000 megawatts of coal-fired electrical generation capacity, equivalent to two United Kingdoms. The U.S. Energy Department says China's emissions rose 138% from 1990 to 2005.

As the Heritage Foundation's Ed Feulner points out, China's emissions rose 8% last year after jumping 11% in each of the two previous years. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency notes that China alone accounted for two-thirds of the growth in global greenhouse gas emissions in 2007.

According to the World Health Organization, China has 16 of the world's most polluted cities, including Beijing, and clouds of pollution are blown across the Pacific into the skies over Los Angeles and other American cities.

Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicate that China's carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of output are five times those of the U.S. Our emissions rose by 1.5% last year after declining 1.3% the year before. Our GDP is rising faster than our emissions, meaning we are becoming more energy efficient every day.

As the big, bad USA's carbon dioxide emissions fell in 2006, our economy boomed 3.3%, says the Energy Information Administration. We used energy more efficiently and reduced emissions without Kyoto. Energy use per unit of GDP fell 4.2 % in 2006, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP fell by 4.5%.

Compared with the Kyoto signatories, the U.S., not Al Gore, should be getting a Nobel Prize. The United Nations reports that greenhouse gas emissions from the Kyoto signatories, despite all their efforts, increased 2.6% from 1990 to 2005. Austria, New Zealand and Canada increased their emissions over 1990 levels by 14%, 23% and 54%.

Environmentalists ignore our success in controlling emissions vs. a country such as China, and they oppose our efforts to do more. Led by Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner, a team of scientists is developing a CO2 scrubber that can remove one ton of carbon dioxide from the air every day.

But are the greenies happy? On May 5, two activist groups demonstrated in Knoxville, Tenn. Citing a Greenpeace position paper, they opposed such technologies as carbon sequestration and devices such as scrubbers because they let us use our vast coal reserves no matter how much CO2 they remove.

Perhaps, as Czech President Vaclav Klaus has said, the environmental movement is indeed a new religion, not as interested in solving a perceived problem as it is in using it as an excuse for more control over people and their lives. The issue is power, not pollution.

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