What is happening with modern day China and its environmental issues - Essay Example

Because of severe contamination of water, air pollution, and land degradation problems, life expectancy in the North of the country has decreased by 5.5 years (Dong, Liu, and Klein 164). Environmental degradation cost China about nine percent of its gross national income yearly. These threaten to undermine the growth of the country and exhaust society’s patience with China Government’s pace of reform. Further, this has threatened the Country’s stability, as the ruling party has to deal with increased public discontent and media scrutiny.

The energy consumption of China has increased, reaching one hundred and thirty from 2000 to 2010. In 2013, Beijing witnessed a prolonged severe session of smog that the citizens dubbed it as “airpocalypse”; the hazardous particles concentration was forty times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization. Later in 2013, visibility in the Northern City of Harbin was shrank by pollution to less than fifty meters (Dong, Liu, and Klein 163). Research reveals that less than one percent of China’s five hundred cities sustain the World Health Organization’s air quality standards.

In the degradation of the quality of air, coal has been the chief culprit. China is the greatest producer of coal in the world, and it accounts for approximately half of the global consumption. Equally, coal is also the chief source of the country’s sulfur dioxide accounting for ninety percent of the country’s total sulfur dioxide emissions and half of its particulate emissions. In China, coal is mostly burned in the North part of the country, and it avails approximately seventy percent of the country’s energy needs.

Nevertheless, in 2011, coal emission levels from coal plants single-handedly contributed to almost two hundred and fifty thousand premature deaths. Similarly, air pollution in China is compounded by the country’s shocking urbanization pace. China’s government plans to move seventy; to seventy-five percent of