The View | There’s one way to profit from the discord over the Paris Agreement
‘China has got the message and that should help environmental businesses become the hot stocks of the future’
“My hope is that every day we will see blue sky, green mountains and clear rivers, not just in Beijing but all across China, so that our children will live in a good environment. This is key to our Chinese dream.”
President Xi Jinping
Chinese pollution is far more damaging to Chinese people than anyone else. So it is unsurprising that pollution concerns are the most discussed topic in social media.
The critical Chinese pollution documentary Under the Dome was viewed 200 million times in seven days. Pulmonary ailments caused by small particle (PM2.5) exposure lead to 1.2 million premature deaths every year. Even in 2009 when I studied in Beijing, the easiest Chinese phrase to parrot was not “The weather is hot” but “tianqi hen wuran” (it is very polluted).
No longer does China feel that pollution is not its responsibility – merely because it is merely Western pollution, transposed. Nevertheless, 30 years of the most populous nation on earth dissing the environment in a blind rush for development means that China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Xi has just as much reason to keep his industrial base content as Trump, but he better understands that his power base comes from the people and the people breathe the air
East Capital, the emerging markets asset manager, calculates that “airpocalypse episodes”, where the air quality index is worse than inside an airport smoking room, affect 25 per cent of the population. The Beijing air quality index was above 100 (unhealthy) for 193 days of 2015. The annual economic cost of air pollution for the main conurbations is estimated at US$1 billion. Even a climate change denier must recognise that breathing industrial dust concentrates is a bad thing.
