This guy has made a lot of money stating the obvious in the past few years, with the exception of the Iraq War of course.

Sunday's Op/Ed on China's environmental policy is pretty good, although his conclusions are also, no surprise, fairly obvious.

[T]he legitimacy of the communist regime, for the first time, is in some way dependent on making the air cleaner. And China’s leaders know it.

Yeah, well, I think environmental issues have certainly been discussed at many levels over here. The government understands that it is a policy priority – this is news? I do not think that environmental issues would have risen so high in the political discourse of the country if the government did not think that it had an effect on its legitimacy.

For now, though, they want to address this problem without having to change the basic ruling system of the Communist Party. They want to be green and red, not green and orange. I could feel it the minute I arrived.

You know, I think he could have gotten the same feeling by reading just about anything on the environment put out by the government in the last couple of years. You don't get a free trip to Beijing that way, though.

Friedman does make a valid point, which is that it is going to be hard to clean this place up while still maintaining a "growth first" economic policy. However, why is it that so many Western commentators, when confronted by a tough policy choice in China, fall back on this old argument that changing the government structure would help to solve problem?

Perhaps because I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer I fail to see why cleaning up the environment would be easier with a new system of government here. Are you trying to tell us, Mr. Friedman, that a U.S.-style system of representative government would translate into tougher action? I look at the current occupant of the White House and certainly do not see an advocate of environmentalism, yet Americans voted Bush into office twice. (One could also argue, of course, that Americans just don't care about the environment . . .)

China's environmental problems have many causes, but essentially it is a failure of effective government regulation. This regulation can be instituted by any type of government as long as the rules are enforced.

The econ side of this argument is expressed in China Economics Blog. The accepted argument is that because this pollution represents externalities, avoiding pollution will cost the economy something. That cost will translate into a lower GDP – this is what Friedman is talking about. That cost can be borne by countries that are sufficiently wealthy, and it is unclear whether China is at that level yet.

Fair enough, but this next statement on the blog post takes us into uncomfortable territory: "the richer a country gets the higher the demand for a clean environment." This "demand" for a clean environment is a demand that can be expressed in a number of ways, such as groups of people pooling their resources and paying for clean coal technology. However, we all know that in most cases, this demand can only be satisfied by government regulation of private industry (I hear economists hissing in the background).

But does this mean that demand for a clean environment must be expressed in China the same way it is in the West? I think that's what Friedman is talking about, and he is suggesting that without that channel for environmental concern, the government will not act as quickly or efficiently as it should.

Ridiculous – in any system, a government will act based on the information it receives. Whether that is the public at large, scientific groups, private industry, or guys from outer space, governments get info from many sources. If the Chinese government decides that environmental clean-up is important, I daresay that it can act quite fast to implement policy; whether it can enforce those policies is another discussion for another time.

Powered by ScribeFire.