China’s Environmental Crisis: Why Should We Care?

Abstract

In this essay1 I address the main problems regarding Chinese environmental pollution and the failure, at least up until now, to enact a series of regulations able to solve or at least partially “revert” the current situation. Why, eventhough Chinese environmental laws have standards as high as those of their American counterparts, do they fail to curb these problems? My contention is that laws are present but not enforced; which is expecially true at the local level where economic growth is what matters the most. Aside from these problems, I argue that the rest of the world can not simply ignore China’s ecological disaster because, ultimately, the whole planet is affected by many of the devastating catastrophes originating in China making a situation that was previously thought of as “confined” within its borders, a global, “contagious” problem.