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Poison to quench thirst

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-23 07:46

It is absurd and unimaginable for a provincial environmental protection department to keep the names of polluting enterprises a secret at a meeting on pollution control.

It is undoubtedly an affront for reporters to be told that Helongjiang provincial environmental department considers the information confidential.

Not only that, what this pollution control watchdog in northeastern China has done is against the regulations on disclosure of government information that took effect last May. It is specified in the regulations that such information concerning environmental protection, food safety, workplace safety and consumer goods quality must be timely made public.

Confidentiality is by no means a reason. But we have far more reasons to guess why it did so.

These polluting firms may quite probably be contributing to the local finance revenue. To disclose their names to the media will undoubtedly bring them the public ire, and the money they will use to treat pollutants they discharge will certainly increase their production cost for the time being, and thus reduce their contribution in taxes to the government coffer.

If this were the reason, it would be another one of numerous examples of keeping the growth of gross domestic products (GDP) at the expense of the environment.

There is also the possibility that the polluting firms have bribed the environmental watchdog as a whole or its leaders. If that is the case, the department needs to be overhauled and leaders involved punished according to law.

To quench your thirst with poison is the exact metaphor to describe the terrible prospect of developing an economy at the cost of the environment.

As we marked the 40th World Earth Day, which fell yesterday, no one would publicly agree to the argument that economic growth should come before the environment, which can be treated later on when there is enough money to do so.

However, quite a number of local governments do not have long-term strategies for environmental protection. It may not be necessarily because local leaders are not clear of the consequence of such unsustainable development, but because they will not work on their positions for that long to see the consequence themselves.

Yet, the interest is immediate from the fast economic growth at the cost of ecological balance: fat local coffer supported by taxes from polluting industries can be the token of their good performance as local leaders, and that they have enough money to squander at the luxuries they can enjoy themselves.

The prospect is too far away that the environment will be polluted to the point of no return. And the damage to the ecological system will make it impossible for local people to make a living.

The central government has done a great deal to make the environmental watchdogs at different levels to bite not just bark. And some environmental protection departments have made progress in fulfilling their duties by imposing fines on some polluting firms or even having closed some down.

However, this extreme case shows that more intensive efforts are yet to be made to not only make environmental watchdogs more efficient, but also put them under effective supervision of the general public so that they will not dare to play a hide-and-seek game as this department did.

(China Daily 04/23/2009 page8)