Global environmental crisis is the product of centuries of Western exploitation of the land, natural resources and labour of the Global South.
US and Western over consumption is still the leading force for environmental destruction of the global ecosystem. The West is responsible for at least three quarters of global cumulative carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Despite its size, China’s cumulative CO2 emissions are only 19% of world cumulative emissions. CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and oceans. Western industrialisation has been pumping out CO2 for 250 years, while China’s industrial take-off started a mere 40 years ago.
In the global battle for ecological rationality and equity, China has increasingly emerged as the international leader for Green development and what the Chinese call ecological civilisation. China is now a key driving force in moving the planet towards ecological civilisation and in redressing the effects of centuries of plunder of the land, labour and resources of the global south by West.
China Environment News was created in late 2019 to contribute towards providing rational and balanced news and analysis about what is happening in China in regard to the protecting the environment, both within that country and and globally. Too often this is clouded by anti-China distortion in the Western media.
We support global north-south equity, and reject the West’s anti-socialist, neo-liberal ideology. The global environmental crisis is not something that can be reversed by adopting a few reforms aimed at the “environmental modernisation” of international capitalism nor by a “Green New Deal” which appeals to and entrenches the privileges of the West.
This does not mean that we do not welcome meaningful Western reforms and initiatives. But we do bear in mind the long history of the West in subjugating both humanity and nature.
Global ecological crisis is the product of centuries of largely unrestrained Western industrialisation and neo-colonial plunder of the natural resources, land and labour of global south by imperialism and its current neo-liberal incarnation.
Seriously tackling the global ecological crisis must involve a global redistribution of power and wealth.