The death of China

Men's Journal, in its August issue, had an interesting article on the environmental crisis brewing in China:

About 740 miles south of Beijing is the drab metropolis of Lanzhou, one of the world's most polluted cities. Given that China has 16 of the 20 filthiest cities on Earth, this is a real feat, even by regional standards...
Battered by controversy over the violent clampdown on protests in Tibet this spring and the tragic death of 65,000 people in an earthquake seismically smaller than the one that killed 67 people in California nineteen years ago, China is desperate to present an environmentally friendly face with an Olympic-size makeover...
Every city remakes its infrastructure somewhat when it hosts the Olympics, but Beijing's renovation has been so over-the-top, it's ridiculous...
The authoritarian government will not be able to hide the environmental nightmare that is contemporary China...
In any event, the attempts to clear the air for the athletes are a Potemkin village that will topple over the minute the global media heads home, leaving residents with the same thick smog and foul water they've been living with for years...
Its heavy dependence on coal-fired power plants and the explosive growth in automobiles that wealth brings has propelled China past the US in the unenviable category of "most CO2 pumped into the atmosphere"...
Far more Chinese are killed by pollution each year— 656,000, according to the World Health Organization— than in the US or anyplace else, and cancer rates are skyrocketing...
Today 320 million Chinese— almost equal to the entire population of the US— drink unsafe water...
Tainted water kills almost 100,000 Chinese every year...

In an accompanying chart, the magazine reveals the magnitude of the disaster:
Carbon dioxide emissions in China will double from 2006 to 2030.
Lakes and rivers too polluted for irrigation or industrial use: 28%
City water too polluted for drinking: 90%
Chinese population drinking unsafe water anyway: 25%, equal to 320 million people
Chinese who die from drinking polluted water each year: 95,600
Premature deaths caused by pollution each year: 656,000
Financial losses due to pollution in 2004: $64 billion
Arable land contaminated by pollution: more than 10%
Land affected by desertification: 27%
Portion of the wetlands of the North China Plain (the major growing region) that have turned dry: 83%

Rico says read 'em and weep people; those are statistics from Hell, worse than anything this country went through in the Great Depression...