China -- Globalization and Air Pollution
Because China has essentially become, as The New York Times explains, " ... the world's factory floor" by producing electronics, clothes and many other goods for America and other nations (as part of its globalization strategy), it has generated "huge emissions of pollutants" in the process. Those pollutants include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides; and certainly the burning of fossil fuels in Beijing and other major Chinese cities contributes carbon dioxide to the problem of global climate change. This paper looks at the problems facing China when it comes to air pollution -- which results from its huge manufacturing and electrical generating plants.
Air Pollution in China
An article in The Guardian claims that air pollution in China's cities is "so bad" it actually resembles a "nuclear winter" (Kaiman, 2014). A nuclear winter (after an atomic bomb has been dropped) is an atmospheric condition that seriously slows photosynthesis in plants, which puts a country's food supply in jeopardy. In Beijing and in " ... broad swaths of six provinces" during February 2014, a very dense "pea-soup" kind of smog was serious enough to penetrate deep into people's lungs and actually enter the bloodstreams of citizens (Kaiman, p. 1). The smog was mainly from the coal-fired plants that run much of China's economy.
The concentration in Beijing was PM 2.5 particles,...
Because transportation infrastructure and services are important components of the urban system, they need to be sustainable and contribute to economic growth rather than harm the people that rely on them for their livelihoods. According to Asri and Hidayat (2005), "The expansion of social and economic activities has resulted in rising pollution and environmental degradation following the economic crisis in Jakarta Metropolitan area where environmental regulations were largely disregarded"
" Humans have become "obsessed" with the idea that the masculine should dominate the feminine, the wealthy should dominate the poor, humans should dominate "nonhuman Nature," and Western cultures should rule over non-Western cultures (Devall, et al. 264). Devall and Sessions believe that while "some leading intellectuals" in the Western culture have viewed religion is merely superstition, and yet there are religious traditions (such as Buddhism, Taoism, Native American rituals and
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