How Much Does It Cost To Clean Up a Dirty Lake in China?
It looks like China is planning on spending $15 billion to clean up Lake Tai, which supplies 5 million residents in Wuxi (near Shanghai) with running water. Here are the specifics from an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
The 108.5 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) plan to clean up Lake Tai, in a densely populated area northwest of Shanghai, should take five years, according to a statement dated Friday and posted on the government Web site of the nearby city of Taizhou.
(…) The algae bloom on Lake Tai in June prompted the suspension of running water in and around the major city of Wuxi for six days, forcing as many as five million people to rely on bottled water.
The Steep Costs of Cleaning Up China’s Dirty Lakes
Don’t you think $15 billion is a steep price to pay for such a cleanup? Did the polluters benefit this much by ignoring pollution regulations?
Revelations like this really bring to light questions of sustainable development – China’s environment has suffered many billions of dollars of damage – is the progress being made sustainable with such heavy damage to its environment?
