Newsweek: The Recession’s Green Lining—closing dirty factories

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/188200

ENVIRONMENT

The Recession’s Green Lining

A global downturn is doing what activists couldn't: closing dirty factories.

By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
Published Mar 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Mar 16, 2009

To savvy snowboarders, Baikalsk has long been the beautiful resort where visitors are so few you can feel as though you own the mountain, at least temporarily: for about 5,000 rubles ($175), you can have exclusive use of one of the six long runs for the day and never see another soul as you schuss through forests. Of course, you've had to tolerate a smell that seemed to be a blend of rotten cabbage and New Jersey Turnpike. For in addition to the resort, this town on Siberia's Lake Baikal—the oldest, largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world—is home to the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill, which has been belching foul-smelling sulfates into the air and chlorides, phenols and other chemicals into the lake since it was built during the Cold War. The pollution killed plants, crabs and fish and threatened the world's only freshwater seal, the earless nerpa. Environmentalists have been trying to shut down the mill since 1964, getting precisely nowhere. But where greens failed, the global recession succeeded all too well. In November, the plant ceased production. "The economic crisis," says Marina Rikhvanova, the head of the environmental group Baikal Wave, worked "like magic."

It is no coincidence that some of the dirtiest industrial operations are falling victim to the global recession. Over the past two decades, much of the world's manufacturing moved to where pollution standards are little more than mild suggestions. Since small, corner-cutting, inefficient facilities tend to both flout pollution laws and be most vulnerable to a sudden drop in demand, the global recession has hit such operations especially hard. Thousands of factories in China's Pearl River Delta have shut their doors since late last year, for instance; output of autos, electronics and other goods from factories in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey and Toluca has fallen so sharply that the amount of cargo trucked across the U.S. border has dropped 40 percent. In India, enough small steel-rolling mills around Delhi have closed that levels of sulfur dioxide (which forms acid rain) fell 85 percent in October 2008 compared with a year earlier. The recession is bringing a green dividend in the developed world, too. Reduced economic activity is projected to cut Europe's emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief man-made greenhouse gas, by 100 million tons in 2009, and the United States' by about the same amount.

Recession is not exactly a long-term environmental strategy, obviously. The challenge is to use the downturn to deemphasize manufacturing in favor of cleaner economic activity, and to reengineer what survives so that when the economy revs up it's not at the environment's expense. Even world-class polluters get it. In China, as factories seek lines of credit to see them through the downturn, local governments are "less likely to help companies that are considered major polluters," says economist Deng Yupeng of Dongguan University.

At Baikal, the post-recession economy is poised to undergo a more radical shift, from pulping trees to serving tourists. One weekend in February the mountain was packed with skiers and snowboarders. Resort manager Yury Shiriak says that in December they had 7,000 visitors, compared with the usual 1,000. "Baikalsk will slowly transfer from an industrial place hated by ecologists into a tourist paradise," he predicts. It will help that the air and water are already cleaner. Only three months after the mill closed, locals already noticed a change. "We are so used to pollution, to the smell of rotting cabbage," said Andrei Pylukh, an artist. "The fresh air feels unusual. I see so many more birds on the lake and in my garden." The challenge for Baikalsk is to invest in hotels, restaurants and other labor-intensive, less-polluting businesses so the mill remains a permanent victim of the green recession but the town—which lost 2,300 jobs when the mill closed—doesn't.

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[David Dunham]

1. It's factories made less polluting that we need for decent jobs.

The US in particular needs more not less factories that make things and provide good jobs. Closing factories is NOT good for the US especially at the time of this economic slowdown.