The Chinese people care more about the environment than Americans do

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http://grist.org/news/the-chinese-people-care-more-about-the-environment-than-americans-do/

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Those who oppose action on climate change in America are fond of complaining about how futile our own efforts to cut greenhouse gases are when China doesn’t give a hoot about its own emissions. But a new poll finds that the Chinese people do want action to cut pollution — even more than we do in America.

The Pew Research Center asked people around the world to rank five global threats. A full third of respondents in China think that issues related to “pollution and the environment” present the greatest danger to the world. Compare that to 15 percent of Americans. (We Americans, according to Pew, are most concerned about inequality — which, incidentally, is a related issue because inequality both makes climate change harder to tackle, and will be made greatly worse as poor communities and nations face the brunt of a climate run amok.)

And increasingly, the Chinese people are making their voices heard. This summer, Stephen Vines reported for Al Jazeera on the growing number of environmental protests in China:

The latest official State of the Environment report recorded 712 cases of “abrupt environmental incidents” in 2013, up 31 percent from the previous year. Many of these “incidents” are in fact protests, and the level of protest in the current year is, if anything, on the up. Yang Chaofei, the vice-chairman of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences, told members of the powerful Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress that environmental protests have been growing 29 percent annually from 1966 to 2011.