Environment protection a shared responsibility

As the final harmonies of the Live Earth concert in Shanghai faded, Western journalists started singing their predictable songs about China's environmental problems. The lyrics are now very familiar - filthy factories, coal-fired power stations, glaciers melting, pollution affecting Seoul and Tokyo, and rivers too toxic to touch.

For balance, the journalists usually provide a sentence reminding us that China's environmental footprint is still below that of the United States and other industrialized nations. The first half of the next sentence then accepts a theoretical right for China to equalize pollution to equalize wealth but after a comma, the right is revoked.

Western journalists miss a significant problem. Using nation-based statistics to argue about the environmental impacts of a globalizing world is intellectual deceit.