>>44345
Afforestation and hydro power can be a bit misleading, particularly when it comes to China. China is planting forests in the north west solely to prevent desertification(and they do this poorly often as well, they often use monocultures which caused a quarter to die from one disease, plus monocultures are not the best plant or animal habitats), they don't care about the forests they are removing in the interior. Hydro power as well is just seen as a cheap and simple power source, they don't care what that is doing to the environment either. Plus they are one of the largest countries on earth, they are naturally going to be on the top lists in the world. Most of their energy still comes form coal.

>heh, i think a brazil poster around here already made it perfectly clear: western countries developed with fuck all goncern about damaging biodiversity, the environment and what not, yet now they *demand* that every other country be held to their post-modern (often unhinged, see germany) eco-preservation standards
pure wectern-centric hypocrisy, used as a polemic tool for geopolitical leverage, which you repeat
Western countries knew nowhere near as much as they do now back then and were also doing nowhere near as much damage.
>why shouldn't one expect that if chinese people and/or authorities find they are consuming their environment beyond control they will self-correct, like the west did
Because they know yet they haven't.
>nevermind that, per-capita, the rich west still consumes more resources, energy and produce more waste than the Chinese, who are in average not nearly as rich
I don't know about waste and if they are then clearly it is being managed far better, European rivers are not lined with cancer villages and they ground water is not pretty much all polluted.
>nevermind that many of those companies in china that produce waste and pollute belong to western capital!
And many don't. It's irrelevant either way because it's within the laws and control of the nation that production happens in, I'm not defending these big companies at all they know what is going on but just because a foreign company owns a factory does not mean it is solely responsible for the waste disposal practices of the factory nor the laws of the nation itself.
>(meanwhile europe already lost the majority of its "old forests" due to expanding agriculture and industrialisation)
So did China... That was happening long before industrialisation and is still happening. The forests it does have are usually in places very difficult to get too, like in the rough topography of the south.
>Countries with the most high-speed rail
>1. China - 25,000 km; 2. Spain - 3,100 km; 3. Germany - 3,038 km
China is a big place. The US is too and so is Australia but they are culturally different as they are car cultures. Chinese infrastructure keeps collapsing as well.