I was at a talk this evening by the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, and his anecdote about arriving in China’s capital drew chuckles:

“I was really struck in landing in Beijing this morning – I came from Shanghai. We landed, and it was just comical. The stewardess said, the flight attendant said, ‘Welcome to Beijing. The temperature is . . . 37 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s a clear day.”

The audience laughed, aware of the heavy smog in Beijing today.

“You could not even see the terminal,” Friedman noted.

Those of us who live in Beijing know there is collective delusion going on about pollution here. Authorities readily blame bad air days on smoke or mist or suspended dust particles. Rarely do they admit that it's all of that and more, adding up to choking smog.

Friedman had quite a bit to say about China’s environmental problems. I’ll transcribe some of it, beating Friedman to the ideas in his next column in an irony he might enjoy. His column only appears twice a week, while this blog is immediate.

“Every time I come to China, it strikes me that people here speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty. I think China is rapidly approaching the point where the environment, and the degradation and the pollution will become a real constraint on its growth.”

The constraints may be felt with little warning, he said.

“You know, if you jump out of an airplane at 30,000 feet, you can actually feel like you’re flying for about five minutes until you have this really brief encounter with the ground. And that’s true with growth as well. You can grow at 10 percent a year for 30 straight years and think you can fly. The thing about Mother Nature . . . is that Mother Nature always laughs last. Never think you can fool Mother Nature.

What strikes Friedman about China’s leadership “is the degree to which they have no clue what is required to make Red China a green China. And if Red China doesn’t become green China, this is not going to scale because if you do this much damage to your environment, taking people from a dollar a day to 10 dollars a day per capita income, and you want for them to do it for 20 more years . . . this place is going to be a moonscape.”