A pretty sobering look at the true cost’s of China’s growth in the New York Times. It’s from this past August, but it’s new to me, and if it’s new to you, take a look. China’s environmental problems gets a lot of mention anecdotally, but without quantification it’s hard to grasp the immense scale of the crisis.

Among the scarier pull-quotes:

Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union.

China already burns more coal than the United States, Europe, and Japan combined.

Chinese industry uses 4 to 10 times more water per unit of production than the average in industrialized nations.

One-third of all river water, and vast sections of China’s great lakes have water rated Grade V, the most degraded level, rendering it unfit for industrial or agricultural use.

By World Bank and WHO estimates, air and water pollution causes 750,000 premature deaths each year. According to Chinese experts, the models used are probably conservative.

China now seems likely to need as much energy in 2010 as it thought it would need in 2020 under the most pessimistic assumptions.

In 2005 alone, China added 66 gigawatts of electricity to its power grid, about as much power as Britain generates in a year. Last year, it added an additional 102 gigawatts, as much as France.