“China is dangerously near a crisis. The country’s enormous environmental debt will have to be paid one way or another,” Pan Yue, deputy head of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration, said in a letter to the South China Morning Post.

“(We must) begin paying this debt now … rather than allowing it to accumulate and, ultimately, threaten to bankrupt us all,” he added. … “Scarcely anyone bothers to consider the environmental costs to — or rights of — the country’s poor and powerless,” Pan said. … Read the full story.