--FILE--le persone a piedi fuori dal Ministero della protezione ambientale a Pechino in Cina, 27 marzo 2008. In un clamorosamente blunt valutazione del suo fiv
--FILE--People walk out from the Ministry of Environmental Protection in Beijing, China, 27 March 2008. In a startlingly blunt assessment of his five-year-old ministry, Zhou Shengxian was quoted by state media as saying: I have heard that there are four major embarrassing departments in the world and that Chinas Ministry of Environmental Protection is one of them. Mr. Zhou, an economist and veteran Communist Party member, blamed his ministrys malfunctions on overlapping remits, which confused the agencys role in handling issues such as carbon emissions and water monitoring. The environment minister made no mention of the other three most embarrassing departments. The environment ministers admission came as a new study claimed that severe air pollution in northern China had slashed life expectancies there by more than five years compared to the south, potentially robbing 500 million Chinese of a total of 2.5 billion years of life.
