It's enough to make some people want to hug a tree — China's "green leap forward," as the Christian Science Monitor gushed the other day. And "China signals long-term plans to curb greenhouse gases," as Reuters now reports.

Take a deep breath, if you can. China's actually more and more an environmental disaster (that's Beijing at left), and the costs of doing business (including paying at least some money to keep workers' lungs functioning) keep mounting. Only Tuesday, the NYT pointed out that China's garbage incinerators are a "global health hazard." China now spews out more household garbage than the U.S. and is the world's largest coal user.

Besides, the Chinese government isn't really doing that much about its rapidly expanding pollution of the planet. Christina Larson pointed out in April: "China's Grand Plans for Eco-Cities Now Lie Abandoned." More to the point, the most prominent environmentalist in the Chinese government, Pan Yue, is now practically voiceless.

Not that the news is all bad. Waste Management just agreed to pour $140 million into a Chinese waste-to-energy venture. It and other trash firms could make a real haul.

News from the other meltdown front, which is heating up around the globe: China's factories are really smokin' — it's headed toward a record output of steel (while S&P analysts are colder on the U.S. mining and metals industry). But Chinese officials rip the Barack Obama's clean-energy moves, still insisting that it's the developed nations, not China, that are responsible for cutting emissions.

Meanwhile, Capitol Hill's global-warming deniers are fuming more than ever about that nasty cap-and-trade approach.

But the FT's Clive Crook has a pretty fresh take, calling the cap-and-trade bill a "travesty" because Barack Obama, though he says he wants to tackle climate change (and healthcare reform), is "choosing to be weak."