Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
China goes for green before growth
Rowan Callick, Australian
CHINA has announced a sweeping program to shut some of its most polluting factories in a green initiative that is likely to cut its economic growth this year to 8 per cent from 10.7 per cent last year.
Premier Wen Jiabao used his state of the nation address yesterday to unveil environmental initiatives that would close a massive section of China’s old heavy industry.
The initiatives also ban the wasteful use of land, including building golf courses and free-standing homes.
Launching the annual session of the National People’s Congress, Mr Wen said future economic growth would hinge on “environmentally friendly industries”.
Projects would be assessed for “energy consumption and environmental impact”. Those that failed to meet such standards would be stopped. Mr Wen said China would close “backward” iron foundries with a production capacity of less than 30 million tonnes and “backward” steel mills that could produce 35million tonnes.
(5 March 2007)
This is a blow to the many in the West using ‘But look at China!’ as their answer to climate change.-LJ
UPDATE: Just out at the Guardian: China edges towards a greener shade of red.
High temperatures leave five million Chinese short of water
AFP
Nearly five million Chinese are unable to get enough drinking water because of a series of droughts caused by “abnormally high” temperatures, state media said Sunday.
Crucially in a nation which still relies on agriculture for the majority of its people, the drought is also cutting off sufficient water supplies for 2.5 million livestock, the Xinhua news agency reported.
(4 March 2007)
China about to pass U.S. as world’s top generator of greenhouse gases
Robert Collier, SF Chronicle
Far more than previously acknowledged, the battle against global warming will be won or lost in China, even more so than in the West, new data show.
A report released last week by Beijing authorities indicated that as its economy continues to expand at a red-hot pace, China is highly likely to overtake the United States this year or in 2008 as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
This information, along with data from the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based alliance of oil importing nations, also revealed that China’s greenhouse gas emissions have recently been growing by a total amount much greater than that of all industrialized nations put together.
“The magnitude of what’s happening in China threatens to wipe out what’s happening internationally,” said David Fridley, leader of the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“Today’s global warming problem has been caused mainly by us in the West, with the cumulative (carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere, but China is contributing to the global warming problem of tomorrow.”
New statistics released in Beijing on Wednesday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics show that China’s consumption of fossil fuels rose in 2006 by 9.3 percent, about the same rate as in previous years — and about eight times higher than the U.S. increase of 1.2 percent.
(5 March 2007)
