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The man making the world’s worst polluter clean up its act
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian
He is not as well known as Al Gore or David Attenborough but among green campaigners, no one has a bigger role in tackling climate change than Ma Jun. As China’s economic growth races on at breakneck speed and with more dirty, coal-burning power plants coming on line each year, the world’s most populous nation will soon overtake the US as the biggest greenhouse gas emitter.
Ma, 39, has emerged as the powerful voice of a budding green movement that is forcing industry and China’s tightly run state to be more accountable for the long-term consequences of their rush to get rich. ..
There was not much an ordinary citizen could do then, when green campaigners were considered a threat to a government fixated with economic growth regardless of the environmental cost. But much has changed. Since 2003, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has done more than any leader to press the environmental case. Five years ago, there were fewer than 50 registered green NGOs in the country. Today there are almost 3,000.
Ma’s institute’s online China Water Pollution Map – ipe.org.cn – names and shames the worst offending regions and companies. It is a symbol of a new kind of social activism in China: pragmatic rather than idealistic, and relying more on maps and data than votes and speeches to lobby for change. ..
(8 July 2007)
Warming strikes a note in China
A growing middle class seeing dangers of pollution
Robert Collier, SF Chronicle
Millions of Chinese got their first exposure to Western-style environmentalism Saturday when the Live Earth concert played to a nation whose stunning economic boom is becoming a global-warming nightmare.
The concert location in Shanghai was the most visually spectacular of the Live Earth sites around the world — at the foot of the Oriental Pearl Tower, an ultra-modern, 1,535-foot-tall structure that resembles a colossal spaceship hovering over the city.
As the tower’s colored lights illuminated the swirling mists of a thunderstorm in garish, candy hues, the event fairly screamed out to be called a harbinger of the future.
Just what sort of future, however, is far from clear.
The big question for China — along with the other nations hosting Live Earth concerts — is whether the event will spur support for meaningful action to cut energy use and, in so doing, reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.
In China, the stakes are far higher than elsewhere.
…Market research firms say their surveys have found rising consumer interest in the environment and public health.
“The Chinese, especially the young, are coming up on environmental concern in quite a big way,” said P.T. Black, president of Jigsaw International, a Shanghai firm that does market research throughout China for major multinational corporations.
Black said that recent surveys his firm has conducted among middle-class, urban Chinese youth show an unmet market niche for products and ideas that are linked to environmental protection.
“It’s still not hip or trendy, but people are becoming more confident in asking, ‘Why is the sky so gray? Why is the water so dirty, and the food so unsafe?’ It’s not like the United States — the yuppie sort of Whole Earth, reduced-consumption, simple-life kind of stuff,” he said. “They still want economic development, but they want to develop better, smarter, cleaner.”
(8 July 2007)
China vs. Earth
Elizabeth Economy, The Nation
The message is clear: Shanghai under water, Tibetan glaciers disappearing, crop yields in precipitous decline, epidemics flaring. These are just some of the dire consequences that Chinese scientists predict for their country this century if current climate change is not addressed. Yet China’s leaders pay about as much attention to the issue as does George W. Bush. In fact, a report issued last year by the Climate Action Network-Europe ranks China fifty-fourth out of fifty-six countries for its climate change response, just behind the United States and ahead only of Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.
Beijing knows the costs of inaction: A recent major official study on climate change predicts up to a 37 percent decline in China’s wheat, rice and corn yields in the second half of the century. Precipitation may decline by as much as 30 percent in three of China’s seven major river regions: the Huai, Liao and Hai. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which support the richest agricultural regions of the country and derive much of their water from Tibetan glaciers, will initially experience floods and then drought as the glaciers melt.
Why can’t this supposed command economy impose solutions if its leadership sees a problem? There are several reasons behind China’s consistent failure to meet environmental goals. ..
First, the central government in Beijing actually has little on-the-ground enforcement capability in the provinces. Local environmental protection officials report to and are beholden to local government officials, not to the State Environmental Protection Administration in Beijing. One of the West’s great misconceptions is that what Beijing says goes. In fact, local officials are often in cahoots with factory managers and allow industry to pollute well above legal limits–either because the officials have a financial stake in the enterprise or because they are afraid that closing a factory, or making it more expensive to operate, will diminish local employment and lead to social unrest, which is now a very serious problem all across China.
In other cases, local officials want to do the right thing but are too weak in the face of powerful enterprise managers. ..
(7 July 2007)
