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China Needs to Cool Growth, Energy Consumption, Planner Says
Li Yanping, Bloomberb
China should take measures to cool economic growth and reduce energy consumption, an official with the National Development and Reform Commission said.
“Current economic growth, 11.5 percent or above 11 percent, is too fast and at too high a cost” Han Yongwen, the planning agency’s secretary general, said at a conference in Beijing today. The world’s fourth largest economy expanded by more than 11 percent through the first three quarters of 2007.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is trying to cool growth in the world’s fastest-growing major economy without triggering a sudden slowdown that may cost jobs and leave factories idle.
(22 December 2007)
The Middle Kingdom’s Dilemma
Christina Larson, Washington Monthly
Can China clean up its environment without cleaning up its politics?
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… As I wrote in these pages last summer (“The Great Leap Forward”), China’s political leaders have in recent years embraced the environmental cause, not out of sentiment or idealism but as a matter of survival. China’s environment is becoming so degraded that it risks choking off the country’s booming economy: the West balks at buying mercury-contaminated grain, while water shortages threaten Chinese paper mills and petrochemical plants. Also at risk is the country’s political stability: peasant riots over land seizures and polluted rivers are becoming increasingly common (“Pollution Revolution”). But while the central government has issued stern directives aimed at reducing air and water pollution, it lacks the means to enforce them. That’s because, in order to promote economic growth over the last three decades, Beijing has gradually relinquished certain types of authority to provincial governments. The result has been dramatic gains in the country’s gross domestic product, with new factories multiplying across the countryside. However, provincial autonomy has also enabled local officials to ignore cumbersome central directives, including regulations on matters ranging from food safety to environmental standards.
Understanding their diminished ability to enforce green statutes locally, China’s leaders have turned cautiously to civil society for assistance. Since 1994, Beijing has empowered nongovernmental groups to expose polluting factories. Today there are more than 3,000 citizen green groups in China. In 2003 and 2004, the government enacted laws requiring environmental impact assessments and citizen input on major public works projects. (These measures took effect shortly after construction commenced on the first two phases of the water transfer project.) In 2005, China’s first national public hearing-over the fate of the Old Summer Palace-was broadcast on national television. Progressive environmental officials are introducing the concepts of “public participation,” “hearings,” and “rights” to the public. Environmental lawyers are litigating China’s first successful class-action lawsuits. Compared to a decade ago, the situation is remarkable.
Still, there are limits to the government’s spirit of reform, and perhaps some in the party feel they’ve been moving too fast.
(December 2007)
China Grabs West’s Smoke-Spewing Factories
Joseph Kahn and Mark Landler, New York Times
… In its rush to re-create the industrial revolution that made the West rich, China has absorbed most of the major industries that once made the West dirty. Spurred by strong state support, Chinese companies have become the dominant makers of steel, coke, aluminum, cement, chemicals, leather, paper and other goods that faced high costs, including tougher environmental rules, in other parts of the world. China has become the world’s factory, but also its smokestack.
This mass shift of polluting industries has blighted China’s economic rise. Double-digit growth rates have done less to improve people’s lives when the damages to the air, land, water and human health are considered, some economists say. Outmoded production equipment will have to be replaced or retrofitted at high cost if the country intends to reduce pollution.
China’s worsening environment has also upended the geopolitics of global warming. It produces and exports so many goods once made in the West that many wealthy countries can boast of declining carbon emissions, even while the world’s overall emissions are rising quickly.
(21 December 2007)
Latest in the New York Times series on China and the environment.
China’s Not Alone in Environmental Crisis
Joshua Muldavin, The Boston Globe
Leaders from around the world gathered these past two weeks at the Bali climate change talks to chart our collective future. Looking out my window in Beijing through the dense haze that envelops this powerful city with world-record levels of smog, dust, and deadly pollution, it is easy to understand why many there perceived China as the Godzilla of global warming. As a country choking on its own “success,” now producing over 20 percent of global greenhouse gases, China makes for easy scapegoating. However, targeting China does little to address the fundamental causes of climate change, mitigate its consequences, or provide lasting solutions.
The West has worked long and hard to transform China into what it is today: an industrial platform for the world where some of the most noxious, occupationally hazardous production processes are concentrated. Western governments and corporations have not only benefited, but have helped lead China down this road of energy-intensive, environmentally destructive development with resulting rapid increases in greenhouse gas emissions.In addition, Western consumers have directly profited from the inexpensive products that pour from China’s factories. Fundamental to the rise of China’s emissions is the rapacious growth of consumption, and the championing of it – especially in the West. The carbon dioxide embedded in China’s exports to the United States in 2004 alone is estimated at 1.8 billion tons, equivalent to 30 percent of the US total.
…The West must acknowledge its own role in shaping and benefiting from China’s global integration and rapid increase in consumption of resources. Instead of being diverted by the relatively easy and therefore attractive answer of blaming China or any single country for rising greenhouse emissions, we must focus on the real root of the problem: a highly unequal and unsustainable international system of production, distribution, and consumption that insulates winners from losers, and delivers the greatest share of the benefits to a lucky few while jeopardizing the future for everyone else.
Joshua Muldavin is a professor of geography at Sarah Lawrence College.
(19 December 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
China: US must be positive on climate
Associated Press
The United States should take a more positive role in tackling climate change while developing nations improve their own domestic energy efficiency, China’s chief climate change negotiator said Thursday.
China is satisfied with the result of the recent Bali climate change negotiations and will cooperate in international talks while working to improve its energy efficiency, Yu Qingtai, China’s special representative for climate change negotiations, told a news briefing.
“When it comes to climate change, developing countries have a basic common position,” Yu said, adding that the countries would have “different responsibilities” in handling the issue.
(20 December 2007)
Global warming causing China’s glaciers to melt quickly: survey
AFP
Global warming has caused some of China’s glaciers — a source for many of Asia’s greatest rivers — to have melted by more than 18 percent over the past five years, state media reported Friday.
A survey of nearly 20,000 square kilometres (8,000 square miles) of China’s glaciers showed they were on average 7.4 percent smaller than five years ago, Caijing magazine said, citing a government-funded survey.
… China’s glaciers, in the west of the country, feed many of Asia’s greatest rivers, including the Yangtze, Mekong, Yellow and Ganges, as well as the Brahmaputra.
In the past four decades, China’s glaciers shrank by 3,248 square kilometres, or 5.5 percent since the 1960s, according to previous studies published in the state-run press.
One of China’s top glaciologists, Yao Tangdong, warned last year of an “ecological catastrophe” in Tibet because of global warming.
(21 December 2007)
Perfect storm of problems leaves many short of water nationwide
Xinhua (China)
China is no stranger to drought, having experienced severe water shortages hundreds of times during the past two millennia. Despite the country’s long experience with drought, however, it is ill-prepared to cope with the current dry spell, one of the worst in decades.
The drought itself, which is affecting even tropical southern regions, is a climactic phenomenon. But its effects are being exacerbated by poor infrastructure, a lack of comprehensive relief plans, river diversion, and increasing water demand from an expanding population and growing industrial economy. Public awareness of the scope of the problem is also low.
Residents around Poyang Lake in eastern China’s Jiangxi Province were astonished in early December to see the country’s largest freshwater lake almost literally drying up before their eyes.
The lake, which covered an area of 300-500 square kilometers last winter, has shrunk to less than 50 sq km, the smallest since hydrological records began to be kept. More than 100,000 residents of the Poyang region are suffering drinking water shortages.
“I have not seen such a severe drought since I was born,” said one 60-year-old, whose family lived by the lake for generations.
China has long suffered frequent droughts. Official records show that from 206 B.C. to 1949 A.D., the country had 1,056 droughts, or one every two years, on average. But a worrisome phenomenon has been observed over the past few years. In addition to the northern and northwestern regions that are accustomed to droughts, the northeast and areas south of the Yangtze River, which historically had abundant precipitation, recorded dry weather more frequently.
(20 December 2007)
