Promise of Green Olympics with Chinese Shame: -- China's Climate Crisis

-- Micky's comment: China has achieved to become the worst nightmare for
many, a run away train with 1.5 billion riders onboard. --

China's Climate Crisis

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/09/opinion/printable3031053.shtml

July 9, 2007(The Nation) This column was written by Elizabeth Economy.

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.

Moreover, a one-meter rise in sea level will submerge an area the size
of Portugal along China's eastern seaboard ― home to more than half the
country's population and 60 percent of its economic output. Already
climate change-related extreme weather is taking its toll: In 2006 such
disasters cost China more than $25 billion in damage. Finally, a study
by Shanghai-based researcher Wen Jiahong suggests that the lethal H5N1
virus will spread as climate change shifts the habitats and migratory
patterns of birds.

Yet China's leaders show little inclination to move aggressively to
forestall such calamities. As a result of China's reliance on coal to
fuel its economy, its emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide
have tripled over the past thirty years and are now second only to those
of the United States. In late 2006 the International Energy Agency
predicted that China would surpass the United States as the largest
contributor of CO2 by 2009, a full decade earlier than anticipated.
China already uses more coal than the United States, the European Union
and Japan combined and is the world's second-largest consumer of oil
after the United States. (India, which lags well behind China in its
overall consumption of coal, is nonetheless on track to become a major
CO2 contributor over the next ten years and is already the fifth-largest
contributor of greenhouse gases globally.)

China's development strategy suggests that little will change in the
foreseeable future. With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese
population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in
China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts. And
China's love affair with the private car is set to rival that of the
United States. A conservative estimate by the Asian Development Bank
predicts that the number of cars in China could increase by fifteen
times present levels over the next thirty years, more than tripling CO2
emissions.

If China's development trajectory continues as planned, its increase in
greenhouse gas emissions will likely exceed that of all industrialized
countries combined over the next twenty-five years, surpassing by five
times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol sought. In
short, it's a nightmarishly bad picture.

It would be unfair, however, to characterize China as doing nothing to
address climate change. The leadership's worries about both energy
security and domestic air pollution ― five of the world's ten most
polluted cities are in China ― are propelling them to set bold targets
for reshaping their energy mix and enhancing energy efficiency.

The Chinese government has called for renewable energy to provide 10
percent of the nation's power by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020. Key
state-owned enterprises and provincial governors must make 20 percent
reductions in their energy intensity (that is, energy consumed per unit
of GDP) over the next three years. On that front there is a lot of room
for improvement: China's buildings consume 250 percent more energy than
buildings in other countries with comparable climates. Beijing has
responded with a raft of tough new building codes for energy efficiency.
Much like the United States, cities and provinces are now taking matters
into their own hands. Shenzhen, for example, has passed a regulation
that solar power be used to supply hot water in all new residential
buildings under twelve stories.

Already there is some success. With the assistance of the U.S.-based
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), China built its first LEED
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified building.
Fittingly, the building houses the Ministry of Science and Technology,
in Beijing. Ten stories tall, it uses 70 percent less energy than
similar buildings and saves 10,000 tons of water annually through
rainwater collection. NRDC energy expert Robert Watson, one of the chief
architects of the project, claims that if every new nonresidential
building in China matched this one, the electricity savings would equal
the amount of energy provided by the Three Gorges Dam.

But China is littered with well-intended demonstration projects that go
nowhere. If these new regulations are to have an impact, Beijing's tough
rhetoric must be matched by real enforcement, a task that has proved
elusive in the past. In 2002 the Chinese government pledged to cut
sulfur dioxide 10 percent by 2005. (SO2 is not a greenhouse gas but is a
noxious byproduct of coal power that causes acid rain and urban smog;
getting rid of it is a good idea.) But SO2 emissions have increased 27
percent. From all accounts, few if any of the coal-fired power plants
that China is bringing online almost every week embrace state-of-the-art
clean technology. Moreover, Beijing has already missed its first-year
target for the 2006-10 plan to increase the energy efficiency of industry.

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.

At root, however, China's lax environmental enforcement results from
Beijing's failure to create a system of green-oriented incentives and
penalties. Pricing of natural resources, pollution levies and promotion
incentives for officials should all be geared toward environmental
protection. Instead, growth at all costs is the guiding logic. Moreover,
China's leaders are afraid to unleash civil society, in the form of the
media, the legal system and NGOs, to help hold local officials
accountable for wrongdoing. Already there are tens of thousands of mass
demonstrations over environmental pollution every year. Officials fear
that opposition demands will escalate out of control, unleashing a far
more powerful push for broader political reform. So the government
relies on its old methods, limiting transparency, accountability and
free expression.

On the international stage, China faces pressure and incentives to
become more environmentally responsible. Beijing's interest in promoting
energy efficiency and the development of renewable energy resources ― as
well as a desire to be perceived as a constructive global actor ― drove
China's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. And China has become an
active player in the Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM),
tapping into opportunities for technology transfer and international
investment. China already has some seventy CDM projects under way ― well
over half of which supply foreign investment and/or technology for
renewable energy projects. According to an Asian Development Bank
expert, China could generate an annual revenue stream of more than $2
billion by participating in externally funded CDM projects.

But without more substantial commitment to meet real targets for radical
emissions reductions, China's greenhouse contributions will overwhelm
its best efforts.

If there is a meaningful Chinese discussion about tackling climate
change, it takes place largely behind closed doors, well out of sight of
foreigners. Perhaps recent natural disasters will motivate Chinese
leaders: Over just the past year China has suffered floods in the east
that have affected more than 10 million people, while drought this
spring left 13 million people and 12 million farm animals without enough
drinking water.

The Communist Party's argument over the past fifteen years has been:
Since China came late to the industrialization game, the core economies,
with their significantly greater historical greenhouse gas
contributions, must pay for a global transformation away from fossil
fuels. Now it is China's turn to develop, so deal with it.

"Development is the first urgent task," said Qin Dahe, a member of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-chair of the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It's a firm principle and,
moreover, we need good and fast development. Only then will we be able
to step by step solve the problem" of climate change. Chinese officials
are also quick to point out that on a per capita basis, China's
greenhouse gas emissions are dwarfed by those of the developed
countries: Per capita discharge is only 61 percent of the world's
average and 21 percent of that of OECD (Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development) countries.

A more subtle indication of how China's leaders understand the global
climate change regime is revealed by the regulatory framework China has
established for the Kyoto-related CDM projects. In essence, Beijing
places a higher priority on projects that contribute to the development
of the economy and transfer technology to China than on projects that
make reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

When growth and green can be accomplished together, the Chinese
government embraces environmentalism. For example, it actively
discriminates in favor of CDM proposals that transfer technology and
advance the country's capacity in renewables, energy efficiency and
methane recovery. But reforestation projects or projects that propose to
reduce emissions of HFC-23 ― a greenhouse gas with global warming
potential more than 11,000 times that of CO23 ― are discouraged because
they do not involve enough capital or provide technology transfer.
Working within these confines, the Kyoto-related CDM framework offers
important ways for OECD countries to nudge China away from fossil fuels.

Paradoxically, another reason climate change is not a bigger issue in
China has to do with local pollution. Anyone who has visited an inland
Chinese city knows how terrifyingly bad the air is. Chinese media are
replete with horrifying statistics: An estimated 400,000 people die
prematurely from respiratory diseases related to air pollution each
year; one-quarter of China's land is desert, and the desert is advancing
at the rate of 1,900 square miles per year, producing tens of thousands
of environmental migrants; and in China's north and west, severe and
growing water scarcity is impinging on economic growth, limiting
agricultural and industrial output. As a result even the burgeoning
environmental nongovernmental sector in China discusses climate change
only as an afterthought. Strangely, few outside the scientific community
make the connection that climate change may be exacerbating and
exacerbated by these "domestic" problems.

The world's most industrialized countries started the climate crisis,
but China might well finish the job. Not having China on board for a
more stringent post-Kyoto accord is simply not an option.

In late April the Chinese government is expected to release a national
plan on global climate change. From all accounts, the document will
reinforce the government's commitment to energy efficiency and
renewables while also setting forth prevention policies for natural
disasters. What it will not do, unsurprisingly, is embrace any targets
or timetables for greenhouse gas emission reductions. For that to
happen, two things are necessary. First, the United States, preferably
with Australia and India in tow, must agree to aggressive emission
reductions, perhaps along the lines currently pursued by California.
Without a strong U.S. commitment, the international community has no
credibility in pressuring the Chinese.

Second, OECD countries will have to be far more generous and
comprehensive in compensating China in its struggle to enforce tougher
energy efficiency and renewable standards. That can be done with both
financial incentives and technology transfers. What finally brought the
Chinese on board with Kyoto and previous international environmental
agreements was the attraction of getting paid to do the right thing. If
the United States joins the fight against climate change ― and if the
price is right ― there is every reason to believe that China can commit
to doing the right thing again.

By Elizabeth Economy
Reprinted with permission from the The Nation.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/09/opinion/printable3031053.shtml