Re: [greenyes] China's environment

["Mike Morin" <mikemorin@no.address>]

You should send this to National Corporate Radio.

After all, they like to report on all the problems elsewhere, but never
those of the United States.

Perhaps this is a propaganda piece so that we can bomb them. After all, the
inventories of "our" military equipment are probably stacking up.

Perhaps, this a piece so that we can all say "God Bless America" as the
whole civilization goes down the tubes.

Wake up America.


Working for peace and cooperation,


Mike Morin
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rose Niemi" <Rose@no.address>
To: <greenyes@no.address>; <gaia-members@no.address>;
<zwia@no.address>; <crra_members@no.address>
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 3:40 PM
Subject: [greenyes] China's environment




From:  http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3104453

China's environment

A great wall of waste

Aug 19th 2004 | BEIJING, GUANGZHOU, HONG KONG, SHANGBA, SHANGHAI AND TAIHE
From The Economist print edition


China is slowly starting to tackle its huge pollution problems

PLUGGING a cigarette into his mouth, He Shouming runs a nicotine-stained
fingernail down a list of registered deaths in Shangba, dubbed “cancer
village” by the locals. The Communist Party official in this cluster of tiny
hamlets of 3,300 people in northern Guangdong province, he concludes that
almost half the 11 deaths among his neighbours this year, and 14 of the 31
last year, were due to cancer.

Mr He blames Dabaoshan, a nearby mineral mine owned by the Guangdong
provincial government, and a host of smaller private mines for spewing toxic
waste into the local rivers, raising lead levels to 44 times permitted
rates. Walking around the village, the water in the streams is indeed an
alarming rust-red. A rice farmer complains of itchy legs from the paddies,
and his wife needs a new kettle each month because the water corrodes metal.
“Put a duck in this water and it would die in two days,” declares Mr He.

Poisons from the mines are also killing the village's economy, which depends
on clean water to irrigate its crops, says Mr He. Rice yields are one-third
of the national average and nobody wants to buy the crop. Annual incomes
here have been stuck at less than 1,500 yuan ($180) per person for a decade,
almost three times lower than the average in Guangdong province. The
solution to Shangba's nightmare would be a local reservoir, but that idea
was abandoned after various tiers of government squabbled over the 8.4m yuan
cost.

Some 200km (124 miles) farther south and several decades into the future
sits the Taihe landfill plant. Built for 540m yuan by Onyx, a
waste-management company that is part of Veolia, a French utility, it has
handled all of Guangzhou city's solid waste for the past two years. Each
hour 140 trucks snake into the site, bringing 7,000 tonnes of rubbish a day
from the 9.9m inhabitants of Guangdong's capital. In October delegates from
300 other municipalities will visit Taihe, promoted by central government as
a role model of technology.

Smart cards record each truck's load, since Onyx charges by weight.
Unrippable German fabric lines the crater into which the waste is dumped,
stopping leachate*a toxic black liquid*from leaking into the groundwater, as
it does at almost all Chinese-run sites. Most landfill in China is wet
(solid rubbish, such as old TVs, is scavenged), and the Taihe plant collects
a full 1,300 tonnes of the black liquid daily. Chemical and filtration
systems to neutralise it are its biggest cost. Expensive too is the
extraction equipment to gather another by-product, methane gas, which Onyx
plans to feed into generators that will supply electricity to the local
grid. Finally, the waste is topped off with plastic caps, deodorised and
landscaped, while a crystal-clear fountain at the entrance tinkles with the
cleaned-up leachate.

The extremes represented by Shangba and Taihe explain why it is difficult to
get an accurate picture of China's pollution. In a country where data are
untrustworthy, corruption rife and the business climate for foreigners
unpredictable, neither the cause of Shangba's problems nor the smooth
efficiency of Taihe are necessarily what they seem. As with many other
aspects of China's economic development, rapid progress and bold experiments
in some areas are balanced by bureaucratic rigidity and stagnation in
others.

Certainly, awareness of China's environmental problems is rising among
policymakers at the highest level*reflected in a new package of
right-sounding initiatives like a “green GDP” indicator to account for
environmental costs. So is the pressure, both internal and international, to
fix them. But while all developing economies face this issue, there are
historical, political and institutional reasons why it will be a long and
complicated process in China. There is some cause for optimism, not least an
influx of foreign technology and capital. But progress on pollution is
unlikely to be as rapid or uniform as the government and environmentalists
desire.

Nor should it necessarily be. China's need to lift so many people out of
poverty (the country's average annual income per head has only just breached
$1,000), holds the edge over long-term considerations like sustainable
development. The priorities of environmental activists, both foreign and
Chinese, almost never reflect this. Greenpeace lobbies for China to invest
in wind farms, an unrealistic answer to the country's power needs, while
environmentalists from rich countries naively tell aspiring Chinese to
eschew their new cars and air-conditioners.



Nor any drop to drink
That is not to deny the huge scale of China's environmental challenges.
Water and waste pollution is the single most serious issue. Pan Yue, deputy
head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), the
country's environmental watchdog ministry, calls it “the bottleneck
constraining economic growth in China”. Per head, China's water resources
are among the lowest in the world and concentrated in the south, so that the
north and west experience regular droughts. Inadequate investments in supply
and treatment infrastructure means that even where water is not scarce, it
is rarely clean. Around half the population, or 600m people, have water
supplies that are contaminated by animal and human waste.

In late July an environmental disaster occurred on the Huai river, one of
China's seven big rivers. A 133km-long black and brown plume swept along the
river killing millions of fish and devastating wildlife. According to Mr
Pan, the catastrophe occurred because too much water had been taken from the
river system, reducing its ability to clean itself. Others say that numerous
factories dump untreated waste directly into the water.

As for used water, with a national daily sewage rate of around 3.7 billion
tonnes, China would need 10,000 waste-water treatment plants costing some
$48 billion just to achieve a 50% treatment rate, according to Frost &
Sullivan, a consultancy. SEPA found over 70% of the water in five of China's
seven major river systems was unsuitable for human contact. As more people
move into cities, the problem of household waste is becoming severe. Only
20% of China's 168m tonnes of solid waste per year is properly disposed of.

The air is not much better. “If I work in your Beijing, I would shorten my
life at least five years,” Zhu Rongji told city officials when he was prime
minister in 1999. According to the World Bank, China has 16 of the world's
20 most polluted cities. Estimates suggest that 300,000 people a year die
prematurely from respiratory diseases.

The main reason is that around 70% of China's mushrooming energy needs are
supplied by coal-fired power stations, compared with 50% in America.
Combined with the still widespread use of coal burners to heat homes, China
has the world's highest emissions of sulphur dioxide and a quarter of the
country endures acid rain. In 2002, SEPA found that the air quality in
almost two-thirds of 300 cities it tested failed World Health Organisation
standards*yet emissions from rocketing car ownership are only just becoming
an issue. Hopes that China will “leapfrog” the West with super-green cars
are naive, since dirty fuel messes up clean engines and the high cost of new
cars keeps old ones on the road. Sun Jian, the second-ranking official at
Shanghai's environmental protection bureau, estimates that 70% of Shanghai's
1m cars do not even reach the oldest European emission standards.

Farmland erosion and desertification resulted in Beijing being hit with 11
sandstorms in 2000, prompting Mr Zhu to wonder whether the advancing desert
might force him to relocate the capital. A year later, the yellow dust
clouds were so extensive that they raised complaints in South Korea and
Japan and travelled as far as America. A partial logging ban and massive
replanting appear to have reversed China's deforestation, but its grass and
agricultural land continue to shrink.

Adding it all up, the World Bank concludes that pollution is costing China
an annual 8-12% of its $1.4 trillion GDP in direct damage, such as the
impact on crops of acid rain, medical bills, lost work from illness, money
spent on disaster relief following floods and the implied costs of resource
depletion. With health costs escalating (see article), that figure will
increase, giving rise to some grim prognoses that growth itself will be
undermined. “Ignored for decades, even centuries, China's environmental
problems have the potential to bring the country to its knees economically,”
argues Elizabeth Economy, author of “The River Runs Black”, a new book on
China's pollution.

SEPA's Mr Pan is gloomier still: “Our natural resources will soon be unable
to support our population.” His predecessor Qu Geping, the first head of
China's National Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA's forerunner) in
1985, believes that while the official goal of quadrupling 2002 GDP by 2020
can be “healthily achieved”, if nothing is done about the environment,
economic growth could grind to a halt.

But China's relationship with its environment has long been uneasy. For
centuries, the country's rulers subjugated their surroundings rather than
attempting to live in harmony with them. Mao declared that man must “conquer
nature and thus attain freedom from nature”. In the past two decades, the
toll extracted by China's manufacturing-led development and the sheer scale
of its 9%-a-year economic expansion has only increased.



From conquest to nurture
This has spurred the government into belated action. In 1998, Mr Zhu
elevated SEPA to ministerial rank and three years later the 10th Five-year
Plan for Environmental Protection set ambitious emission-reduction targets
and boosted environmental spending to 700 billion yuan ($85 billion) for
2001-05*equivalent to 1.3% of GDP, up from 0.8% in the early 1990s (though
still below the 2% suggested by the World Bank). A legal framework has been
created. And the rhetoric has changed too, with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao,
the current president and prime minister, now stressing balanced development
rather than all-out economic growth.

Beijing's good intentions, however, have so far had only limited impact,
thanks to the vast, decentralised bureaucracy through which it is forced to
govern such a huge country. As Ken Lieberthal, a China expert at the
University of Michigan, explains: “Much of the environmental energy
generated at the national level dissipates as it diffuses through the
multi-layered state structure, producing outcomes that have little concrete
effect.”

SEPA, the government's chosen weapon in the fight against pollution, is
under-resourced despite its enhanced status, with little money and just 300
central staff. In the capital, it must battle for influence with other
agencies, such as the Construction Ministry that handles water and sewage
treatment. Bureaucratic rivalries mean there is no co-operation and no
sharing of the (often patchy) data that are collected with limited funds,
observes Bruce Murray, the Asian Development Bank's representative in China.

Around the country, SEPA's branches, known as Environmental Protection Burea
us, are supposed to monitor pollution, enforce standards and collect fines.
But they are more in thrall to local governments*whose priorities are to
maintain growth and employment in their jurisdiction*than to head office in
Beijing. It is no rarity, therefore, to find a bureau imposing a fine on a
dirty local enterprise (thus fulfilling its duty), but then passing the
money on to the local administration, which refunds it to the company via a
tax break. “The environmental management system needs real reform,” says Ma
Jun, an environmental scholar. “The bureaus depend on the local government
for their salaries and pensions. How can they enforce regulations against
the local government?” Mr Pan complains that SEPA cannot effectively push
through central edicts because it does not directly employ environmental
personnel at the local level. Mr Sun at the Shanghai bureau says that SEPA
has given him only 300 people with which to police 20,000 factories.



Make polluters pay
SEPA's impotence is one reason why penalties, even when it can impose them,
remain laughably light. Mr Sun says the maximum he can fine a polluting
company in Shanghai*a model city when it comes to the environment*is 100,000
yuan or about $12,000. But just as fundamental is that China lacks an
understanding of the concept that the polluter should pay. “The legacy of
the old, centrally planned economy is that electricity and water are treated
as free goods or goods to be provided at minimal cost,” says the ADB's Mr
Murray. Since the utilities cannot pass on the costs of cleaner water or
lower power-station emissions to consumers, they fight any drive for higher
standards and conservation tooth and nail. Even the central government is
unwilling to impose price rises in basic services that could spark public
unrest.

Water is an example. While customer tariffs have been raised in showcase
cities, such as Beijing and Dalian in the north-east, water remains
stunningly cheap in China. According to the World Bank, water for
agriculture, which makes up three-quarters of the total used, is priced at
0.03 yuan (0.4 cents) per cubic metre, or about 40% of cost. More than half
is lost in leaky irrigation systems. Meanwhile, the cost of more modern
services, such as Guangzhou's solid-waste disposal, is entirely borne by the
government.

Without the introduction of realistic pricing, China will not be able to
afford to clean up its pollution, particularly the cost of enough foreign
technology. Yet a system allocating the costs to the polluter will be hard
to introduce and enforce. Even in Hong Kong, the territory's environment
minister Sarah Liao concedes there is no tradition of having consumers bear
the full costs of environmental regulations.

Ms Liao can also testify to the mainland's ambivalent attitude when it comes
to letting outsiders help. She started looking into how the Pearl River
delta's pollution was affecting Hong Kong back in 1999, but her requests to
start monitoring emissions were repeatedly rebuffed even when she offered to
pay for the equipment. Data collection finally started this year. For Thames
Water, a British utility that is now a part of Germany's RWE, the experience
was much worse. In June, Thames pulled out of a $73m advanced waste-water
treatment plant it had built and was running in Shanghai, after the central
government ruled that the fixed annual 15% return it had negotiated was now
illegal.

There is no need to be unremittingly gloomy about China's environment,
nevertheless. As developing countries get richer, they tend to pollute less.
Nationally in China, discharges of chemical oxygen have declined over the
past three years, those of industrial dust have stabilised and
sulphur-dioxide emissions had been on the downtrend until 2003 when energy
shortages increased demand for sulphurous coal (see charts). Most east-coast
cities are enjoying more sunny days and the pollution load in the rivers is
falling. Environmentally, in many places, China may have passed its nadir.

The government is increasing environmental spending and the more concerned
attitude of the top leadership could filter down the hierarchy if the
performance of officials starts being measured partly on environmental
criteria, as Mr Qu hints it might. But the bigger incentive is that Beijing
is under pressure to do more, partly from domestic public opinion. As urban
Chinese see their material wealth increase, more are caring about the
environment, while the concerns of the poor are increasingly being
channelled by green non-governmental organisations. Though these remain
extremely weak*few have more than a handful of members and all need
government affiliation*Mr Wen said recently he suspended plans for the
construction of 13 dams along the Nu river in Yunnan province partly because
of the concerns outlined by such groups.

External pressure is even greater. Despite reservations, foreign companies
are flocking to China, scenting a fast-growing market for their
environmental technologies and skills. International agencies are tying
funds to environmental criteria, while foreign governments are beginning to
complain about China's dust storms and greenhouse-gas emissions. All this
will help spread best practices. Beijing is fast cleaning up ahead of the
2008 Olympics, moving out factories and introducing clean-vehicle
technology: a new premium is being placed on global respectability.

Of course, environmental problems and their huge costs will dog China for
many years. In a country where the public is not free to speak, too many
courts are toothless and environmental groups remain on a tight leash, it
will be hard to know if the government's avowedly green policies are being
implemented. But China deserves credit for its attempts to clean itself up.
The balance between sustainable development and economic growth will have to
be continuously adjusted in the future. Right now, China is probably moving
in the right direction.





Rose Niemi
Merced County Association of Governments
369 West 18th Street
Merced CA 95340
209-723-3153, extension 315
rose@no.address