When the new leadership’s ministerial appointments were announced last weekend, Zhou retained his post, to the disappointment of those concerned about the environment. The public questioned why a minister with no achievements should remain in power.

When, on March 16, almost 3,000 representatives to the National People’s Congress voted on 25 ministerial appointments, Zhou received the lowest number of supporting votes, showing the level of discontent with his work.

The news was also met with catcalls from the public. Musician Zhao Tianming asked on his microblog if anyone knew what the minister’s achievements were. The vast majority of the 4,000-odd netizens who forwarded and commented on his message did not. One asked if the fact that one river was full of pigs and others had dried up; and the towns covered in smog and millions suffering from dust-related lung diseases could be classed as ministerial feats.

Liu does credit new premier Li Keqiang with some encouraging rhetoric and past achievements. But a campaigner quoted by Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian argued that, in any case, the problem does not lie at the top of the political pyramid:

Ma Tianjie, the head of toxics campaign at Greenpeace East Asia, said that despite the lack of concrete anti-pollution action at the congress, bold environmental legislation may yet emerge over the next five years as new leaders acclimate to their roles and cement their alliances.

“Because they’re changing a lot of positions at the top, they have been a bit cautious in revealing their agenda,” he said. “The problem is not that the top doesn’t get it – they have got it for a while now. The problem is with lower level authorities, whether they can translate that kind of top-level consciousness to actual actions on the ground.”

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Post tags: environment, environmental policy, environmental protection, greenpeace, Li Keqiang, National People's Congress, Pan Yue, pollution
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Chinese officials are fond of grandiose engineering projects. After more than a decade of toil, one of the biggest since the construction of the Great Wall is close to achieving what they like to call a “decisive victory”. In coming months, canals and pipelines hundreds of kilometres long will bring water from the Yangzi River basin to the parched north. But growing demand is forcing officials to look for other sources. A promising one, they believe, is the sea.

[…] In its first five-year plan for the industry, in December, the government insisted that desalination was “of benefit to sustainable development”. It was better, it argued, than sucking more water out of the north’s fast-diminishing aquifers. That is surely right. Yet desalinating water uses enormous amounts of energy, which comes mainly from highly polluting coal (though Beijiang’s advanced technology is more efficient than that found in standard power plants). And diverting water from the river basin could exacerbate the impact of droughts in the south. No wonder that environmentalists complain that the government is relying on costly remedies, and doing too little to encourage conservation.

Historian Kenneth Pomeranz suggested in 2011 “that if you put anything like the cost of the South-North water diversion project into fixing a million leaky faucets, lining a million unlined irrigation ditches […] etc., etc., you could do more to alleviate the problem (and more safely) than the diversion project will do.”

In fact, “China is becoming a global hub of environmental experimentation” in water conservation, according to environmental economist Michael Bennett. But these innovative measures are limited in scope and forced to compete with the official penchant for Pharaonic engineering. At chinadialogue last month, Olivia Boyd examined China’s “split personality”:

One pressing question is whether the elements of government pushing for a continued emphasis on heavy engineering can be tamed. As impressive as China’s efforts to preserve its water resources may be, recent history holds a litany of controversial water-management schemes: the Three Gorges Dam, the South-North water transfer scheme and even an idea to pump sea water from the Bohai Gulf to Inner Mongolia to feed thirsty coal plants.

The South-North project currently tops the list. This Mao-era dream to divert water north from the Yangtze River, now under construction, has been criticised by economists and environmentalists for its expense, impacts on agriculture and mass relocations of communities, among other issues. Many, including Bennett, argue the government would do better to reform water pricing so that downtown hotels in parched Beijing no longer gush water from grand fountains, or golf courses guzzle resources keeping their courses green.

“The government has multiple personalities and one of them is obviously this pour more cement, create more infrastructure to solve water problems kind of approach,” says Bennett. “But there’s definitely a growing voice that says no, we need to price water accordingly, we need to invest proactively in improving the efficiency of how we use water.”

A Greenpeace investigation following a chemical spill in Shanxi in December highlighted the scale of the challenge. From Didi Kirsten Tatlow at IHT Rendezvous:

[…] Greenpeace found that the fast pace of water consumption by coal and chemical industries in the area is drying up all water resources further downstream. In fact, by 2015, water consumption by coal and chemical industry in China’s dry, western areas is set to use up a whopping quarter of the water flowing annually in the nearby Yellow River, which forms much of the border of Shanxi Province and is popularly known as China’s “Mother River,” wrote chinadialogue.

As chinadialogue wrote, citing Greenpeace, “Even more worrying than the chemical leak is the high water consumption of the coal and chemical industries in the area.”

[…] None of this may be news to hardened followers of China’s crumpling environment, but the scale of the water consumption in the water-scarce area is nonetheless shocking: The Tianji Coal Chemical Industry Group, which caused the spill, consumes water equivalent to the consumption of about 300,000 people per year, chinadialogue wrote, citing the Greenpeace investigation.

The Yellow and other rivers now carry so much pollution and so little water to the Bohai—from which the Beijiang desalination plant in the Economist article draws its water—that the sea is in danger of ecological collapse.

See more on water shortages and the South-North Water Diversion project on CDT.

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Post tags: Bohai, desalination, greenpeace, Shanxi, south-to-north water diversion project, Three Gorges Dam, Tianjin, water shortage, Yangtze River, Yellow River
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The capital will take 180,000 old vehicles off the road and promote clean energy autos among government departments, the public and the urban cleaning sector, which includes street cleaners and trash collectors, Wang Anshun said at the opening of a session of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, the municipal legislature.

The heating systems of 44,000 old, single-story homes and coal-burning boilers downtown are to be replaced with clean energy, Wang said as he delivered a government work report.

The city will also speed up the promotion of clean energy in rural areas and strictly control dust in construction projects, said Wang.

He vowed to strengthen air quality monitoring and analysis, as well as the release of such information.

The promise of increased transparency, itself coming on the heels of a wave of unusually frank coverage in state media, was accompanied by a call for public comment on the new regulations. From Dexter Roberts at Bloomberg Businessweek:

In another sign that Beijing officials are, for now, leaning toward openness, officials will allow the city’s 20 million residents to weigh in on draft regulations aimed at curbing the Chinese capital’s horrendous air pollution, according to a notice posted Jan. 20 on the Beijing municipal government website. The public can comment on the proposed new measures until Feb. 8, the day before China shuts down for the annual Chinese New Year festival, said the statement issued by the city’s legal affairs office.

“This is important. Now public scrutiny should play a key role in promoting pollution control and enforcement of this rule,” says Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Ma’s environmental advocacy group plans to comment through the online platform that the municipal government has created for this purpose.

Edward Wong argued at The New York Times on Sunday that Beijing’s “extraordinary surge” in air pollution was one of several drivers of growing demands for political input. But Reuters reported a generally unfavorable response to the plans on Sina Weibo:

“These plans are just dreams,” wrote one user.

Others said the phasing out of old cars would make little difference in a city where about 250,000 new cars hit the road every year, albeit with supposedly higher emissions standards.

“These ‘old cars’ are what the ordinary people drive. You people can only dare talk about this subject when you start phasing out all the cars officials drive,” wrote another user.

Other doubts remain about the likely effectiveness of public consultation, enforcement, and of rules targeted only at the city itself. From Yin Yeping at Global Times:

Zhang Yuanxun, a professor of resources and environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that a lack of law enforcement will be a problem.

“The punishments enshrined in the regulations are too strict and broad. It will require many more law enforcement officers to ensure its effective implementation,” he said.

“The old laws were not enforced, not to mention this new one,” he said.

[…] “Also, just restricting the local atmospheric pollution would have little contribution to its improvement if there are no changes in the pollution conditions in the surrounding areas [of Beijing],” [Zhou Rong, climate and energy director of Greenpeace] said.

Wang Yan, a resident working in international trade, said she thinks the new laws should have been launched already.

“I don’t think I’ll offer comments on the new regulation since I doubt if my voice will be heard,” she said, adding targeting street barbecues is ridiculous.

At chinadialogue, Gavin Lohry suggested an additional measure that might help address a range of environmental concerns, from air quality and energy consumption to drainage:

Green roofs – roofs covered with plant vegetation – first gained popularity in Germany and have since been spreading around the world. They help cities reduce storm water runoff, cool the urban environment, absorb air pollution, insulate buildings and increase biodiversity. With enough green roof adoption, Beijing could realise positive impacts on the environment and improved quality of life.

My research on the topic found that in Beijing there is around 93 million square metres of roof space suitable for cost effective green roof adoption. If the cheapest and most basic forms of green roofs covered the suitable roof space, the urban environment would be substantially improved.

Under this scenario air particle pollution could be reduced by as much as 880,000 kilograms every year, equivalent to taking 730,000 cars off the road. The roofs could reduce storm water by 3.5 million cubic metres during large rain events, equivalent to filling the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square with two metres of water or 1,400 Olympic swimming pools.

Any boost to Beijing’s drainage infrastructure would be valuable in the event of more storms like last summer’s, which killed 77 people. But there are no easy solutions: the problems are tangled, often beyond the scope of local government policies, or out of human control entirely. From Jonathan Kaiman at The Guardian:

Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s environment at the University of California, San Diego, said that there is no silver bullet for the country’s air pollution. The underlying causes are dynamic and diverse: power plants, small factories, automobile emissions, rampant construction, farmers burning coal for heat. “One of the things about the air quality in Beijing is that it varies a lot more than it used to,” she said.

Beijing’s air quality fluctuates with the weather – a strong wind from the north can blow the smog to sea, she said, while south-eastern winds trap the air against a nearby mountain range, drowning the city in a pea-soup haze.

[…] Beijing has taken significant steps to combat pollution – it invested an estimated $10bn before the 2008 Olympics to raise emissions standards, replace residents’ coal stoves with natural gas heaters, and relocate a ring of steel plants on the city’s outskirts. Yet Beijing still shares its airspace with six surrounding provinces which may not adhere to comparable environmental standards.

“One of the fundamental problems is that the environmental regulators don’t have sufficient authority and resources to overcome the forces that are creating the pollution,” said Alex Wang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on China’s environmental law.

The problem is indeed hardly limited to Beijing, as Peking University professor Pan Xiaochuan angrily pointed out while blasting the term “Beijing Cough” as an “extreme insult” to the city. Other cities have been even more severely affected, and Shanghai has not escaped. From Reuters:

Shanghai, too, is improving public communication of air pollution data, as Angel Hsu describes on her blog:

[… B]y far my favorite innovation Shanghai’s EPB has made so far is in the use of this little air quality mascot to communicate what the various levels of pollution on the normalized AQI index mean. For the most part, things take a sour turn for AQI girl (let’s just call her that, I’m not sure if she has an official name) after the Good (51-100) part of the range. I like how they coordinated her hair color with the official color codes of different pollutant thresholds – it’s a great way for people to automatically remember and understand what the different colors mean. AQI girl also provides a much more people and user-friendly means to calculate air quality, as opposed to other cartoon characters or anime figures that they could gone with.

[…] I can only imagine next will come a video game for AQI girl, that will feature her navigating Shanghai’s polluted streets, having to dodge roadside exhaust coming from tailpipes, all the while remembering to wear her face mask when she sees AQI readings above 150.

The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Spegele and Wayne Ma described the obstacles to implementing deeper and broader solutions. Proposed changes inevitably raise questions of who will pay for them.

Over the long term, drawing down emissions will require costly upgrades to industrial facilities and oil refineries, measures resisted by state-owned companies unable to pass costs on to consumers and local governments that depend on industrial output for revenue.

[…] Though attention over the years has focused on power plants and passenger-car emissions, China’s pollution problems are complex and spread broadly across the economy. Mr. Zhao, of Nanjing University, and a research team studied the effectiveness of Chinese government policies in curbing emissions between 2005 and 2010 and estimated PM2.5 from coal-fired power generation fell roughly 21% as cleaner technologies took hold. Meanwhile, PM2.5 emissions from iron and steel production rose roughly 39% to 2.2 million metric tons, according to the estimates, as output increased.

China is particularly struggling to curb what are known as secondary pollutants, formed when primary pollutants—such as emitted sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, from coal burning and other sources—undergo reactions in the atmosphere. The government has had some success targeting primary pollutants, but analysts say it is just beginning to target secondary pollutant problems, including particulate matter that is harmful to human health.

Spegele also discussed a range of air pollution issues with the Journal’s Deborah Kan:

Officials have been careful to manage expectations, stressing that real change will take years, just as the current situation was years in the making. South China Morning Post’s Li Jing spoke to Qu Geping, whose career in shaping China’s environmental policy included a stint as the country’s first environmental protection administrator from 1987 to 1993. Qu lamented that the present of emergency was foreseen thirty years ago, when China nearly chose a different development path to avoid it. He blames the lost opportunity on government according to “the rule of men”, rather than rule of law.

“I would not call the past 40 years’ efforts of environmental protection a total failure,” he said. “But I have to admit that governments have done far from enough to rein in the wild pursuit of economic growth … and failed to avoid some of the worst pollution scenarios we, as policymakers, had predicted.”

[…] But, Qu said, if the central government had respected a policy that it released in 1983, China could be in a much better place now.

“The State Council published a document that year, stipulating that economic and urban construction should synchronise with environmental protection, so that the three legs of social development could reach a co-ordinated benefit,” he said. “It was a pragmatic and feasible strategy, even more approachable than the notion of ‘sustainable development’ enshrined by the United Nations years later.”

[…] “Why was the strategy never properly implemented?” he said. “I think it is because there was no supervision of governments. It is because the power is still above the law.”

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Post tags: 2008 Beijing Olympics, air pollution, air quality, Beijing, Beijing environment, beijing flood 2012, Chinese Academy of Science, clean air, clean energy, factories, forbidden city, greenpeace, industrial pollution, law enforcement, Ma Jun, PM2.5, power plants, rule of law, Shanghai, state-owned enterprises, steel, Tiananmen Square, Wang Anshun
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[…] [C]ivil society groups and scientists were scathing about the outcome. Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo called the summit a failure of epic proportions. “We didn’t get the Future We Want in Rio, because we do not have the leaders we need. The leaders of the most powerful countries supported business as usual, shamefully putting private profit before people and the planet.”

Rio+20 was intended as a follow up on the 1992 Earth Summit, which put in place landmark conventions on climate change and biodiversity, as well as commitments on poverty eradication and social justice. Since then, however, global emissions have risen by 48%, 300m hectares of forest have been cleared and the population has increased by 1.6bn people. Despite a reduction in poverty, one in six people are malnourished.

The Guardian noted the more prominent roles that BRICS nations played in this year’s conference, highlighting Brazil’s. In an interview with chinadialogue’s Xu Nan, Ma Jun of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs suggested grounds for optimism in this new, less Western-centric process:

Xu Nan: How do you rate the declaration text the Rio+20 conference has produced?

Ma Jun: Generally, the NGOs here aren’t happy with it. And if you just look at the text, there doesn’t seem to be much progress – much of it is confirming or admitting what’s already happened, rather than moving forward.

But I have a different take.

The outcome of the Rio conference 20 years ago was led by the western developed nations – it reflected their concern for the environment. But 20 years later, things are different. The developing nations are very deeply involved, and some are very big players in sustainable development. So this text is more of a global consensus.

A discussion involving both northern and southern hemispheres is bound to be more difficult, and the text is bound to be the result of compromise – but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad outcome. After all, it includes many good principles for dealing with the problems.

Taking China as an example, 20 years ago it accepted the declaration under western guidance. Now, it only accepts what it can genuinely agree with. And that is a huge step forward.

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Post tags: Brazil, BRICS, environmental policy, greenpeace, international relations, IPE, jonathan watts, Ma Jun
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Two theories on the deadly smog soon emerged. The most popular, and the least serious, was that Wuhan’s high school students were burning their books in the wake of graduation and the much-hated college entrance examination. The more serious was that a large-scale industrial accident had taken place. Boiled Universe, the handle of a Wuhan-based Sina Weibo user of no great importance, was one of hundreds of microbloggers who offered a variation: “It’s said that a boiler explosion at Wuhan Iron & Steel caused large volumes of toxic dust and smoke to spread, enveloping the whole of Wuhan, and the death of two people.” Others not only promoted the rumor, they did so by re-tweeting what they claimed was a photo of a chlorine gas leak at Wuhan Iron & Steel. (Another microblogger later offered definitive proof that the photo was six months old).

Someone from Wuhan Iron & Steel Co. Ltd, clearly incensed by the rumor-mongering, logged into the company’s Sina Weibo account (the company has 900 followers, billions in revenue) to deny responsibility for the haze . But that was destined to go nowhere: Few in China are going to take the word of a giant state-owned steel company, especially when it comes to rumors about large industrial accidents. By mid-afternoon, fears of a chlorine gas leak had become so prevalent (online, at least), that the Wuhan Fire Department felt compelled to tweet on Sina Weibo to inform its 95,000 followers that over the course of Monday, it had removed two hornet’s nests, caught a snake and put out five small fires, but it had not, under any circumstance, responded to a major alarm, much less a “so-called chemical leak and explosion.”

Local authorities then went further. From Bloomberg, the following day:

Police in the Chinese city of Wuhan detained two people for spreading rumors that heavy pollution in the capital of Hubei province was caused by an industrial accident, a newspaper controlled by the local Communist Party reported.

The Changjiang Daily, supervised by Wuhan’s party committee, said government departments denied rumors the smog that covered the city June 11 was related to an industrial accident or the leaking of toxic gases. The newspaper didn’t give more information about the people detained or the rumors.

After some investigation, Wuhan’s Environmental Protection Bureau blamed burning of straw by farmers for the pollution, in a statement translated and circulated by the US embassy in Beijing:

An analysis of the air indicates the pollution is caused from burning of plant material northeast of Wuhan.

[…] According to our investigation, the abnormal air quality in our city is mainly caused by the burning of the crops northeast of Wuhan towards Hubei province. Similar air quality is occurring in Jiangsu, Henan and Anhui provinces, as well as in Xiaogan, Jingzhou, Jingmen and Xiantao, cities nearby Wuhan.

The straw burning explanation was, as Minter described, greeted with some incredulity. Farmers had long burned straw as fuel, but Monday’s pollution was exceptional, and its intensity seemed to point to an industrial source. But according to Cornell University air quality expert Dane Westerdahl, America’s only source of “beyond index” pollution scores is not industrial activity, but forest fire. Using straw as fuel spread the burning out over many months. With coal and natural gas replacing it in this role, and other traditional uses also disappearing, straw is now incinerated in vast quantities simply for disposal, producing greater, more concentrated amounts of smoke than in the past. Jiang Gaoming described this shift in a 2007 article at chinadialogue, pointing out that with some organisation and investment, the straw could instead be used to produce beef, fertilising manure or carbon-neutral energy.

In northern China it is now the middle of the autumn planting season, and once again the farmers are burning off the crop stubble left after the harvest. The highways that run through the fields are covered in smoke, which seeps in through closed windows and can reduce visibility to half a kilometre. It gets worse at night; crop fires are illegal, so the farmers wait till it gets dark to avoid getting caught. However, you were unlikely to see this a decade ago ….

So why are the farmers so determined to burn off their leftover straw? Because there is nothing else to do with it. In the past the straw was used as fuel, but now farmers are more affluent and burn coal or natural gas. At one time it could also have been used to feed draught animals, but now they have been replaced with tractors. The government has promoted the use of straw in methane production, but to date only 0.5% of China’s total 600 to 700 [million?] tonnes of straw produced annually is used to make the gas. Ideally it could feed livestock, but the cost of storing straw and the livestock itself makes this unfeasible. Even if you fed the entire nation’s herds with straw, there would still be a lot left over. One could increase the number of ruminants, but China’s straw is scattered around the country and the cost of collecting and transporting it is high. If farmers cannot make a decent profit from it (and they no longer care about earning a few yuan here and there) it will be burnt off to prevent it getting in the way of other work.

The immediate grab for explanations involving hushed-up accidents, and the widespread rejection of the one offered by the local government, show the depths to which trust on public safety issues has sunk. New rules requiring publication of PM2.5 data for cities around China, overdue or not, were a sign of progress on this front. More recent developments such as the arrests of the alleged rumour-mongers in Wuhan and demands for the US embassy to stop tweeting its own air quality measurements seem to indicate a backward step. At chinadialogue, Greenpeace’s Zhou Rong argued that, while the American @BeijingAir monitor does indeed accentuate negative readings, silencing it is not a solution. Instead, the government’s best means of overcoming public scepticism is greater transparency.

First, the government should face up to the severity of the air-pollution problem. China has long looked to traditional pollutant indicators like PM10 (coarse particulates) to evaluate air quality, but not PM2.5 levels. The result is a picture of air pollution that is, at times, too rosy – and out of step with public perceptions.

[…] Second, although most Chinese cities have now started to publish PM2.5 figures – a major step forward – they remain evasive about the health implications of that data. The public don’t understand what a daily average PM2.5 figure of 35ug/m3 or 75ug/m3 means for their health. They just want to know if their elderly parents can go out for a stroll or their kids can go out to play, but the raw statistics they are given don’t tell them that. In the absence of more “human” data, it is hardly surprising that so many citizens, concerned about their families, turned to the US embassy’s feed and its depressing litany of warnings – exaggerations that have worsened the fear and mistrust of the government.

It isn’t complicated stuff. But escalating it to a political – even a diplomatic – issue may just make it so. To regain public trust, all that the Chinese government needs to do is push its existing systems of data disclosure further, and provide accurate information in a format the public can digest and use. Breathing air under the same piece of sky every day, ordinary Chinese people make their own judgements about the state of their environment. And when it comes to statistics, urban residents will judge their veracity by their own experience.

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Post tags: agriculture, air pollution, air quality, chemical leak, farming, greenpeace, industrial accident, PM2.5, public opinion, public safety, rumors, United States, wuhan
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This sweeping continues within China. While the country’s population became mostly urban for the first time late last year, its pollution balance has tipped in the opposite direction, with the countryside now polluting more than the cities. In addition to agriculture and changing lifestyles, the shift has been fuelled by relocation of industry and waste to rural areas where environmental enforcement is often weaker, and local communities less able to resist. Caixin spoke to Tsinghua professor Li Dun about rural pollution with Chinese characteristics:

The environmental issues facing rural China differ from those facing developed countries and other developing nations. It is an environmental and ecological deterioration that has occurred in the wake of the collapse of the state monopoly of grain and the people’s commune system which left in place the hukou system and its legacy of official separation between rural and urban areas.

From this system sprung an unspoken yet not entirely unconscious arrangement: The countryside was where you could sweep under the rug all of the waste and heavy polluters from the shiny prosperous new cities.

Chemical and smelting enterprises that were originally located in the cities were prompted to relocate to rural areas. Any firm whose polluting activities caused public protest was relocated to more remote and less developed locales in rural areas where no complaints would be heard. Highly dangerous materials such chemicals, heavy metals and even radioactive waste were stockpiled in rural areas or just abandoned. Industrial waste was frequently sent to rural areas to be disassembled and dealt with, while conventional city waste also arrived to be disposed with in rural landfills.

Rugs are not effective long-term storage solutions. Use of the countryside as a dumping ground now undermines the food and water security of China as a whole, and Western outsourcers of pollution can also find it coming back to haunt them. A recent study in the Journal of Geophysical Research found that as much as 20% of California’s ground-level ozone originated in East Asia, and had been blown across the Pacific. Other pollutants ride cargo ships: at The Diplomat, Greenpeace’s Monica Tan describes the reshoring of hormone-disrupting nonylphenol (NP) used in the Chinese textile industry:

The use of NP in clothing manufacturing has effectively been banned within the EU, with similar restrictions also in place in the United States and Canada. Of course, this is hardly the first time multinational companies have taken advantage of lax standards in other countries. Exporting the manufacturing industry hasn’t been accompanied by the export of high environmental protection standards, and has led to a host of pollution problems in China, most pressingly water pollution. Ask any local, it seems, and it’s hard to find a river clean enough to swim in in this country ….

In the latest toxics report to be commissioned by Greenpeace, simulations of standard domestic laundering on 14 clothing samples found that a single wash can wash out a substantial amount of the nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPE) residues present within textile products. More than 80 percent were washed out for half of the plain fabric samples tested. This suggests that all residues of NPEs within textile products will be washed out over their lifetime, and that in many cases this will have occurred after just the first few washes ….

In short, brands are making their consumers unsuspecting accomplices in the release of these hazardous substances into public water supplies. And, let’s not forget, we’re talking about a substance that has been effectively banned or heavily restricted in the EU, United States and Canada.

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Post tags: exporting pollution, food security, greenhouse gas emissions, greenpeace, industrial pollution, outsourcing, rare earth elements, rural areas, rural development, rural urban divide, textiles, water crisis
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Given China’s vast and growing population and increasing appetite for meat, it’s no surprise the nation’s leaders have been scrambling for years to intensify food production along the US model.

Lately, however, the Chinese government appears to be questioning two key tenants of US industrial-ag dogma: 1) that daily low-level doses of antibiotics are necessary and desirable for livestock production, and 2) that genetically modified crops are safe to eat ….

China will obviously exert plenty of influence over how the world feeds itself over the next generation. It’s interesting to see the nation show signs, at least, of straying from the US model it so tightly embraced over the previous generation.

From Greenpeace, on the 5-10 year suspension of GM rice and wheat commercialisation:

Greenpeace welcomes and supports this move by the government. “This step is a milestone in the process to end all GE rice commercialization in China,” said Greenpeace Food and Agriculture campaigner Pan Wenjing.

GE crop’s long-term risks on human health and the environmental are still unknown. It has also been found that many of the GE rice lines in China are embedded with non-Chinese patents, which poses a huge risk on China’s food security should they become commercialized.

“Rice is the main staple food for 1.3 billion Chinese people. Any decisions related to rice must be taken seriously and must include the people’s opinions,” said Pan Wenjing.

See also China’s Counterfeiters Get Seedy, on the increasingly common sale of ordinary seeds as GM or otherwise sought-after varieties.

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Post tags: agriculture policy, antibiotics, food security, genetically altered food, greenpeace
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In their one-year investigation into China’s textile industry – the world’s largest, with 50,000 mills – Greenpeace campaigners collected samples from factory discharge pipes and sent them for analysis at laboratories at Exeter University and in the Netherlands. They discovered a range of persistent pollutants in the wastewater from two major plants.

The Youngor facility in Ningbo, near Shanghai, was found to have discharged nonylphenol, an endocrine disruptor that builds up in the food chain, perfluorinated chemicals, which can have an adverse effect on the liver and sperm counts, as well as a cocktail of other toxins.

These chemicals were detected in small quantities, but they are hard to break down so they tend to accumulate in nature to dangerous levels. Many were found in fish during an earlier study of toxins in the Yangtze food chain. Although the chemicals are not yet illegal in China, they are banned in the EU and many developed nations ….

Greenpeace says Nike, Adidas, Puma, H&M and Lacoste have confirmed a business relationship with Youngor though all denied making use of the plant’s wet processes, which are likely to be responsible for the pollution discharges into the Fenghua river.

At China Hearsay, Stan Abrams argues that Greenpeace “might be reaching a bit too far”:

Are these companies therefore “off the hook” in your eyes if they only do business with a subsidiary of the polluter or do not actually make use of polluting processes? Alternatively, would you hold them accountable no matter their commercial involvement with these polluters?

I find this a tough case, and I doubt that the companies in question will be able to respond in a way that will mollify Greenpeace, particularly when their competitors are engaged in similar behavior. It would be one thing if they were utilizing goods/services that resulted in the activity in question. But when their commercial arrangements are attenuated from the polluting processes, it’s asking a lot for them to take aggressive action.

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Post tags: Adidas, corporate responsibility, CSR, greenpeace, industrial pollution, nike, Ningbo, textiles, water pollution
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“It will be very difficult to fundamentally alter our country’s energy supply structure which is based on coal consumption,” Li said, noting that coal provided about 70 percent of China’s energy needs.

“If we rely on the international market to satisfy our energy supplies, there are big risks and also big costs,” said Li.

“To ensure such large energy needs, we must both increase investment in energy development and also ensure the security of international and domestic energy supply routes, and that requires a major foreign policy effort. Therefore, energy-saving must always be a priority.”

Li, who has an economics degree, did not give specifics about policies Beijing may take up to meet its energy conservation and pollution-cutting goals. But he said the government should focus on developing policies to ensure that “polluters pay”.

“Establish an effective system of incentives and constraints so that law-abiding businesses gain economically and law-breaking businesses pay a heavy price,” he said.

China would “accelerate resource fee and taxation reforms”, he added.

Recent coverage in The Guardian of the forthcoming Five Year Plan’s environmental components included details of a proposed pollution tax scheme.

The environmental tax – which will levy fees according to discharges of sulphur dioxide, sewage and other contaminants – is intended as a disincentive for polluting industries, many of which have flocked to China to take advantage of low costs and weak regulations. Officials and academics have been studying the options for several years, but government advisers have told the Guardian the policy is certain to be adopted.

“The environment tax is going to happen. This is evident in the proposals for the next five year plan,” said Ma Zhong, director of the School of Environment and National Resources at Renmin University in Beijing. “It is likely to be levied nationwide, but there is also a possibility that it will initially be introduced in selected regions.” …

Carbon dioxide, a key concern given China’s status as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, may be included in the system at a later stage, though the issue is being debated. “Some want to put them together, but I think a carbon tax should be different and at a higher level and from the environmental tax,” said Zhang.

The coverage also included reactions to the proposals from several prominent environmental organisations:

“We are expecting to see a truly green five-year plan, which for the first time will contain really detailed measures and teeth in it,” said Yang Ailun of Greenpeace. “The next five years will be the defining moment for China’s environmental movement. There will be more disasters and more of a struggle to impose tougher regulations. Local interests groups have grown quite strong. They won’t accept change quietly.” …

Ma Jun, of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, said the government would take a big step forward if it set absolute limits on pollutants and resource consumption, rather than the incremental, economy-linked targets seen until now.

“This is the first major effort to translate words into actions. Before the government set targets and talked of improvement, but this is the first really major effort to integrate that into an economic plan. They should get credit for that,” said Ma … “[But] I don’t consider this a turning point … We haven’t seen air and water really get clean yet. The measures under discussion are not sufficient at all. ” …

“I’m hopeful about the next five-year plan,” said Li Bo of Friends of Nature. “The government is prepared to go further than before. But we should do more. Until now, low carbon concepts have been introduced only for industry. In the future, I hope those ideas can be adopted in the community so we see a change in lifestyles.”

Institutional obstacles to the plan’s successful implementation remain, with loopholes and lax supervision threatening to undermine enforcement of new policies. Some of these problems were discussed in a recent China Dialogue post by Tang Hao.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 12th Five-Year Plan, energy efficiency, environmental regulation, Friends of Nature, greenpeace, Li Keqiang, Ma Jun, pollution
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Apple trumpets its environmental policy, and claims to take extensive measures to monitor and regulate working conditions at suppliers’ plants. Last year, its Supplier Responsibility Progress Report (PDF) revealed that some had been found to have employed underaged workers. Because of the carefully preserved opacity of the company’s supply chain, however, its own audits cannot be subjected to independent verification. From The Guardian:

“This attitude means it is impossible to have any public supervision over their supply chain. Without that how can we trust them?” said Ma Jun of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs. “When environmental violations become public knowledge, they should not use commercial confidentiality as an excuse for silence. This is different from other leading brands.”

Hewlett Packard, British Telecom, Samsung, Sony, Siemens and Alcatel were credited as being the most responsive to third-party inquiries about alleged environmental violations.

“Apple can say it is completely ‘green’ because it is a brand with no factory, but if it doesn’t manage its supply chain, these are just empty words,” said Ma Jun …. “Far from being the best on planet, it is bottom among 29 IT brands. Apple should be a leader. If it can move on this, it can change the whole industry.”

The hope that pressure exerted on Apple will eventually affect the tech industry as a whole echoes that of Greenpeace’s 2007 campaign for A Greener Apple:

It’s not about bruising Apple’s image, Apple should be an environmental leader. We want Apple to be at the forefront of green technology, and to clearly show other companies how to do it the right way.

Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs later announced the phasing out of toxic chemicals and a more aggressive approach to recycling, a shift still hailed as a success story on the front page of Greenpeace’s website.

At present, legal responsibility for injury or sickness brought about by poor working conditions is limited to the suppliers themselves, but this may soon change. From Global Times:

Dong Baohua, a Shanghai-based labor lawyer, told the Global Times that there is no regulation in Chinese labor laws that mandates that contractors must take joint liability for compensating workers who suffer from occupational diseases in their supply chain if the suppliers and contractors are independent and legal employers.

“These workers could seek help from global organizations that monitor working conditions, but the process is lengthy and costly,” he said.

What might give the suffering workers a slice of hope is that amendments to the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Prevention and Control of Occupational Diseases will be taken into consideration by national legislators this year.

That may, to some extent, help solve problems that arise when diagnosing occupational injuries.

Apple’s secrecy has come under scrutiny before, when a Foxconn employee killed himself after suffering alleged mistreatment by security guards when an iPhone prototype in his care went missing.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, factory workers, greenpeace, Ma Jun, working conditions
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Environmental activists are attacking a $60 billion deal that will keep Chinese power stations supplied with Australian coal for at least the next two decades.

Under the agreement announced last week, the Australian coal and iron ore mining company Resourcehouse will build a new mining complex to give China Power International Development 30 million tonnes of coal annually for the next two decades. Resourcehouse Chairman Clive Palmer called it the “biggest-ever export contract” for Australia, which is the world’s leading exporter of coal.

But in supplying China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, green groups are accusing Australia of ignoring the role it plays in maintaining dirty energy economies around the world.

“It is hypocritical for Australia to on the one hand blame China for climate change and on the other hand try so hard to sell more coal to China,” said Ailun Yang of Greenpeace China. The deal, she said, “will only lock China further up in its unhealthy dependency on coal.”

© cschultz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Australia relations, coal power, greenpeace
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Global companies are often criticized for sacrificing their principles and core values in coming to China. Look at how hard Google and Yahoo! were hit last year over internet censorship issues.

China is too big a country for global marketers not to stake out a place for themselves.

But do nonprofit entities also shift their values to have a presence in China? In conversations with colleagues recently, several have suggested that just as companies may bend their rules to come to China so do global philanthropies/advocacy groups. [Full text]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corporate responsibility, greenpeace, NGOs
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But little was said or done to alert the rural communities in numerous towns and villages along the Songhua between Jilin and Harbin about the dangerous chemicals flowing in the water. The authorities have offered no estimates on how many people rely on the river for drinking water.

After the news of the spill filtered to the villages surrounding Harbin, peasants started digging underground wells for water, the local media reported. But the environmental organization Greenpeace has warned that any industrial chemicals that have seeped into the soil would have a long-term environmental impact.

The November 13 explosion released into the river about 100 tons of benzene, which is highly toxic and carcinogenic, along with some nitrobenzene, a benzene derivative. High-level exposure to benzene is known to cause leukemia, and there are concerns that the same effects could result from long-term low-level exposure through water or food.

Technorati Tags: China, harbin

(...)
Read the rest of China’s toxic spillover – Antoaneta Bezlova (91 words)

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: greenpeace, Harbin
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Singapore-based Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), part of Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Group, has been accused of illegal logging of natural forest in southwest China’s Yunnan province. The alleged deforestation was done as part of a vast wood-for-paper project, in which APP and the Yunnan government are cooperating. The project area covers almost two million hectares in Yunnan, most of which is currently primary tropical forest, Huang Xu of the environmental group Greenpeace told Asia Times Online. Despite the announcement by China’s State Forestry Administration (SFA) this March that it had stopped illegal logging by APP, sources in Yunnan this month confirmed that the logging goes on uninterrupted. In protest, a coalition of environmental organizations and student groups has initiated a boycott of APP’s products.

For more about environmental activism in China, see “Green dreams, brown reality for China.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: app, deforestation, environmental activism, greenpeace, logging
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Just two weeks after Greenpeace exposed the illegal selling and planting of genetically engineered (GE) rice in Hubei province, a research paper published today in Science magazine describes what appear to be unregulated trials of the same GE rice (Shanyou 63) that Greenpeace researchers found being illegally sold in the open market.

With rice planting due to start any day, Greenpeace said the study reveals further evidence of the failure to control GE rice trials in China.

© Wang Jun for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: greenpeace
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