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.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 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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The last decade was the hottest on record and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1998. But within that period, global surface temperatures did not show a rising trend, leading some to question whether climate change had stopped. The new study shows that while greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, their warming effect on the climate was offset by the cooling produced by the rise in sulphur pollution. This combined with the sun entering a less intense part of its 11-year cycle and the peaking of the El Niño climate warming phenomenon ….

The cooling effect of sulphur pollution on climate has long been recognised by scientists studying volcanic eruptions, which have, for example, caused failed crops and famines in the past. Sulphur dioxide forms droplets of sulphuric acid in the stratosphere, which increases the reflection of the Sun’s heat back to space, cooling the Earth’s surface ….

[The authors] emphasised the rapid increase in coal burning in Asia, and in China in particular, noting that Chinese coal consumption doubled between 2002 and 2007: the previous doubling had taken 22 years.

Michael E Mann, at Pennsylvania State University and not part of the research team, said the study was “a very solid, careful statistical analysis” which reinforces research showing “there is a clear impact of human activity on ongoing warming of our climate”. It demonstrated, Mann said, that “the claim that ‘global warming has stopped’ is simply false.”

At OnEarth, however, Mike Lemonick presents some dissenting views:

It all sounds logical, and, says Hiram Levy, a climate modeler at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory near Princeton, NJ, “the idea is physically sound.” But he’s not convinced that this is what’s really happening. Coal use is indeed growing in China, but it’s decreasing in other parts of the world. Globally, he estimates an overall increase of 10 percent in sulfate emissions over the last decade, which wouldn’t be enough to explain the slowdown. “At the same time,” he says, “there’s been a 10 percent increase in black carbon [emissions]” — soot, essentially, which tends to absorb sunlight and warm the air ….

Even worse from, [Kevin] Trenberth’s perspective, is the fact that the new paper cites the period from 1998 to 2008 as the span over which temperatures were relatively flat. But as climate scientists have explained ad nauseam, 1998 was an unusually warm year, thanks to a strong El Niño event in the Pacific. Choosing 1998 as a starting point (as many climate skeptics do) inevitably makes any temperature increase that follows look artificially small.

Trenberth, Levy and Kaufmann all agree, however — as do virtually all climate scientists — that slowdowns in global warming, some lasting as long as a decade or more, are not just expected, but inevitable as manmade greenhouse-gas emissions heat the planet. They further agree that these can come from natural effects as well as artificial ones like sulfur emissions from coal-fired power plants.

The deliberate injection of sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere has been mooted as a possible means of counteracting temperature increases. Such schemes were controversially featured in the 2009 book Superfreakonomics: see an argument against the proposals from MIT’s Technology Review, a defence by the book’s authors, and a related Q&A from Wired magazine on geoengineering, “A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: climate change, coal power, global warming, power plants, sulfur, sulpher dioxide
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Companies are starting to feel the pain. Shane Lou, a small factory operator in Zhejiang province, now has to suspend operations every Thursday and Friday. He says he may have to shutter his plant for good.

Things are dire because coal prices in China are at a more than two-year high, in part because of flooding in Queensland, Australia, a top supplier. (Coal still generates about 80 percent of power in China.) Repairs on the railway from coal-rich Shanxi province in central China are not complete, and demand for electricity rose 13 percent in the first quarter. Worst of all, power-generating plants are running at only about half of capacity because of financial pressures, estimates Xizhou Zhou, the head of China energy at the Beijing office of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (IHS). “It’s not as if these plants are maxed out,” he says.

China’s half-liberalized energy market is responsible for the mess. While power-generating companies have to buy coal at market rates, they still must sell power to utilities at regulated prices that don’t cover costs. Losses among China’s five big state-controlled power producers, including China Huaneng, China Datang, and China Guodian, totaled 13 billion yuan ($2 billion) last year, says Nate Taplin, an energy analyst at economic consultants GaveKal Dragonomics in Beijing. Not surprisingly, the power companies won’t produce more, since that will just increase losses. Neither the electricity council nor the five big power companies responded to faxed questions.

For more on this issue, see ‘China’s Looming Power Shortages: Blackouts, or Blackmail?’ on CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Australia relations, coal power, electricity, energy companies, power plants, Shanxi, Zhejiang
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Beijing has big plans for wind power as a renewable energy of the future, but China may already have too much of a good thing.

At home, China’s power-transmission infrastructure can’t handle the intermittent electricity supply already being generated from wind. It is estimated that 30% of last year’s wind-power supply went unused.

Despite that bottleneck, Beijing wants more. The government hopes to see 100 gigawatts of wind-power capacity installed in China by 2020, a more than eightfold increase from 2008, making wind the third most important source of power in China behind coal and hydroelectric. Even by next year, the amount of wind-power equipment being made will be twice what the nation can install, according to the central government.

That has implications abroad. Foreign rivals are raising concerns that Chinese producers will export their excess capacity at cheap prices. Wind power was one of the industries cited last week by the European Chamber of Commerce in China as likely to stir trade tensions.

The U.N. has already stopped certifying wind projects in China. From Business Week:

The United Nations has stopped certifying wind-power projects in China as eligible for overseas investment under a carbon-credit program overseen by the international body, a Chinese official said.

The certification was halted because the UN is concerned that low power tariffs set by the state help wind projects qualify, said the official at the National Development and Reform Commission with direct knowledge of the matter. David Abbass, a Bonn-based spokesman for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, wasn’t immediately available for comment.

The UN program, known as the Clean Development Mechanism, allows companies to invest in emissions-reductions projects that generate carbon credits in developing nations. Polluting companies can buy the credits to meet emissions-reduction targets set in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to fight climate change.

In Newsweek, Gary Dirks and David G. Victor look at China’s move towards becoming environmentally responsible:

China is already taking the first crucial step: it is cutting emissions by becoming more energy–efficient. Beijing has forced every province and major city to adopt efficiency targets. The top 1,000 companies have their own goals, and Beijing has created a scheme to help smaller firms do their part. In the past two years, China has pushed its provinces and companies to change faster.

The economic downturn has made it easier to implement these reforms. When the economy was firing on all cylinders, there was no capacity to spare, but in these slack times China has closed some of its oldest (and most inefficient) coal- and oil-fired power plants. At the same time, Beijing shifted away from energy-hungry industries such as steel and concrete to higher-value activities, such as skilled manufacturing, that are more frugal with natural resources.

China is also trying to move away from fossil fuels. Wind turbines are sprouting like weeds, most quickly in the geographical middle and far west. The country sees this construction as a form of development aid to these regions, which have lagged coastal cities like Shanghai in economic growth, but also as a way of nurturing its commercial wind industry. So far, China doesn’t export many wind turbines, but as quality rises, so will -foreign sales.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: environmental protection, power plants, wind power
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China’s nuclear power firms aim to join its auto and electronic companies as export powerhouses, analysts say, but massive domestic expansion plans may not leave them the capacity to make an overseas push for over a decade.

A $1 billion deal signed last week with Russia to build and supply a uranium enrichment plant in China was another step towards civilian nuclear independence, less than two decades after its first nuclear generator came on line.

The country last year sealed deals with France’s Areva and U.S.-based, Japanese-owned Westinghouse for several third-generation reactors, and the blueprints to allow them to develop domestic version.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: nuclear, nuclear power, power plants
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The Zhejiang Provincial Development and Reform Commission is being sued over a plan to build a special power plant that uses rubbish as fuel.

Nearly 300 farmers in Cangnan County have taken the commission to court because they say the power plant could cause environmental problems near their villages.

They also say the approval was given without any public hearing, Hangzhou’s West Lake District Court heard.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: environmental protests, pollution, power plants
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