Posted on 08/15/2007 7:05:24 PM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
(HONG KONG) -- Just as growing numbers of newly affluent Chinese are planning to buy the status symbol they seek most, along comes a spoilsport government with a plan to limit the number of cars on the roads. Beijing today, Shanghai and other cities tomorrow?
The central government is enforcing a test run this week of a plan to take more than 1 million cars off Beijing's roads. The object is to see how effective it will be in cleaning the capital's filthy air for China's "green" Olympics in August next year.
It's a desperate measure in a country that has devastating levels of pollution.
China's per capita car ownership numbers are very low compared to rates in the United States and Europe. But car numbers across China are growing at 26 percent a year. In the first six months of this year another 3 million took to the roads. Some forecasts say automobile sales could reach 10 million a year by 2010.
The state news agency Xinhua says cars are one of the biggest sources of pollution in Beijing, but many observers and environmentalists believe the real polluter is coal.
Coal provides between 70 and 80 percent of China's energy, either via coal-burning power-generation plants or directly in unsophisticated factory furnaces.
Government plans to close coal-burning factories and power plants in the vicinity of Beijing during the Olympics have been less publicized. A small forest of "green" windmill-driven turbines is being built on the edge of the city to help power it while the coal-powered plants are idle.
But the temporary greening of Beijing will make a miniscule dent in the pollution problem engulfing China as its express train of industrialization and urbanization rattles along, hundreds of millions on board.
A Threat to Stability
A World Bank report last year named 16 Chinese cities as among the world's most polluted. Of more than 500 Chinese cities surveyed, 40 percent were described as suffering from moderate or serious air and water pollution.
However, a new bank report assessing the cost of pollution to the Chinese economy has been edited under Beijing government pressure, a report in the London Financial Times said in July. The bank's report, using World Health Organization material, had concluded that up to 750,000 Chinese are dying annually due to air and water pollution.
Beijing was apparently concerned about the possible public disquiet over the bank report.
"Serious environmental pollution has caused social instability in China. And the Chinese government, which has been stressing 'stability above everything else,' is not happy to see the brewing unease among its populace," wrote Chinese journalist Jianqiang Liu for the environmental watchdog China Watch, sister organization of the U.S.-based Worldwatch Institute.
"Confronted with deteriorating environmental pollution, China's urban middle class has started expressing its anger through mass protests," said Jianqiang, citing street demonstrations in the southern city of Xiamen in June against a chemical factory being built close to a school and where 100,000 people live within a few miles radius.
In 2005, China's Public Security Bureau listed 50,000 public protests and said pollution was the cause of 90 percent of them.
Millions of Chinese in cities and the countryside are suffering from health problems due to air pollution and water contamination, says a report by Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. It estimates air pollution in China annually causes 400,000 premature deaths and 75 million asthma attacks.
Part of the problem, says the center, is that U.S. and foreign vehicle manufacturers are reluctant to transfer pollution-control technologies to China due to concerns about intellectual property rights.
China reached another unwanted milestone this year, becoming the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, according to a recent Dutch scientific assessment.
"These environmental insecurities can potentially derail China's growth and stability," says Simon Tay, chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affars, a regional think tank. "Protests against environmental pollution have increased. Chinese leaders recognize increasingly that environmental issues must be dealt with, as part of their wider agenda to keep citizens from becoming restive and to assure other nations about its peaceful rise and positive role."
Mountains of Coal
Despite efforts by the central government to push cleaner-burning imported liquid natural gas, expand nuclear energy, and encourage renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydro, the country's most abundant and cheapest energy source remains coal.
China's colossal appetite for coal is forecast to make the country the world's No. 1 producer by the end of this year, displacing the United States. The country is expected to devour at least 2.3 billion tons this year, says the National Development and Reform Commission in Beijing.
Huge fields of it keep being discovered. Only last week, geologists identified a new source in Inner Mongolia, estimated to hold about 5 billion tons.
The state-owned coal and power conglomerate Shenhua Group this month predicted it will overtake the U.S. giant Peabody Energy by the end of this year as the world's largest coal mining company.
"China's power industry is expected to add another 60,000 megawatts of installed capacity this year, and to put that in perspective with the rest of the world it's the equivalent of about 50 percent of Germany's entire power capacity," said energy commodities consultant Jeff Mead in Hong Kong.
"At the end of 2006, China's generating capacity topped 600,000 megawatts and it's still not enough. There have been power shortages across the country again this summer."
At least one new power plant is opened every week in China, most of them coal fired.
The National Development and Reform Commission says China will need to consume 2.6 billion tons of coal per year by 2010. That's an annual increase of 530 million tons over 2006 domestic output.
New electricity generating capacity is expected to keep rising by 10.5 percent a year at least until 2010, when the total could be 850,000 megawatts, the State Grid Corporation predicted recently.
This demand is unlikely to be met by windmills and solar cells.
"In answer to Western criticism about its pollution and encroachment on global energy resources, from coal to gas to oil, Beijing argues that the western world did it all before and so why not China now. The difference is China's growth and demands are on an unparalleled scale," said Mead.
Wen's Green Campaign
Premier Wen Jiabao has been leading a loud campaign this year to put sustainability, environment and energy efficiency at the top of the national agenda.
But as more provincial governments catch up with the richer coastal strip, few Chinese seem to be listening to him. The economy is currently racing along at nearly 12 percent.
China is one of the world's most energy-inefficient countries, consuming 40 percent more energy per unit of GDP than many Western industrialized countries.
The government has set a target of cutting energy use per unit of GDP by 20 percent by 2010.
But the director of the council's Development Research Centre, Feng Fei, was quoted by the official news agency Xinhua as saying this would be difficult without reducing economic growth to 7.5 percent and curbing output in high-energy-consuming industries such as steel, cement, glass and vehicle manufacture.
Feng said energy consumption in the industrial sector alone over the last five years has risen by the equivalent of 630 million tons of coal. He said "backward technology and equipment" were in large part to blame for poor energy efficiency levels. Coal efficiency in many thermal power plants was less than half that of other countries.
Hong Kong's Pollution Problem
When it comes to pollution, even Hong Kong is very much a Chinese city.
Pollution here has become so bad that it is deterring foreign investment, according to a recent survey by the local American Chamber of Commerce. The survey of senior executives at 140 leading companies found 95 percent were concerned about the city's pollution levels.
The survey discovered that 39 percent of the executives have experienced difficulty recruiting people from abroad and 55 percent knew of people who had declined job offers in Hong Kong because of its pollution, which often masks the famous harbor view from the business district on Hong Kong island across to the mainland of Kowloon.
The Hong Kong government has long blamed neighboring Guangdong province, whose smokestack industry -- much of which, ironically, is owned by Hong Kong Chinese -- and said it was powerless to act.
Coal burning does cause huge pollution over Guangdong and across to Hong Kong. The World Bank awarded the tag World's Most Pollute City to Linfen in the province.
But both the American chamber and an invigorated action group of local Chinese and expatriates, Clear the Air, now say there is irrefutable evidence that dense traffic is as much to blame.
North of the notional border that separates the so-called Special Administrative Region from communist China, the all-powerful authorities can clear the air for the three weeks of the Beijing Olympics.
But if senior executive recruitment in tiny Hong Kong is becoming difficult, it may not be long before pollution on the mainland begins to seriously undermine China's economy and social stability.
What a great idea.
After we ban cars from Beijing, lets ban the rest of the stuff they send too, until they open their markets to American goods 50-50.
Let’s start today.
I’d like to see the enviro nuts be honest and go ahead and admit they want to do that here. Come on guys, propose an automobile ban - please - right before the next election.
> This demand is unlikely to be met by windmills and solar cells.
No!
I’ve never seen anything like the pollution in Bejing. On a clear day you can’t even see the sky. Buildings a quarter mile from you just vanish into the gray haze. Its oppressive and disgusting. I don’t know how they expect worldclass athletes to compete in that filth.
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