China’s success buys pollution

BEIJING – As China’s economy roars ahead, leaving polluted rivers and skies in its wake, the world’s most populous nation has struggled to craft environmental policies that will appease growing numbers of critics at home and abroad.

Traditionally, many of the issues outlined in Friday’s ominous U.N. report on climate change have been framed here, as elsewhere, as a trade-off between clean air and jobs.

Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that the division is not so clear-cut. Some studies estimate that pollution exacts a 7 percent to 10 percent cost on China’s economy.

Complicating what passes for an environmental debate in China are political sensitivities, a controlled media, widespread rural poverty and a long tradition of top-down government wary of too much meddling by citizens.

For the past two decades, China has made economic growth a priority. The results have been impressive as the country becomes a bigger player on the global stage and hundreds of millions of its people are lifted out of extreme poverty.

But the cost has been high.

The U.N. report released Friday, which warned of the catastrophic results of global warming, served as a pointed indictment of the world’s biggest producers of pollution.

Many of China’s neighbors, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, were able to pollute their way to prosperity and then pay for the cleanup afterward. China, which comes to the development game late, is under growing international pressure to tackle its environmental problems at the same time, given its huge planetary footprint.

By some accounts, China remains two decades behind the United States in its environmental standards and as many as three decades behind Europe. In response, Chinese leaders have set targets designed to promote alternate fuels, recycling and “green economic growth.” These include a vow by Beijing to get 16 percent of the nation’s energy from renewable sources by 2020, double today’s rate, and to become 20 percent more energy efficient by 2010.

Unlike the United States, China also has signed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, though it is not required to reduce its carbon emissions under the agreement. And in two weeks, Beijing is set to release a national climate change plan that, while unlikely to include much new, will consolidate and bring more focus to existing rules.

The effort, however, faces problems. Many of the laws and regulations passed by the central government are routinely ignored or undermined by local officials because of corruption, mismanagement, greed and a system that hands out promotions based on economic growth.

“This is a big problem,” said Yang Ailun, campaign manager for energy and climate change with Greenpeace China. “An important task for the central government is to design a framework for local implementation, rather than just issuing orders from above.”

Though environmental awareness among the general public is growing, the picture is mixed. Increasingly prosperous middle-class urban residents in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing are voicing concerns. But many impoverished rural residents remain more concerned with filling their rice bowls than rattling for quality-of-life improvements.

Still, the nation is seeing growing outrage and violent protests as crops wither and children are born with birth defects from leaking chemical plants. Heart disease and respiratory problems related to air pollution are among the leading causes of death in China, experts say, with acid rain falling on 30 percent of the country.

Many of these incidents successfully are covered up by officials holding an iron grip on the media and police. And China has kept nongovernmental organizations on a relatively short leash, wary that any movement may challenge the political monopoly of the Communist Party.

The structure of the Chinese government creates other problems. Though the State Environmental Protection Administration, or SEPA, was elevated to a ministry-level organization a few years ago, it is still far outgunned in personnel and budgetary terms by ministries that oversee resource extraction, construction, industry and land use.

Beijing has not denied the scope of the climate change problem or its potential impact on China. But its basic position remains that developed countries must take the lead. It also contends that globalization has dealt it a disproportionate share of the problem given the relocation of many energy-intensive, polluting industries to China. One early bright spot has been China’s growing interest in carbon trading, a system under which pollution rights are traded globally in an effort to bring down overall carbon dioxide output.

Beijing has expressed interest in the idea. Not only does it allow the central government to show overseas critics it’s trying to be a responsible global citizen, the system also promises to bring investment to government, create jobs and improve the environment.

“It’s a fabulous opportunity for China to do the right thing, and lots of projects will be developed that wouldn’t be otherwise,” said Scott Lamont, chief executive of Beijing-based Clean Energy Services, a carbon trading firm.

“The main concern, though, is that there would be ongoing monitoring. You have to make sure what the money is allocated for actually gets built, as with any industry in China.”