Remember the 2008 Beijing Olympics? Magnificent architecture, stunning performances… and best of all you could see every moment in pristine HDTV. It was a super-wow to all who watched. The opening and closing ceremonies were outstanding, and the shape and form of the “Bird’s Nest” Stadium (above, if you can see it) is forever etched in my mind as one of the most beautiful modern building I have ever seen. Seen any picture of Beijing today? In so many photographs, you can see anything clearly that’s more than a 100 feet away! People wearing masks, officials deploying industrial air scrubbers in their offices, homes and cars, coughing and gagging. The pollution levels in the city have pinned the measurement needles to their most extreme confirmation of a city gone wrong.
In cities all over China, the horrific levels of air pollution are matched by effluents, serious carcinogens and biologically-dangerous debris filling lakes and rivers. “More than 16,000 dead pigs have been found floating in rivers that provide drinking water to Shanghai. A haze akin to volcanic fumes cloaked the capital, causing convulsive coughing and obscuring the portrait of Mao Zedong on the gate to the Forbidden City.” New York Times, March 21st.
This is the problem that the new Chinese administration must grapple with. China’s pollution is carried worldwide – trashing car finishes in South Korea and impairing air quality as currents carry pollutants thousands of miles even to the United States. The fact that China burns about half the world’s coal – used in the ever-expanding number of electrical power plants built all over the country – deploys masses of inefficient diesel truck, most using the cheapest and dirtiest grades of fuel available, and prefers economic growth to clean potable or irrigation water are the basics of the problem. With gigantic masses of new cars, coal plants, factories, etc. being added every year, the problem is just getting worse. People are sick, miserable and many dying from the mess.
That China sees the need to expand the economic prosperity enjoyed by coastal and “big river” towns to neglected regions elsewhere in China suggests that more power plants, more factories and more vehicles will plague this planet in that growth mandate. On a per capita basis, China is still a very poor nation, ranking around 100 in the list of nations on this factor. The new administration sees an absolute necessity of creating growth to offset that terrible statistic, eliminating forever those 100-150 million Chinese estimated to be living on $2/day or less.
The question is one of priorities, but China alone can make the difference in the planet’s entire global warming strategy. Without China’s compliance to vastly more strict pollution standards, the ability to stem the damage of global warming is pretty much impossible. But fixing the environment requires a reallocation of capital from new growth to repair of existing growth, resulting in a necessary contraction in the overall growth rates. What’s more, both in the public and private sector, allocating money for pollution fixes makes the supervising managers look worse as profitability necessarily plunges. Old machines and power generators are shut off, inefficient trucks are taken off line, expensive “cleaner” fuel is purchased, factories and plants go idle during the transition, and expensive new replacements are deployed in their place.
The subtext in all of this pits those leaders who see the obvious necessity of creating a livable environment against the “growth at all costs” and “hey, don’t mess with my profits” cadres who oppose such efforts… and would be the parties implementing the environmental mandates. It’s politely referred to as infighting, but layers of secondary issues, notably corruption and the power of the insider “princelings,” lie just beneath the surface.
“[E]ven though trucks and buses crisscrossing China are far worse for the environment than any other vehicles, the oil companies have delayed for years an improvement in the diesel fuel those vehicles burn. As a result, the sulfur levels of diesel in China are at least 23 times that of the United States. As for power companies, the three biggest ones in the country are all repeat violators of government restrictions on emissions from coal-burning plants; offending power plants are found across the country, from Inner Mongolia to the southwest metropolis of Chongqing.
“The state-owned enterprises are given critical roles in policy-making on environmental standards. The committees that determine fuel standards, for example, are housed in the buildings of an oil company. Whether the enterprises can be forced to follow, rather than impede, environmental restrictions will be a critical test of the commitment of …the new party chief and president... to curbing the influence of vested interests in the economy.
[In February of this year], after deadly air pollution hit record levels in northern China, officials led by Wen Jiabao, then the prime minister, put forward strict new fuel standards that the oil companies had blocked for years. But there are doubts about whether the oil companies will comply, especially since oil officials resisted a similar government order for higher-grade fuel four years ago. State-owned power companies have been similarly resistant. The companies regularly ignore government orders to upgrade coal-burning electricity plants, according to ministry data. And as with the oil companies, the power companies exert an outsize influence over environmental policy debates.” NY Times
Not only are the officials charged with enforcement pressured to slow down and look the other way, some for friends and others for corruption reasons, but the actual fines for violating the rules, when applied, are so small as to lack sufficient teeth to effect change and sustain enforcement: “[F]ines are generally capped around $16,000, not much of a deterrent, said Ms. Zhou [Rong], the Greenpeace representative. She said the violating factories ‘should be required to stop production temporarily — that would then force companies to take this seriously.’” NY Times. Xi Jinping, the new party chief and president, and Li Keqiang, the new prime minister, have a monumental challenge in their new administration. How they grapple with these issues will most probably impact rising oceans, global warming transitions and life expectancy all over the world… even yours.
I’m Peter Dekom, and we are woefully over-connected with each other, destined to share our “good, bad and ugly” with the entire planet.
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