Not what should they do…that’s pretty obvious. They SHOULD institute immediate and stiff clean air legislation and actually enforce it, they SHOULD clean up their coal plants (they currently use almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined, including the US, and a lot of their plants are the older, dirtier types) and they SHOULD enforce already existing regulations on car emissions and refinement of things like their diesel fuels.
But what WILL they do? All of the above would be very costly in the short term, especially to a still emerging economy and nation, and will probably mean they need to pause a bit in their head long charge to becoming a world economic superpower…especially right now, when they are having economic troubles of their own in the current world wide recession. Offsetting those short term costs, however would be a reduction in the number of people having health issues associated with the currently ridiculous levels of air pollution plaguing many Chinese cities, as well as the numbers of deaths due to this.
So, what are your thoughts, 'dopers? What will China do and on what sort of time frame will they do it? From what I’ve read, a growing number of Chinese citizens WANT change and are increasingly unhappy with how bad things have gotten, but what will the Chinese government do and how will they do it?
Didn’t they resort to some radical ideas in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics? Things like if your license ends in an odd number, you can’t drive on certain days? China’s got a pretty bullying government, so if they really want to, they’ll spend a ton of taxpayer money and bulldoze a bunch of factories and throw a lot of polluters in jail.
One thing they can do is forced relocation. Move people away from urban areas, build roads to some of those empty cities they built in the countryside and force people to move there. For a county that can snatch women up and force them to have abortions, nothing is too far fetched.
China is a world leader in renewable energy spending to gdp. they spent over 60 billion on renewables last year, more than what the us spent with 2x the gdp (western europe spent about 100 billion).
things like that make me think China is trying to take this stuff seriously.
All that job-killing regulation and government creation of environmental laws will just create a massive deadweight loss to the Chinese economy while imposing huge costs on business, costing hundred of thousands of jobs. Far better to let the free market produce dynamic alternatives to the dead hand of government regulation. Maybe they can provide a nationwide network of clean air which can be pumped into your home and cheaply -available protable oxygen tanks for when you’re not in a sealed building. Something like that.
I think they have most of the laws they need as far as pollution emission from industry goes; IIRC their main problem is enforcement. Local governments often undermine the central government’s efforts at enforcement. I’ve heard (although I don’t have a cite for this off hand) that sometimes the pollution-reduction technology (scrubbers, etc) is installed but then disabled later to increase profits.
One thing the central gov’t could do that might be easier to enforce is to discourage automobile usage and ownership. This could be accomplished through high taxes on auto sales and gasoline. Will they actually do this? I’m guessing not, because selling cars is good for the economy. So they’ll probably continue to focus on limiting emissions from industry.
My best guess is that they will make a few high-profile crackdowns while the rest of the emitters quietly go about business-as-usual.
I predict that the Chinese government will do nothing major in the short term. This is based on the fact that China is not a democracy. Over here and in other democracies, the citizens can pressure the government to take action on the environment. In China, the citizens cannot do that. At the basic level China remains a communist country, though obviously less so that 50 or even 20 years ago. It is governed by a class of oligarchs who have theories about how economic activity should work and what the goals of policy should be. As long as that’s the case and the oligarchs have no genuine interest in air quality, the air quality problem won’t be solved. Even if the oligarchs to show some interest in the problem, it won’t be solved, because problems in communist countries generally don’t get solved. As others have mentioned, China has pollution laws but lacks enforcement.
It’s worth noting that very simple changes could at least move them in the right direction. I read a piece a few months ago–I think it was in Popular Science–about airlines in China. In the rest of the world, long commercial flights go to 30,000 feet or higher, where the atmosphere is thin. In China, they’re not allowed to go above 15,000 feet, in theory because the higher altitudes are reserved for the military. Since the atmosphere is denser at lower altitudes, that makes flying more inefficient and airplanes waste a lot of fuel. In reality there’s no reason for them not to let planes fly higher, but such practicality isn’t in the nature of communist countries.
Thanks for the replies so far…appreciate everyone’s thoughts on this. Just quickly, in passing:
[QUOTE=Wesley Clark]
China is a world leader in renewable energy spending to gdp.
[/QUOTE]
Do you have a cite for this? I suspect that you are talking about the Chinese government, but not counting private US companies who have spent quite a bit on renewable energy…or in Europe, for that matter.
Yet they are building even more (dirty) coal plants at the same time, and in fact they emit more than more pollution from coal than any other country in the world, including the US. And I don’t see any effort at this time to curtail or even mitigate that fact…they are building more renewable energy systems at the same time they are building more of EVERY kind of energy system, to meet both current and expected power needs in the future. To me, that doesn’t indicate they are serious about pollution control, merely that they are building power infrastructure like made, and some of it is ‘renewable’ and most of it isn’t.
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
I predict that the Chinese government will do nothing major in the short term. This is based on the fact that China is not a democracy. Over here and in other democracies, the citizens can pressure the government to take action on the environment. In China, the citizens cannot do that. At the basic level China remains a communist country, though obviously less so that 50 or even 20 years ago. It is governed by a class of oligarchs who have theories about how economic activity should work and what the goals of policy should be. As long as that’s the case and the oligarchs have no genuine interest in air quality, the air quality problem won’t be solved. Even if the oligarchs to show some interest in the problem, it won’t be solved, because problems in communist countries generally don’t get solved. As others have mentioned, China has pollution laws but lacks enforcement.
It’s worth noting that very simple changes could at least move them in the right direction. I read a piece a few months ago–I think it was in Popular Science–about airlines in China. In the rest of the world, long commercial flights go to 30,000 feet or higher, where the atmosphere is thin. In China, they’re not allowed to go above 15,000 feet, in theory because the higher altitudes are reserved for the military. Since the atmosphere is denser at lower altitudes, that makes flying more inefficient and airplanes waste a lot of fuel. In reality there’s no reason for them not to let planes fly higher, but such practicality isn’t in the nature of communist countries.
[/QUOTE]
This is pretty much what my thoughts are as well. China actually has a lot of stuff on the books, but since they are pretty much a totalitarian government they can arbitrarily decide to enforce it…or not to enforce it…as the folks in charge (at either the local or national level) so choose.
The big dis-connect in China (which is hardly a “Communist” country) between what is dictated and what is done - whatever the topic and whoever is doing the dictating.
The central government - be it Imperial or Communist - has traditionally been interested in only 2 things: Pay your taxes and don’t stir up the rabble. Everything else was left to the locals*. That has been the situation since BEFORE Europeans “discovered” the Western Hemisphere. Momentum is everything.
Here is a simple case: Leaded paint on Fisher-Price toys. Fisher-Price had given the toy maker a list of approved suppliers - there is lead-free paint in China. There is also leaded paint (it’s cheaper). Had the locals followed the directions from above, we would not have had that panic.
According to Fisher-Price at the press conference:
The toy maker ran out of paint
Approved vendors could not supply paint in the required color and quantity.
(Local) Toy maker disregards instructions and uses what they could find.
The boss of the power plant has trouble getting the quality of coal the plant is designed to burn.
Guess what happens? Hint: he is not going to shut it down, nor is he going to cut production by half
He gets an order to increase production. Disabling the scrubbers increases burn rate**, boosting output. Guess what happens?
this is why only the written language is standardized - you only needed to be able to read the Imperial orders - the emperor did not care how you pronounced them
** - this is a hypothetical guess why there is an economic incentive to disable the equipment
The last huge conference on climate change – was it Kyoto or another one? – basically came down to the west asking China and India and the rest of Asia to bring in the same kind of enviromental energy targets we have in the west, cutting emissions, renewable energy sources etc.
And Asia told the west to fuck off. They said you built your economies on fossil fuels and it’s hypocritical of you to ask us to slow our development by not using fossil fuels. So no deal got made. Maybe massive pollution forces a rethink, we have to wait and see.
Normally I’m on-board with free-market solutions but I don’t think they work regarding the environment unless the government gets involved. The problem as I see it is that the environment can’t be localized. For example, there is no financial pressure for coal plants in the mid-West to reduce sulfar that produces acid rain in the East. In those cases nothing is more effective than government regulations and I’d say the regulations in the US over the last 40+ years have worked fairly well. I do think that regulations that promote free-market solutions are the best, like cap-and-trade.
If we’re going to talk about CO2, china’s emissions per capita are still lower than Europe’s and much lower than the US’ (less than a quarter).
And at the Doha conference, which happened last year, it was the US mostly that was trying to rally support of other big emitters to block any deal being made.
Surely there must be a way to let private enterprise handle this problem? Maybe all the big industrial nations could get their corporate CEOs together and I’m sure they’d solve the problem in no time. After all, they’re creating the pollution so they’re the perfect people to solve the problem. It’d give multinational corporations massive new business opportunities, creating new “clean air” markets that allow taxpayers to spend their own money buying nontoxic breathable product instead of paying even more taxes to government to add yet more regulation to the economy.
They’re now the biggest overall polluter though and they’re accelerating at a rate of knots – 1.5 billion people versus 300 million. They’re building hundreds of new power stations over the next fifty years and fifty new nuclear plants over fifty years. They’re going to add up to fifty million cars to the global fleet in the next twenty years. America isn’t doing much to prevent emissions and is scaling back environmental laws but China/India/Asia in general’s emissions are going to become huge and there’s no will in those countries to cut them. All these targets we have in europe and America won’t mean anything unless Asia gets on board.
So what are you saying? That we shouldn’t factor in population when looking at the figures?
When it comes to CO2, nuclear is part of the solution, not the problem.
What you earlier said was “The last huge conference on climate change … basically came down to the west asking China and India and the rest of Asia to bring in the same kind of enviromental energy targets we have in the west, cutting emissions, renewable energy sources etc. And Asia told the west to fuck off.”
If Asia had the same kind of targets as the US, then apart from a few wealthy enclaves like Qatar, most countries could massively increase emissions. Including China.
But, I’m no apologist for China. Clearly, because of the country’s size if they’re going to enjoy a Western way of life, they will have to transition into it more cleanly than we managed. And on the topic of air quality (getting back to the OP), I of course think China should follow all the suggestions of the OP, but doubt that it will.
I don’t see the point in looking at per capita numbers. It’s total pollution that matters and total potential pollution in the future. With a massive population and massive economic growth potential due to that population that’s when it’s worth looking at population.
I know nuclear energy is good for CO2 emissions. I’m just trying to show the scale of the growth of the Chinese economy over the next half century. They’re building a nuclear plant a year for the next fifty years and expect them to produce 5% of their electricity needs in fifty years.
Asia and China in particular nixed any agreement at Kyoto. Because they’re not interested in limiting their emissions and because they’re going to grow so much over the next decades it’s basically irrelevant whether we in the west cut our emissions or not.
You don’t see the absurdity of comparing countries and ignoring population?
Hmm, I guess you’re right; we are thousands of times worse than the people of Liechtenstein.
But…we can easily rectify that by disbanding federal government, and splitting the US into 50 separate countries, most of which would be nowhere near the top for co2 emissions (and those that are can be split further).
The US is the only country that attended Kyoto and didn’t ratify it. The excuse then was because the targets were non-binding for countries such as China.
It’s embarrassing to hear this excuse still being used. Personally I want to live in a country that tries to do the right thing and set an example. If other people want to shit in the street doesn’t make it OK for me to do the same.
China is still very poor. Their GDP per capita is only $8,300, somewhere between Ecuador and Belize. Furthermore, this is not particularly well distributed, and China’s poor areas are honest-to-god world class third world poverty. The living standards in rural Guizhou are on par with Ghana. And what prosperity there is, is new. Kids who are in college today have stunted growth from malnourishment, and remember when meat was a once-a-month treat. If you go back another generation, you get people who remember actual “eating corpses and bark off trees” famine.
So China does not consider economic growth to be a luxury. They consider it to be a humanitarian imperative. The understand that there are trade-offs, but they see their first job as moving from a third world country to an economically sustainable one. Only when the Chinese people are out of extreme poverty will they feel free to work on other priorities.
China takes the view that a period of high pollution is a part of economic progress. Victorian London was black with soot, and turn of the century New York wasn’t any better. Eventually, we established our industries, and then we were able to refine and perfect them to the point where we could become somewhat environmentally sustainable. But what came first was establishing the industries, building the worker force, and building the infrastructure and supports, and this was messy and dirty work. China does not think it is fair that we could pollute for centuries while we built our prosperity, and now that we are prosperous we expect others to skip directly to where we are. Likewise, they are not impressed when we ask them to drive less. China has 85 cars per 1,000 people, versus our 812 per 1,000. And China is just as huge and spread out as the US. It’s just not a reasonable argument for us to make and it’s not going to look like anything but hypocritical bullying.
That said, they do recognize it is a problem and they are investing in future green technology. Indeed, they have made it a bit of a pet industry and are investing heavily so they can get a jump start when green technology begins to spread. But they just don’t see it as economically feasible to implement in the long term right now.
The central government is strong, but they do not have actual totalitarian control. It’s a messy, fractured system and Beijing is actually constantly having to play the the regions. While the central government can keep a tight control of national security, they have little say over what happens in other fields on a regional level. The idea that they can just unilateral mandate environmental controls is a fantasy. It’s a big, messy, complex country and that the central government is constantly just barely keeping control of.
This is the last thing that will happen. Wealth comes from cities, and China figured that out long ago. They’ve been aggressively emptying the country side and encouraging people to move to urban areas. This is actually a great idea. Urban areas are more ecologically sustainable than rural ones. Urban people have smaller houses, use more public transport, require less shipping, and generally use fossil fuels at a lower rate than rural people.
Are the CEOs going to do this out of the goodness of their hearts? I have great faith in the free market but we need to set up incentives (read: money) for those CEOs to work on solving the pollution problem. The only viable way I see for that to happen is to involve the government.
I’m not ignoring population. And maybe it wasn’t Kyoto but it was a big climate summit and it was billed as the last chance to save the earth and the Asians turned the west down on an emissions deal.