China Takes Steps to Confront Pollution

China’s environmental watchdog made
a rare decision this week to halt new
projects for two top state-run oil
companies after they failed to meet
pollution targets.
Environmental groups welcomed the
move, but as China grapples with the
difficult balance of fueling continued
economic growth and environmental
protection, the move is just one small
step.
China’s notoriously smoggy air and the
environmental price it has paid for
decades of fast economic growth has
won the country much unwanted
international attention. It is also a
leading source of public discontent.
Increasingly, projects from coal-fired
plants to petrochemical facilities have
come under intense public scrutiny in
China because of their feared
environmental impact. In some cases,
local officials have had to abandon the
projects altogether following large public
protests.
The Ministry of Environmental
Protection’s decision this week was
made in part because of the growing
pressure from the public, analysts say.
The strong message was not only
directed at the companies the halt
targeted - China National Petroleum
Corp. and China Petrochemical Corp. or
Sinopec Group.
“This is a warning to all state-owned
enterprises that they must work hard to
shoulder the social responsibility that
they bear as a state-owned enterprise,”
said Yang Fuqiang, with the National
Resources Defense Council, an
environmental group.
The decision was also a response to
public criticism that China’s
environmental ministry is not doing
enough to rein in polluters, Yang added.
“The move by the Ministry of
Environmental Protection is an effort to
use their actions to show that they have
the resolve to strictly enforce the law,”
said Yang.
Public concerns and awareness about
the environment has surged in China in
recent years. Last January public
concerns heightened when a severe
wave of pollution hit Beijing and other
parts of country. Later, the discovery of
chemically tainted rice in Guangdong
peaked concerns about water quality.
But as public concern grew,
environmental groups and non-
governmental organizations said much
more needed to be done. One of China’s
biggest sources of pollution is coal, an
energy source that accounts for a large
portion of the country’s massive energy
needs.
Earlier this week, a new study warned
that plans to build 22 more coal-fired
power plants in southern Guangdong
province could cause as many as
16,000 deaths over the next 40 years.
The study was conducted by Andrew
Gray - a private air quality consultant -
and commissioned by the environmental
group Greenpeace. Gray said right now
there were around 140 coal-fired power
plants in the area and the additional 22
would increase local capacity by more
than half of its current output.
“The amount of energy increase and
demand is obviously growing very very
rapidly in that area and so the decisions
that are made will affect the people in
that part of the world for a long, long
time,” he said.
The Chinese government is working to
improve environmental protection
measures for coal plants and has begun
a massive undertaking of consolidating
the industry into 10 large and 10
medium-sized companies. The country
currently has tens of thousands of small
local mines where funding is lacking.
But, as China seeks to consolidate the
industry, it also has plans to build even
more coal-fired plants. The construction
of the plants is not only an issue
because of the pollution risks, but also
because of their high usage of water.
“When we looked at our own analysis of
363 planned new coal fired power plants
we found that over half of those are in
high or extremely high water stressed
areas…where there is already a lot of
competition for the available water.
Because coal fired power plants require
a lot of water, for cooling and for energy
generation that is only going to increase
the strain in water supply,” said Betsy
Otto, a project director at the World
Resources Institute , a Washington-
based research group.
Environmental group Greenpeace tried to
raise concerns about the demand coal
puts on China’s limited water resources
in late July when it issued a report on
China’s biggest state-run coal
company, Shenhua.
The report said a liquid-to-coal plant,
Shenhua was not only polluting the
environment by illegally discharging
toxic wastewater, but also draining
water levels in Inner Mongolia, where
the plant was located.
The company has admitted to illegally
dumping waste and is in the process of
carrying out an environmental impact
assessment that its plant has on the
water resources.
Shenhua had until the end of the year to
complete the review, but in the
meantime operations continued - as did
the company's plans to expand its
operations there, said Greenpeace East
Asia climate and energy campaigner
Deng Ping.
“Water resources are not something that
is going to change rapidly. What we
have now, is what we have. The
government’s plans for the expansion of
coal production, however, is growing
and growing at rapid pace,” said Deng.
The World Resources Institute says that
60 percent of the proposed power
capacity for plants in the government
plans will come from six provinces,
including Inner Mongolia. Those
provinces, however, are home to only
five percent of China’s total water
resources.