The Guardian: The Giant Wakes

The giant wakes

The Chinese climate is paying the price for economic growth. Jonathan Watts reports on one man's mission to take on the polluters

Thursday June 30, 2005
The Guardian

There are probably very few people outside China who have heard of Pan Yue, but if the planet is to have any chance of avoiding disastrous levels of global warming this is a name that environmentalists should get to know very quickly.
Pan is the deputy director of the state environmental protection agency in China, the world's second largest producer of greenhouse gases. And though his country - as a developing nation - is not obliged by the Kyoto Protocol to cut emissions, he and his fellow underdogs are fighting a campaign to cut wasteful power consumption and increase the use of renewable energy.


They appear hopelessly outnumbered. Inside the government, the upper hand is held by proponents of rapid economic development, who point out that the past 25 years of spectacular growth have lifted 400 million people out of poverty.
These industrial lobbyists want more of the same, but Pan has taken a big risk to declare that China - and the world - simply cannot sustain business as usual.

Breaking with the usually secretive traditions of Beijing's political world, he has used the media and non-governmental organisations, such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, to take on power companies and local polluters.

"Environmental crisis is no longer a risk we predict for our children, it is a problem that our generation must face. It is going to hit us in 15 years, not 50," he told the Guardian.

Pan is certainly not the only pro-environment voice in China, but his is certainly the loudest. In interview after interview with domestic and foreign media, the former journalist has tried to make up for a lack of political clout with an appeal to a still nascent civic society.

"My agency has always gone against the grain," he told Der Spiegel. "In the process, there have always been conflicts with the powerful lobbyist groups and strong local governments. But the people, the media and science are behind us. In fact, the pressure is a motivator for me. Nobody is going to push me off my current course."

Thirst for resources

There is no shortage of evidence to support his assertion that China must change. Inevitably, the world's fastest growing and most populous nation is also one of the planet's biggest environmental villains, particularly with regard to climate change. With a sharp increase in ownership of cars, air conditioners, computers - in fact, just about anything - the country has moved in the past decade from being a net exporter of oil to being the world's second biggest consumer, after the US. Add to this a huge reliance on coal, which accounts for about 70% of the country's energy needs, and it is no surprise that China is also the second biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. Between 1990 and 2002, China's CO2 emissions rose 33% to 3.05bn tons. By comparison India - a developing nation with a similar sized population - emitted 1.01bn. The US, however, with just a quarter of the people, belched out 5.6bn tons.

As far as climate change is concerned, the problem with China is that its economy is only just starting to warm up. With GDP expected to quadruple by 2030, its energy related emissions are projected to at least double - possibly even triple - in the same period, even as the developed world is supposed to rein back outputs. For George Bush, this is a "fatal flaw" of the Kyoto protocol. It is certainly a huge obstacle to achieving the EU goal of restricting the rise in temperatures to two degrees by 2050.

China's environmentalists need outside help - a lot of it - if they are to tackle this problem. But, as Pan Yue points out, there are lots of reasons why the government should also cooperate.

"The 1990s was the warmest decade in the past 100 years for China," he notes. "Since 1950, there has been a gradual reduction in precipitation nationwide. Since 1960, the volume of our six main rivers has steadily declined. Since the 1980s, our northern provinces has suffered from intermittent droughts and flash floods. On the coast, sea levels are rising. And inland, our vegetation is moving to a higher latitude. China has been very much affected by climate change."

Scientists and the media are paying increasing attention to such problems. Yao Tandong, a professor of glaciology at the China Academy of Science, worked unobtrusively for more than 20 years in the Himalayas, but last year he caused a sensation by declaring that two-thirds of China's high altitude icefields - which account for 15% of the planet's ice - would melt by 2050 if current trends continued.

Environmental groups say global warming is also raising the risk of water shortages in already drought-stricken northern cities such as Beijing, as well as impacting crop yields and health. Malarial mosquitos are expected to move north, and heat-related deaths in Shanghai are predicted to rise between 3.6 and 7.1 times the current rate.

Possible solutions

"China has to address this issue seriously and consider long-term action," says Hillary Cox of the World Wildlife Fund. "A half-hearted approach won't be enough for the world to avoid a dangerous level of climate change."

For most government officials, including Pan Yue, the problem is seen through the prism of power shortages rather than global warming. This need not matter. To rein back waste, the government has shut down almost 100,000 inefficient plants. This year, China enacted the country's first renewable energy law, which theoretically forces utilities to buy energy from wind farms, nuclear plants and generators using solar and tidal power.

As with all of the central government's fine-sounding policies, there are huge problems of implementation at a local level, where officials know they are judged on the basis of economic growth rates. One consequence of this is the failure of an energy efficiency law enacted in 1998. According to Pan, China uses seven times more resources than Japan to produce goods worth $10,000 (£5,500) and nearly three times more than India. This means that even when Beijing takes a conservationist stance domestically, its environmental problems are simply exported elsewhere. For example, China has belatedly started to protect its forests - and to build a "great green wall" of woodland in the north - but its demand for timber is still growing, which had led to dramatic increases in illegal logging in Russia, Burma and Indonesia.

To address such problems, Pan has proposed the introduction of a green GDP, which would factor environmental costs into economic measurements. Studies on this have begun in 10 provinces and even though it is still far away from becoming national policy, NGOs have given Pan high marks for getting such issues on the political agenda.

"Pan Yue is a special figure inside the government," said Howard Liu, executive director of Greenpeace China. "Most officials keep a low profile, but Pan has strong opinions on China's development. It is very clear to me that he is trying to make a difference. And for the moment at least, the top leaders are giving him the space to express his opinions in public."