SF Chronicle: The good life means more greenhouse gas

The good life means more greenhouse gas
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Pi Heyang gingerly closed the door of his first car-to-be. Then, he ran his hand slowly along the shiny hood, touching the Chinese-made Tianjin Weizi sedan as delicately as if it were made of gossamer.

"This will change our lives," the Beijing bus driver said solemnly while his wife and young son stood at his side in the dealer's showroom.

Several miles away through Beijing's smoggy streets, an exhibition hall was jammed with thousands of people perusing booths with displays for new homes in suburban subdivisions. Videos played, dancers gyrated, and neon signs in English touted developments with names such as "Rich Garden" and "Canal Side Upper Strata Life."

"We want space, greenery, freedom," said Han Yu, a mobile phone salesman, after he and his wife signed papers to buy a three-bedroom condominium on Beijing's eastern outskirts for $105,000. "This is it."

This is the new Chinese Dream: cars and suburbs. Like the American counterpart, it is good news for many people -- but perhaps bad news for Planet Earth. The same economic boom that is catapulting millions of Chinese each year into the middle class has made their country the world's fastest- growing source of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

As China's thirst for fuel helps push world oil prices to record highs, the country is emerging as a key factor in the debate over climate change -- as well as a wild card that could determine the health of the world's economy.

Chinese leaders acknowledge global warming as a serious problem, and they have begun a concerted campaign to cut the country's greenhouse gas output, which is largely driven by energy consumption. The government is spending billions of dollars -- nobody knows exactly how much -- to increase energy conservation, shut fume-belching factories and reduce power plant emissions. At the same time, however, the resulting efficiency improvements have been outpaced by unrelenting growth in automobile use, power generation and industrial activity.

Although the Chinese government does not publish data about carbon emissions, most foreign analysts estimate that the country's carbon dioxide emission levels are now second only to the United States worldwide and are growing by anywhere from 5 to 10 percent a year, the fastest increase of any major nation. China is expected to overtake the United States for the No. 1 spot by 2025, with its share of total world greenhouse-gas output rising from 12 to 20 percent during the period.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, China and other developing nations are exempted from the mandatory cuts in emissions of global-warming gases that rich nations must obey. Chinese officials say such limits would prevent them from rising from poverty, and they point out that rich industrialized nations are responsible for the vast majority of global-warming emissions.

The Bush administration says China's exemption is unfair, and it is one reason that President Bush withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. Global warming is a top agenda item at the summit of the Group of Eight richest industrialized nations opening today in Scotland. The other seven members of the G-8 have promised to adhere to the Kyoto treaty.

Administration supporters say China's economic boom is fueled by profligate waste. China uses three times more energy per dollar of its gross domestic product than the global average and 4.7 times more than the United States, according to a recent study by the U.S. Department of Energy.

But Beijing officials defend the government's record.

"China wants to do its part against global warming, and we have taken many actions," said Zhou Dadi, director general of the Energy Research Institute, the central government's main policy agency on the subject. He cited several key steps in recent years, including these:

-- A new law was approved in February to support the adoption of renewable energy sources such as wind and small-scale hydroelectric plants.

-- Widespread energy-saving standards have been enacted for household appliances.

-- Auto emissions standards will be stiffened by 2007 to a level tougher than current U.S. rules.

-- Construction has started on nine high-speed passenger railway lines --

the nation's first -- to connect major cities.

Yet Zhou admitted that these moves were counteracted by broader economic forces.

"In the media there are lots of ads trying to convince people to adopt some kind of American life, a fancy car, a very big house," he said. "This is what everyone wants now. It is part of development; it is a historical process. Energy efficiency is a function of this."

Because of the nation's red-hot economic growth, which is averaging about 9 percent annually, even working-class Chinese such as Pi, the bus driver, are able to buy a car. Pi said he and his wife, Feng Xiaoe, an accountant, had saved for years, and with some help from his brother and parents, they were able to pay the new car's entire $9,000 sticker price.

"We can go out of the city on weekends," he said, smiling. "We can go fishing, go fly kites."

Bare-bones models are even more accessible to average wage-earners. A Geely sedan with no air conditioning or radio and with a one-liter engine sells for about $3,600. Government officials say they hope that eventually every Chinese family will own a car -- a goal that is championed by China's powerful domestic auto industry.

As a result, the broad freeways that have been built recently in Beijing and other cities are often gridlocked until late at night. The number of cars in the capital alone has doubled in the past five years to 2 million, and China's auto sales are expected to grow 17 percent this year, after 15 percent growth in 2004 and 37 percent in 2003. There still is lots of room for growth because car ownership is estimated at only 12 million -- less than one per 100 people, a tiny fraction of the U.S. rate of 74 per 100.

Bicycles, once the main mode of transportation, now are forbidden on many principal avenues in big cities. Bicycle lanes and sidewalks have been sacrificed in many places to allow more road space for autos.

Cities nationwide have spun off suburbs as municipal governments sell undeveloped rural land, evict tenant farmers and foster construction of suburban housing developments, golf courses and shopping malls. In the past few years, the ever-familiar signs praising the ruling Communist Party have been replaced by slick billboards hawking real estate -- "Grand Luxury!" "Country Mansion Living!" "Bucolic Repose!"

Many international analysts say this new emphasis on consumption is addicting China to high energy use.

"The world's front line for sustainable development is not in the Amazon jungle. The front line is in cities," said Nicholas You, the chief of strategic planning for Habitat, the U.N. housing agency, who recently completed a study of 10 mid-size Chinese cities.

Chinese urban sprawl, You said, is more carefully planned and less energy- intensive than the anarchic, uncontrolled explosions of cities such as Nairobi, Kenya, or Lagos, Nigeria. But he said China's unparalleled size, with more than one-fifth of the world's population, made even small mistakes gargantuan.

"It's obvious that if China continues urbanizing for the next 20 to 30 years, with another 300 million people moving into the cities and with suburbs being built everywhere, it will cause irreversible changes in energy consumption patterns," You said.

Nationwide, energy use is growing about 15 percent annually, and local governments are building scores of coal-fired power plants to try to stave off the blackouts that have plagued cities in recent summers. The central government predicts that there will be a 5 percent gap between electricity production and consumption nationwide this summer, producing more blackouts and brownouts.

China obtains 67 percent of its electricity from coal, and with an estimated 500 years of reserves at current production levels, it has little economic incentive to use alternative fuels.

Nor is there much public awareness of global warming or the need to switch to cleaner energy sources, say leaders of China's tiny environmentalist movement, much of which is subsidized by foreign groups.

"Knowledge of renewable energy is still very low," said Yu Jie, an energy policy analyst for Greenpeace in Beijing. "This is a problem."

But the government's highest circles include many officials who see energy waste and pollution as a severe long-term threat to China's economy and public health. These leaders pushed the new renewable-energy law into fruition in February, an achievement that many foreign analysts call unprecedented for a developing nation.

The law requires power-grid operators to buy electricity from producers of wind, solar, geothermal and small- and medium-scale hydro energy, and will offer financial incentives such as a national fund to foster renewable energy development. It sets the goal of raising renewable energy's share of national consumption from the current level of 3 to 10 percent by 2020. But construction and operation of renewable energy technologies is much more expensive than for conventional coal, oil and gas, and the cost of this switch is estimated at $80 billion.

Industrial lobbies are fighting hard to water down the law's all- important implementation regulations, scheduled to be announced in November. Among the most controversial issues is whether grid operators will be forced to pay an artificially high price to renewable energy producers -- as is the case in Germany, which has become the world's leader in renewable energy since it mandated such built-in subsidies in 2001.

China's environmentalists say the devil is in the details.

"It all depends on how ambitious the central government is," said Yu, the Greenpeace analyst. If pricing decisions are left in the hands of local authorities, she said, the implementation may be gutted by provincially owned utility companies, known as the "electrical tigers."

As part of its drive to add nonpolluting power sources, the government also is starting the world's largest nuclear energy construction program since the 1970s. As many as 40 new nuclear plants are scheduled over the next 15 years, supplementing the country's nine existing plants, to create a capacity of 40,000 gigawatts. This campaign may become partly financed by the Bush administration -- the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a bid by Westinghouse Corp. to construct four of the reactors, and the U.S. Export- Import bank has approved $5 billion in loan guarantees. Westinghouse's main competing bidder is a French-German consortium.

Last week, however, amid growing anti-China sentiment in Congress, the House voted 313-114 to block the Westinghouse financing. The prospects for similar legislation in the Senate are uncertain.

Even with the new expansion program, nuclear energy will contribute only 4 percent of China's power supply by 2020, up from 2.3 percent now. In contrast, nuclear plants provide 20 percent of electricity in the United States and 35 percent in Europe.

But the main weakness of China's campaign for energy efficiency and emissions reduction may be the government's inability to enforce its own edicts.

For example, the energy conservation campaign is being roundly ignored in Beijing and other major cities. Lights in many commercial buildings are on all night, and even structures under construction are often brightly lit from top to bottom as if decked out for a festival.

In December, the State Environmental Protection Agency gained headlines nationwide by shutting 32 new coal power plants that had been built by local governments despite violating the federal agency's air emissions standards. Chinese and foreign environmentalists viewed the move as a sign that the country was finally getting serious about clean-air regulations.

Yet the shutdowns had little impact. All the power plants simply paid fines of 200,000 yuan (about $24,000), the maximum that the federal government could levy, and restarted operations within a few months -- in most cases without any attempt to comply with the federal rules. "We have a saying that if you obey the law, you will have a higher cost, but if you violate it, your cost will be lower," said Ren Haiping, a policy researcher for the environmental agency.

He noted that the agency's officials outside Beijing were under the direct control of provincial and city officials rather than the agency's own headquarters. "If our officials in a province shut down a power plant, for example, they can be fired by the local mayor," said Ren. "It is very sad. We do the best we can, but it is not much.".



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DATA

Fueling China's boom

The booming economy and the adoption of modern consumer lifestyles are expected to cause China to overtake the United States as the world's top source of global warming gases by 2025.

No.2 and rising fast

China's carbon dioxide emissions were second only to those of the United
States in 2002.

United States 5.7 Billion metric tons of carbon dioxide
China 3.6
Russia 1.5
Japan 1.2
India 1.0
Germany 0.8
Canada 0.6
United Kingdom 0.6
South Korea 0.5
Italy 0.4
Australia 0.4
France 0.4

Note: Data include carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel energy
consumption and natural gas venting and flaring.

E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com.