China Environmental Law

Yang Chaofei, director of the policy, law and regulations department at the Ministry of Environmental Protection (and a very nice man, by the way) announced this weekend that the feedback process on the draft amendment to the regional planning Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) regulation would be finalized by Wednesday and “then be submitted to relevant authorities for review before its eventual release by the State Council at the end of the year.” 

The press report was slightly confused as to the type of EIA involved here:

The purpose of planning EIA is to ensure that environmental consequences of major development projects, such as chemical and power plants, are identified and assessed before approval is granted.

Planning EIA will be conducted much earlier in the decision-making process than project EIA, which fails to factor environmental impact on a wider geographic area, and is a major step toward sustainable development.

A regional or “special program” EIA (EIA Law, Articles 7 to 15), will rarely solely consider the consequences of a “major development project” as specific as an individual chemical or power plant, but rather would address more general “zoning” or land use planning issues. I assume there could be certain situations were a particular project triggered the need for a “special program” EIA, especially if it was not contemplated in the existing regional land use plans (this may have been the type of EIA that was conducted at SEPA’s insistence in the Xiamen PX plant case), but these would be relatively rare occurrences.

The same story mentions that MEP held a joint forum over the weekend with Greenpeace. This is good news in that it appears China is not holding a grudge against an organization that was reportedly among the groups planning to disrupt the torch relay in Jakarta .

Greenpeace, of course, is the “bad boy” of environmental groups know for its outrageous stunts when protesting the actions of tolerant Western democracies or their corporations. You’d expect the same MO in China wouldn’t you? Well, no you wouldn’t actually. I suspect China’s sense of humor does not encompass a banner unfurled from the Great Wall protesting State-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) CO₂ emissions. So how does Greenpeace act in China? A happy middle ground perhaps. No, they simply round up the usual suspects:

Greenpeace released survey results revealing that among 28 multinational companies operating in China, nearly half shirked the standard operating procedures of their countries of origin by not publicizing pollution information. . . .

Liu Lican, a manager of Greenpeace China, said: “Lack of impetus in China to unveil the information of pollution by those companies has greatly hurt the Chinese people’s right to know about the truth.”

Note that the MNCs are not accused of emitting pollutants in excess of China’s standards or of failing to report pollutant discharges according to China’s laws, but rather of failing to abide by the “standard operating procedures,” whatever those are, of their “countries of origin.” Thus, we have another case of an environmental NGO in China choosing to go after the soft (non-problematic) targets. The Chinese press laps it up, of course, but the “bad boy” of the world-wide environmental movement comes off looking like the “toady boy” (if you doubt me on this check out their insipid China website). When Greenpeace publishes a survey indicating how large, polluting Chinese companies have “greatly hurt the Chinese people’s right to know about the truth,” then I may start to listen.