China Environmental Law

Color me skeptical. The Environmental News Network carries a Reuters article that reports

This summer’s Beijing Olympics will be “basically” carbon neutral thanks to a series of energy saving measures such as the use of solar power and an afforestation program, a senior official said on Thursday.

Technology Minister Wan Gang said that the event was expected to generate 1.18 million tonnes of carbon, in part because so many athletes and spectators were traveling long distances.

“The ‘Green Olympics’ will take a series of measures, including technological ones, like planting of trees and controlling the use of vehicles, to reduce emissions by between 1 million and 1.29 million tonnes,” Wan told a news conference.

“We can basically ensure that emissions will be balanced.”

The whole concept of the modern peripatetic Olympics with the construction of gigantic new venues which have only limited post-Olympic applications and the movement of masses of people long distances would seem to make the games a poster child for non-sustainability and certainly a huge carbon generator. This isn’t a China issue, it just intuitively seems that any Olympics’ carbon footprint is going to be enormous(as Beijing has admitted), and I can’t fathom how that carbon can be truly and verifiably offset.

Solar panels for Olympic facilities and hybrid electric vehicles to shuttle participants around may reduce the total amount of carbon generated from Olympic operations (which are, by definition, extraordinary and incremental emitters of carbon) than would otherwise be the case, but they do not “offset” or reduce carbon emissions from, say, the airline flights of athletes, journalists, and spectators; the same could arguably be said about “traffic restrictions” during the Olympics and afforestation projects that would have been undertaken anyway as part of China’s anti-desertification efforts.

I know that some people may argue that the solar installations or afforestation, for instance, can be used after the Olympics and their entire life cycle carbon reductions should be considered in the Olympics’ carbon equation. I don’t buy that; the carbon generated by the Olympics has already been emitted into the atmosphere (during the construction phase) or will be emitted in a big slug immediately before, during, and after the Olympics.  This isn’t like a traditional Clean Development Mechanism project where reductions over time match emissions over time, and thus, in terms of atmospheric loadings, cancel each other out on a roughly temporally equivalent basis. Am I missing something here?  

Does anyone know where the conclusion that “the event plans to generate 1.18 million tons of carbon” comes from, and how it was calculated? Same goes for “1 million to 1.29 million tons” of carbon reductions? For all I know China has done a fantastic job of controlling and offsetting the carbon footprint of the 2008 games. I wouldn’t have even raised this issue had it not been raised by Minister Gang first. But since it has been raised, I just can’t feel warm and fuzzy about it, until I know where the numbers came from and how they were calculated. I’ll try to do a little additional digging myself.