China Environmental Law

We have previously discussed the moves earlier this year to tinker with China’s energy administrative apparatus.  Despite earlier predictions that China would be creating a Ministry-level energy entity it hasn’t, and Ministry of Energy proponents found little encouragement in the draft of the new national Energy Law, released at the end of last year, which only [...]

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The third session of the Standing Committee of the 11th National People’s Congress (NPC), opened in Beijing on June 24, 2008 and the draft of the Circular Economy Law was “deliberated” for a second time.
The Chinese language press is reporting that the following provisions of the draft were deleted:
Article 14.3国务院和县级以上地方人民政府向同级人民代表大会报告政府工作时，应当同时报告循环经济发展工作。
The State Council and the local people’s [...]

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Apparently Beijing is consuming water at the rate Marie Antoinette consumed petit fours and there is always a price to pay for such gluttony. Many news organizations (see, e.g., here and here) reported today on a new study, published by Probe International and written by a Chinese environmentalist, entitled “Beijing’s Water Crisis: 1949-2008 Olympics” which reads like a [...]

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If you know only one official at the Ministry of Environmental Protection, it’s probably Pan Yue (潘岳). His biography reads like countless other cadres:
Male, Han Nationality, born in April, 1960 in Nanjing City of Jiangsu Province. Doctor of History. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1987. Associate Researcher.
From 1976 to 1982, he served in [...]

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This is Beijing on June 20, 2008:

[Photo Credit: James Fallows]
That is how it will look again about the first of October. In the meantime it will get better.
China has undoubtedly made great efforts to improve Beijing’s air quality.  As has been noted, given the city’s breakneck development, without these efforts, the situation would be much worse.  [...]

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More support from China’s financial press for a move to market-based utility pricing (this time even citing Milton Freidman).  Following the Caijing article we discussed last week, the The Economic Observer Online yesterday published an editorial entitled “Let the Market Lead in Prices.” 
The recent rise in fuel and electricity prices has to some extent rectified [...]

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The Observer ran an article yesterday which profiled a tort action brought by some injured parties in a “cancer village.” Although the thrust of the piece was that environmental activism, to the extent it exists in China, is being placed in Olympic lockdown mode, the report about the lawsuit itself is relatively encouraging:
The people of Hou [...]

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Truth be told there is not much of a family resemblance, but it did come from the sea (off Fujian province–close enough to Tokyo by my reckoning) and it could be the result of humans getting things out of kilter. 

Here’s the lowdown from China.org.cn
An acaleph-like aquatic creature was spotted in Fuzhou, the capital city of southeastern China’s [...]

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The Green Leap Forward  has a great rundown on yesterday’s announcement that China will increase fuel and electricity prices. This would certainly appear to be welcome news from an environmental, energy conservation, and (apparently) investor perspective, but not everyone is convinced.
China’s decision to raise fuel prices is unlikely to have much of an impact on [...]

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The SED 4 concluded on Wednesday and as expected, the United States and China “signed a Ten Year Energy and Environment Cooperation Framework that sets goals and lays out concrete next steps.” Click here for the US Treasury Department’s Fact Sheet on the Framework.
The two countries announced the following four steps as part of their [...]

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