China Environmental Law

Apologies for failing to give a nod to World Environment Day (WED) yesterday. China which rarely lets an International Day pass with out loads of singing school children was hard pressed to report on any WED activities in the Middle Kingdom, but it did note that:

North Korean state media said the government was doing its bit for the environment, including updating existing thermal power plants, increasing hydro-power generating capacity, creating more forests and using more organic fertilizers.

Thank you North Korea, but aren’t you doing enough already like turning out all your lights at night and that kind of thing?

The New York Times dropped a brick on China for its WED present: “China Reports Some Progress on Pollution.” Why does every NYT article on China seem so whiny? If the editor had put quotes around progress in the title it would have more accurately portrayed the tenor of the piece.

The NYT article reports the pollution reduction numbers contained in the recently released Ministry of Environmental Protection’s 2007 Annual Report as if they were hot off the press. Readers of this blog (see here and here) and James Fallow’s “China’s Silver Lining,” know otherwise. Nevertheless, the Annual Report for 2007 (so far only available in Chinese) is noteworthy as a candid assessment of China’s environmental situation, and is by no means sugar coated. But it does repeat this good news, as here reported in the NYT:

After rising steeply for many years, emissions of three important pollutants began to decline last year, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection announced Thursday as part of an annual report.

I’m ready to kill a fatted calf to celebrate these numbers; after years of squandering its environment in pursuit of the pleasures of economic development, China is starting to return to its senses. But the NYT plays the role of the older brother and insists on killing the party with tsk tsking and some dubious science.

Air quality tends to improve faster than water quality in China when pollution is reduced. Fresh air typically flows in from Siberia and Central Asia, while China’s polluted air is wafted east across the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and Japan, with some pollution reaching the United States.

I’m reminded of a “bonus round” question on the Dating Game (which I have only seen on youtube, of course): “Girls in what direction does the sun rise in your neighborhood every morning, and remember girls we are asking about your neighborhood?” Do the air and water of China act differently than the air and water in the rest of the world? I think not. Look folks, wind blows air pollution away: it blows it from the Ohio Valley to the northeast states, it blows it from China to Korea. China can’t be blamed for the direction of the prevailing winds, but to the extent “pollution is reduced” in China, China’s downwind neighbors will quickly benefit from the reduction.

The pollutants identified in the report as showing improvement, particularly sulfur dioxide, tended to be those emitted by relatively few factories and power plants, many of them owned or controlled by the state. That makes it easier to limit pollution.

Man, isn’t that always the way it is. The lazy sods go after the easy stuff first. Of course, had SO2 emissions not been reduced, I think I could write the line for the NYT: “SO2 emissions, responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year and the acid rain which falls over large swaths of China, remained unchanged.” Oh but wait, the NYT doesn’t need my help; its already written that line (in an article published June 11, 2006):

The sulfur dioxide produced in coal combustion poses an immediate threat to the health of China’s citizens, contributing to about 400,000 premature deaths a year. It also causes acid rain that poisons lakes, rivers, forests and crops.

Certainly China can be forgiven, if not praised, for first tackling “China’s No. 1 [according to the 2006 article] pollution problem.” No, the NYT is an unforgiving task master:

Air quality experts calculate that up to 90 percent of deaths from air pollution are caused by tiny particles of soot. The biggest contributors in cities are trucks. The ministry provided no figures on Thursday for emissions of such particles.

Hiding the ball again are ya China? Or could it be that the Chinese, believe it or not, do not use “tiny particles of soot,” but 颗粒物 when they refer to particulate matter. The MEP release notes that 72% of Chinese cities obtained intermediate grade 2 levels for particulates, while only 2.2% of cities reported the worst (grade 3) levels.

But here’s my favorite:

Industries reduced their discharges of solid waste into the air and water by 8.1 percent.

Guohua you got that Titan III loaded up with our solid waste yet? The disposal of solid wastes “into the air” can not be an efficient or effective disposal mechanism. Perhaps something has been lost in translation; if we are reading the same report in Chinese, I don’t see any mention of the media into which the solid wastes were disposed.

Enough of that, I think if we’d had some singing school children celebrating WED in China I would have been in a more festive mood. I’m heading out to a North Korean restaurant in Shanghai for a drink; they still know how to celebrate an International Day!