China Environmental Law

I’m tied up today, but feeling just a bit less anxious knowing that in the event of a nuclear attack I now have a 24 hour hotline to call for “medical advice and technical support.”  China Radio International reports  that the hotline was opened recently at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing.  As [...]

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The U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission held hearings on August 13, 2008 regarding China’s Energy Policies and Their Environmental Impacts. If you were designing a topic with this blog in mind, you couldn’t have done any better than this.  Filming commitments (more later) kept me from participating at the hearing itself, but I will be [...]

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Regular readers know that the performance of sub-national political officials is evaluated to a certain extent based how well they deliver on several environmental (SO2 and COD discharge reductions) and energy efficiency targets.  Until yesterday, however, I did not know how much these criteria factored into the evaluation mix.  It turns out it is an [...]

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Occasionally one of my Google alerts turns up a strange little nugget.  Today’s sieving revealed a truly bizarre bit of news.  A report on Vermont Public Radio reveals that the Chinese government weighed in with a Vermont legislator regarding a pending computer recycling law. 
Here’s the gist of it:
Senator Ginny Lyons believes electronics products represent a [...]

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Sorry dear readers, very busy today.  Here’s the most important environmental story of the day: “Tax on big cars raised to save fuel” . 
Key points:

Cars with engines above 4-liter capacity: 40% tax
Cars with engines between 3 and 4 liters: 25% tax (up from 15%)
Cars with engines below 1-liter capacity: 1% tax (reduced from 3%)

This is [...]

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The internet connection here at CELB is impossibly slow today.  The half of the CELB staff that is not usually engaged in online gaming (that would be the female half), appears to have switched from IMing to watching Olympic-related streaming videos or downloading the entire opening ceremony.  As a result, our research efforts have been [...]

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What happens when smoke stacks replace haystacks?  The tensions between farms and encroaching factories occur in every country, but given China’s rapid development, they happen with greater frequency here.
For the residents of Shihezi farm in China’s north western Xinjiang Autonomous Region, the approach of new chemical plants sparked a battle which has lasted more than [...]

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As the environment in China’s eastern cities stabilizes or sees marginal improvement, the focus of China’s anti-pollution efforts is shifting to the countryside. 
The problems of domestic, industrial, and agricultural wastes in rural areas are enormous:

Domestic wastes are largely untreated and responsible for a lack clean drinking water for hundreds of millions of rural residents. According [...]

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My favorite shot was the aerial that followed the fireworks from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic venues.  Most surprising non-visual feature captured by television: the heat.  The fluttering fans and sweat-sheened faces gave a strong impression of how hot it must have been in the stadium.  Take away reaction: relief.  I don’t remember any of [...]

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The official figures are now out on energy efficiency gains for the first half of 2008.  You may recall that earlier reports had characterized the results as disappointing, but did not give the actual numbers. 
The numbers are disappointing in the sense that they failed to achieve the 4% annualized efficiency improvement target (on a year-on-year basis), [...]

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