China Environmental Law

China announced again on Tuesday that it reduced pollutant emissions in the first half of 2008.  Did the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) officials conclude that insufficient attention had been paid to this story when it was first released two months ago, or did they assume that everyone had forgotten about it so why not recycle some good news?  Is the Xinhua reporter in on the joke, or is he or she simply a lazy tool who will publish any agency press release without the least scrutiny?  Oh well, it’s a minor issue in the grand scheme of things I suppose, and there were a few new “facts” in the latest article.  Indeed, some of the new material is pretty interesting. 

Here are the highlights:

• Electric Power Generation: “In 2008, China’s power industry installed flue gas desulphurization (FGD) technology at some coal-burning power plants with a total generating capacity of 40,600 megawatts (MW).  China also closed some smaller power plants, with a total generating capacity of 8,360 MW, because they failed to meet requirements for clean production.”
• Sewage Treatment: “New sewage treatment facilities built this year could treat 6.78 million tons of sewage daily. Because that’s more than older facilities, the amount of water pollution in certain areas was reduced.”
• Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) Approvals: In the time period January - August a total of 439 projects were submitted for approval.  Of these, 104 projects, involving 314.56 billion yuan (US$46 billion) of investment, were either rejected or postponed.  The balance consisting of 335 projects, with a total investment of 1.49 trillion yuan (US$218.2 billion), were approved.  

The article is not clear but with respect to the last item I believe only those projects where the EIA was required to be submitted to MEP headquarters for approval are included, not all projects for which EIA’s were required.  Any project larger than US$100,000,000 requires headquarters approval (except in a few specified areas such as foreign-invested projects in the “Restricted” category, etc. where the investment threshold is lower).  Thus, there would also have been a significant number of projects which were approved or rejected at the sub-national level.  The national approval rate was 76%. 

The total number of projects is a little staggering when you consider that MEP’s total headquarters’ headcount is about 300, and they have other things to do besides review EIA’s.  Of course, I’m aware that MEP convenes panels of outside experts to do the heavy lifting in terms of the technical review, but it is still hard to imagine how MEP is able to fulfill its review function.  Apparently some EIA approvals are easier to obtain than others if the shenanigans we reported earlier this week are true.  Still, if 439 represents a normal eight month load, I really don’t know how the agency intends to manage the additional load of stimulus plan funded projects.