China Environmental Law

We’ve about reached our pontification limit for the week here at CELB, so will avoid in depth analysis today and give you a quick tour of a few other China environmental stories making the headlines.

Environmental Protests

More than 1,000 residents in Zhentou, Hunan Province, “demonstrated outside local government headquarters and a police station, demanding greater compensation for pollution from the Xianhe Chemical Plant.”  It’s hard to know what’s going on here.  The local government seems to have been fairly proactive in getting the offending plant shut down, and the dispute truly does seem to simply revolve around whether the local residents have been paid enough for the damages they received.

A female official reached by phone at Zhentou government headquarters defended the steps taken by authorities.

“We have already done a lot of work on the pollution issue and announced compensation, but some people do not accept it,” said the woman, who gave only her surname, Luo.

“Instead, they spread rumours and inflate the problem. We do not know what they are up to.”

A local villager who also gave his surname as Luo told AFP his family of five had received 5,000 yuan (735 dollars) in compensation.

“That is too low. We demand that the government move us to a safer location,” he said.

Would the official have been identified as a “male,” if that had been the case?  The number of Luo’s in Zhentou reminds me of when my youngest was reviewing the class list for the 1^st grade class and remarked “that Wang family sure has a lot of children.”  Indeed it did.

Proposed Nansha Refinery Relocates

It’s apparently official, the oil refinery to be constructed by a joint venture between China’s Sinopec and Kuwait Petroleum Corporation will not be built in Nansha, Guangdong Province.  The project will be relocated to an as yet undisclosed alternative location in the Province.  Wang Yang, Communist Party secretary of Guangdong, and never a fan of the Nansha location (as we have previously noted) made the announcement yesterday.

“The Nansha refinery project had been criticised strongly by the community and by (officials) and by scholars,” Wang told reporters.

“And we have also taken into account the fragile nature of the Nansha ecology and the interest of the neighbouring provinces.

“After numerous studies and a lot of efforts, we have decided that we will relocate the project.

“I think this reflects how Guangdong values ecology and it is open to criticism.”

At least when the Party Secretary is already predisposed in favor of the critics.

China Closes More Inefficient Coal-fired Generating Plants

China has a program to shut down small, inefficient coal-fired generating units.  Because of the economic slowdown it is shutting them down faster than planned.

“This couldn’t be done when power demand was very intense,” Sun [Qin, deputy administrator of the Cabinet's National Energy Administration] said at a news conference. “Due to this financial crisis, the power generation has slowed down, so we took this opportunity to accelerate the shutdown.”

I can almost guarantee that most of these plants are being mothballed (evidenced by the fact that the article notes that “seven local officials and company managers were punished for restarting power plants after the agency closed them”), not dismantled, so if demand picks up significantly they can be placed back in service.

So the bottom line is China is dealing with overcapacity in its electric generation sector by shutting down its most inefficient (and polluting)  plants.  This is perfectly rational decision making.  It really is stretching the concept pretty far to characterize these actions as evidence that China is going “green,” but many have done so.

All In Their Heads

The New York Times runs a good recap of the environmental poisoning/mass hysteria event in Jilin City, Jilin Province.

As soon as the Jilin Connell Chemical Plant started production this spring, local hospitals began receiving stricken workers from the acrylic yarn factory 100 yards downwind from Connell’s exhaust stacks. On some days, doctors were overwhelmed and patients were put two to a bed.

A clear case of chemical contamination? Not so, say Chinese health officials who contend that the episode is a communal outbreak of psychogenic illness, also called mass hysteria. The blurry vision, muscle spasms and pounding headaches, according to a government report issued in May, were simply psychological reactions to a feared chemical exposure.

A couple of other salient facts:

1. “The State Administration of Work Safety posted a statement on its Web site describing the problem as a ‘chemical leak’ and advising other companies to learn from Connell Chemical’s mistake. After a few hours, however, the statement had been removed.”

2. The President of Connel is Song Zhiping, “a representative to the National People’s Congress.”

OK, I think we know how this one is going to end.