China Environmental Law

The Ministry of Environmental Protection released the English summary of its “State of the Environment” report earlier this month.  We have read it so you won’t have to.
Let’s first look at the ten achievements identified for 2008.  Where interesting facts and figures were given, we have noted them.

First, the CPC Central Committee and the State [...]

[Read more →]

Now it can be told!  This is one for the history books!  Not since Kissinger’s secret trip to China in July 1971 have we had US-China intrigue of this magnitude!  Here’s the scoop:
A high-powered group of senior Republicans and Democrats led two missions to China in the final months of the Bush administration for secret [...]

[Read more →]

Premier Wen apparently announced the 2008 numbers for Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) discharges and Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) emissions reductions in his address to the National People’s Congress.  If these numbers had been released previously, I missed them.  You may recall that the 11th Five Year Plan calls for a 10% reduction in COD and SO2 [...]

[Read more →]

China fine tuned its 2008 “energy intensity” number yesterday and announced that the energy used to generate each dollar of gross domestic product fell 4.59 percent (to 1.107″ton of coal equivalents”/10,000RMB of GDP).  This is good news, but will still require over the next two years a combined 10.4% drop from the 2005 baseline to [...]

[Read more →]

The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has articulated the concerns of many that the need for economic stimulating activities may result in backsliding on the environmental front in China.  Zhou Shengxian, the Minister of MEP, in remarks before a national conference on environmental protection on Monday, said that “factories with backward facilities ‘would revive’, using [...]

[Read more →]