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Bad Air: Some Photos from Beijing

2008-01-09T16:35:24Z

Well, what can I say about my trip to a ‘developing’ country with a culture over 5,000 years old? It was one of the most rewarding trips I have ever taken but to say it was fun in would be overstating it. Fascinating yes, fun for the time I was talking to NRDC staff, absolutely, the rest of the time, I am not so sure.

This first blog post has to be about air quality. First, I was preoccupied with it and second, it will have serious implications for next summer when China has its coming out party to the rest of the world in the form of the summer Olympics. The air quality is as bad as others (such as the media, people who have visited China, statistics from the World Health Organization) led me to believe. I did not have a coughing fit from being there (my cough came from water skiing behind a two-stroke engine in Bali) but once I looked out my hotel room window during the first morning I was shocked by what I saw. I could only see about six blocks in any direction (pictures from NRDC office very close to hotel are below). It was not until I left the next day and traveled across the city that I realized how much I was missing. The city sprawls forever but I could not tell. In any case, I noticed right away that there was something seriously ‘wrong’ with the air in Beijing.

I placed the word ‘wrong’ in quotes because while it is a priority to clear the air in Beijing, it is dwarfed by the goal of economic development. Causing dangerous air quality in order to grow the economy is a trade-off China is more than willing to make. Trade-offs with the goal of achieving balance between competing interests are common in environmental decision-making, but it is not often that one can literally see the results of a trade-off from a hotel balcony.

As bad as I thought the air was, it was better than it was just five days later when my colleague Erik Laaken was in Beijing.

Here is a picture from my trip. Visibility is okay. I was a little bit surprised but it reminded me of pictures of Los Angeles in the 1960s.

My experience with air quality paled (literally) in comparison to my colleague, Eric Laaken (also with NRDC). This picture was taken just five days after I left. This picture was taken at 4:30. Sunset in Beijing does not take place until around 6pm.

I am interested to see what the Chinese government will do to clean this up in time for the Olympics. If they are unsuccessful, I hope they can hold the marathon outside city limits.

Game On: China Wind Comes to Montana

2007-12-07T02:04:00Z

Mark your calendars, folks. This is the week that China starts exporting wind turbines to the United States. According to the Wall Street Journal’s energy blog, Mingyang Wind Power Technology Co., Ltd., has inked it’s first American deal for more than 70 1.5 MW turbines.

The machines are destined for a windfarm in Montana.

Further example of the competition that is only just beginning to see who is going to dominate the markets for clean, efficient and renewable energy technologies in the coming years.

Turbines are in huge demand, and the market is extremely tight. That means profits for anyone who can deliver good product reliably.

So far in 2007, only eight turbine makers have provided turbines to the U.S. market. GE is the big domestic player. Seimens (Germany), Vestas (Denmark) and Gamesa (Spain) are the big players from Europe.

It will be fascinating to see how this new competition, combined with the sinking US dollar, does for the wind market.

“What’s interesting about Guangdong Mingyang’s mid-sized machines,” the Journal also notes, “are their two flavors: one turbine is specially-designed for cold-weather, low wind speeds in northern China; another is built to withstand typhoons in southern China.”

What a difference a day makes...

2007-11-26T17:33:08Z

It's a beautiful day in Beijing today, which made me think about this picture someone sent me a few months ago:

This is a photo of Beijing on two consecutive days about a year ago in 2006. This, in a single picture, crystallizes for me why we are working in China. The enormity of the problem on one side. The overwhelming promise and potential on the other.

Many days over this gritty city are like those days you see on the left. Those are days when you stay inside and turn your air purifier up to 11. But, sometimes – particularly when a strong wind blows through or after a heavy rain – we get a perfect day like you see towards the right, an instant reminder of what is possible.

There is a tremendous amount of environmental protection activity to take us to the cleaner side of this picture, coming from many different sectors of Chinese society – government, community groups, lawyers, environmental groups, scientists, doctors, etc. More needs to be done though. We have been working to help implement a number of key solutions (in the areas of greater public involvement in environmental protection, improved access to environmental information, energy efficiency and green buildings, clean energy technologies, and so on). I’ll look forward to talking more about these in the weeks to come.

On Leaving My Wallet At Home

2007-11-21T03:28:40Z

I am a geek of the worst kind. I am an electronics gadget geek. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a lover of many other geeky things, like comics and video games, but nothing else comes close to my obsession with gadgets. Now I may not be able to afford an iPhone or latest Garmin GPS, but my lack of funds doesn’t stop me from knowing everything there is to know about those two items. If the opportunity to get one at a sweet price should present itself, I will be prepared. This obsession is evidenced by my possession of not one, but four Polar heart rate monitors. I use one of them, and only very, very rarely. I got such amazing prices on them (a savings of over 80%, amazing right?) I could not walk away. I have memory sticks, cell phones, mp3 players, mp3 player accessories, cameras, computer speakers, laptops, enough cords to make a rug, power tools, and I’m not even going to get into the cycling and camping gear because this could go on all day.

When these items become obsolete, I usually box them up and put them away. Every once in a while the stash gets to be too much and I have to get rid of a few items. Recently I disposed of a Sprint cell phone from 1999. That my friends, is not a joke. When the time comes though, I always find myself searching for a way to recycle the product, and when I can’t figure it out I take it to Goodwill. No one will ever buy these items from Goodwill, and deep down I know those items are going to end up in a dumpster. As AP writer Terence Chea pointed out this week in a story highlighting the problem of "e-waste", those items are going to end up in China. My old printer, the one that worked fine, but was an eyesore, is now somehwere in China polluting a river.

This coming Friday is Black Friday. It is a electronic gadget geeks Christmas. The savings are so obscene that an entire world of Black Friday websites have popped up across the internet. Less than $500 for a 32” HD LCD television? Are you kidding me? Break out the lawn chair and sleeping bag, I’m getting in line today! But why? My television works fine. And so does my first generation iPod mini. And my year old Motorola Razor. And yes, even my Polar hear rate monitor.

So this coming Friday, I’ll be joining the growing movement behind Buy Nothing Day. I’m not going to explain Buy Nothing Day, because it is exactly what the name implies. This year marks the 10th year that BND has been positioned on the same day as Black Friday. After finding out that we are sending about 300,000 tons of our unwanted electronics to China every year, I can’t imagine waiting another year to get behind the cause. No matter how badly I want an iPod touch.

Pollution Reduces China’s Rainfall

2007-11-18T18:01:13Z

Pollution is causing rainfall to decrease in certain parts of China. A little noticed study published in Science earlier this year, somewhat opaquely entitled “Inverse Relations between Amounts of Air Pollution and Orographic Precipitation,” found that average precipitation in a particular mountain region in central China had fallen by 20 percent over the past 50 years. The authors of the study showed that increasing concentrations of fine, airborne pollutants were responsible for decreasing average precipitation in mountain regions.

“These findings highlight the threat to vital water resources in polluted regions of the world where hilly-area precipitation makes a significant contribution to the regional water supply, as in the southwestern U.S. central and northern China, and the Middle East.”

Figure: Trends of annual precipitation amounts and Ro between Mt. Hua and the plain stations of (A) Xi'an and (B) Huayin.

In past years, the conventional wisdom was that environmental protection, while desirable, was a luxury that a still developing China could not always afford. This study is part of the increasingly overwhelming body of evidence that environmental pollution actually hurts China’s economic development. Development that harms a region’s ability to renew its own water supply is not sustainable development. Many terrific experts within China have been pounding this drum in recent years.

The BBC ran an article on this a few months ago.

Little Stiletto Heels and China’s Environment

2007-11-06T13:56:54Z

It’s no secret that the products that fuel our daily consumer lives in the U.S. are now overwhelmingly produced in China. Try living a year without buying anything “Made in China” and see how you like it (one woman seems to have done just that and wrote a book about it – in short, it’s doable, but more expensive and an all-around pain).

Less often discussed is the fact that the environmental crisis in China is driven in significant part by the production of goods for our consumption. The resultant pollution in turn is finding its way back to the U.S. A few media articles have made this connection.

A Wall Street Journal article last week noted the following:

A significant portion of China's air pollution can be traced directly to the production of goods that are exported. In the city of Shenzhen, a major industrial base in southern China, about 89% of emissions of sulfur dioxide, an air pollutant that causes acid rain, are released in the process of export manufacturing, according to a recent study published in the U.S.-based Journal of Environmental Science and Technology. The study also found 71% of particulate matter, the small particles that cause smog and respiratory problems, can be traced to the manufacturing of exported goods.

The best piece I have seen on the connection between Chinese pollution and U.S. consumer behavior is Evan Osnos’ award-winning piece in the Chicago Tribune on Chinese cashmere. The article tied insatiable demand in the U.S. for $20 Wal-Mart cashmere sweaters to massive land degradation in northern China where the goats that generate cashmere wool are raised. The dust storms caused by this land degradation have in turn contributed to air pollution over the U.S. Osnos talks about the cycle on the Colbert Report of all places (to paraphrase, “the goats hooves are like little stiletto heels piercing the earth…”). What goes around comes around.

China’s government is using this dynamic to try to address its own environmental problems. China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) recently announced an initiative with the Ministry of Commerce to clamp down on export manufacturers that violate environmental laws. According to WSJ, “export manufacturers that violate China's pollution laws would be forced to close for one to three years. The policy will be enforced jointly by SEPA and the Ministry of Commerce.”

On its face, this seems like a superfluous move since all enterprises (not just export manufacturers) are subject to environmental laws already. However, the key here is joint SEPA enforcement with the much more powerful Ministry of Commerce. SEPA continues to be one of China’s weakest ministries with only 250 some staffers at the national level to oversee China’s environmental protection, and this represents another in a series of moves by SEPA to maximize its influence within the limits of its fairly significant resource constraints.

On “average,” there is no air pollution

2007-10-16T22:57:29Z

What do Chinese Communist Party air pollution officials share in common with Bush administration air pollution officials?

Resort to the rhetoric of “averages” when it comes to obscuring and excusing air pollution.

A front page story in today’s Washington Post examines the terrible air pollution in Beijing as China prepares to host the summer Olympics in 2008. This article should be read just for the sobering insights it offers into the dismal state of air pollution, its regulation, monitoring and reporting in China. But what caught my eye was this passage: Beijing officials “have refused to publicly release figures on the amount of pollutants at any given location, such as the Olympic Village or Tiananmen Square, preferring to stick with a citywide average.”

These citywide “averages,” of course, are likely to present a false understanding of the actual air quality in locations where the Olympic athletes will be competing. The article makes clear that Chinese officials are seeking to avoid the embarrassment that would accompany reports of unhealthy air quality in these locations. The article suggests that officials are starting to hint they will not honor previous pledges to shut down belching factories during the Olympic games, preferring economic growth over air quality, the health of the athletes and public, and the approval of the international community.

This should all be familiar territory for observers of the Bush administration’s air pollution agenda over the past seven years, especially as that agenda concerns coal-fired power plants. The Bush administration has offered an even more farflung version of the geographic “averaging” argument employed by Beijing officials to obscure air pollution levels across that city. Bush administration officials have argued that nationwide reductions in air pollution, on average, justify the gutting of a Clean Air Act program called “new source review” that controls facility-specific pollution levels from power plants and other industrial polluters.

The administration has issued a proposed rulemaking to effectively eliminate the new source review requirements covering coal-fired power plants. In this measure, EPA’s air program has argued that nationwide reductions in power plant emissions under a separate rulemaking embodying a pollution trading scheme, render unnecessary an independent Clean Air Act mandate to control pollution locally and regionally from individual power plants. Yet EPA itself admits that its rule would allow individual power plants to increase emissions by thousands of tons; allow hundreds of power plant units never to install pollution controls; and allow counties in dozens of states to experience overall (net) pollution increases totalling thousands of tons. EPA pooh-poohs objections that its rule will allow and invite local air quality to worsen, by observing wanly that it believes such concerns are “diminished” or “mitigated” in a system where total annual pollution is “capped nationally.”

The Bush administration resorted to a similar rhetorical deception involving temporal averaging – averaging pollution levels across time – when it was selling its ill-fated Clear Skies legislation governing power plants. The administration insisted that its legislation would reduce power plant air pollution 70% by 2018, with President Bush going so far as to make this claim in his 2003 State of the Union speech. Not true. Instead, the legislation’s cap-and-trade approaches established pollution “caps” in 2018 corresponding to 70% reductions, but EPA’s own analysis revealed that actual pollution reductions of 70% from power plants would not be achieved until some time after 2025; this was due primarily to the legislation’s emissions credit “banking” features, which allowed credits to be banked, then withdrawn and spent well beyond the 2018 cap date. EPA was misrepresenting the legislation’s rigor and timeliness by failing to highlight the temporal averaging and credit banking inherent in its chosen cap-and-trade scheme.

Now EPA just needs to pull off the trick of convincing people to breathe nationally, on average, or across time, on average, rather than in the locales where they actually live, in real time. Maybe an administration committed above all to pollution trading schemes – except when it comes to global warming pollution since, whoops, that would require capping and reducing actual pollution – could explore a credit trading regime for breathers. If someone in an area with clean air held their breath for 5 minutes, they could sell the right to breathe that healthy air in the form of a breathing credit to a resident of Los Angeles or Houston or Pittsburgh suffering from unhealthy air quality. Breathing credits could be bought and sold for the same calendar year or future years, with the time value of money and inflation affecting pricing. The market would identify the optimal price for breathing, and rational actors would stay indoors or move to different states or stop breathing based upon price signals. Credit pricing might even be affected by halitosis or minty fresh breath.

So if the political pollution spinmeisters at EPA are looking for new work as the Bush administration winds down, there's still time to land a job in Beijing before August 2008.

Dirty Laundry

2007-08-25T20:42:08Z

Claudia Deutch has an interesting interview with George Feldenkreis, Chairman of the Perry Ellis clothing label in the Saturday edition of the New York Times (which I am increasingly convinced is a more interesting paper than the vaunted Sunday bundle).

Most people don't think of their clothing as having much of an environmental footprint. To the extent it's come up, the conversation has tended to center on raw material. Under the heading 'Green and Fashionable', Feldenkreis discusses challenges the company faces greening the 72 million garments it sells each year, and how hard it is to obtain sufficient quantities organic cotton.

Growing cotton, of course, consumes vast quantities of both water (often in places where it is scarce) and pesticides. Various alternatives including the near-totemic hemp are often discussed as the answer.

What rarely comes up is the tremendous environmental impacts that occur once processing begins.

As NRDC has delved deeper and deeper into the Chinese production chain supplying clothing to big American retailers, we have become more and more aware of the tremendous mess that is being created.

A page one story this week the Wall Street Journal describes the devastating toxic legacy flowing into local rivers from a massive 230-acre textile plant in Dongguan that supplies Nike, Wal-Mart and Lands End among others.

In fact, the Journal points out, the textile industry is among China's dirtiest:

In addition to heavy metals and various carcinogens, fabric dyes may contain high levels of organic materials, and thread is often dipped in starch before it is woven into fabric. The breakdown of large amounts of organic compounds such as starch can suck all the oxygen out of a river, killing fish, and turning the water into a stagnant sludge."

After residents complained that pollution from the mill had turned their river dark red, investigators discovered a pipe buried under a factory floor through which, each day, the company was pumping 22,000 tons of water contaminated in chemical dying operations straight into the local waters.

There's no shortage of easy blame to go around here – corrupt officials, lax standards, greedy companies, careless retailers. They're all part of a larger set of economic circumstances brought about by intense economic forces. The article points out prices on fabric and clothing imported to the U.S. have fallen 25 percent since 1995 thanks to competitive pressures traveling in both directions across the Pacific. That means a lot of corners are being cut, literally as well as figuratively.

"Prices in the U.S. are artificially low," Andy Xie, former chief economist for Morgan Stanley Asia, who now works independently, tells WSJ readers. "You're not paying the costs of pollution, and that is why China is an environmental catastrophe."

The article notes that problems like these have escaped the scrutiny of even the best, most sincere corporate social and environmental initiatives, because the environmental disaster is unfolding farther down a tangled network of supplier relationships than they are used to looking. The Gap, for instance, has almost 100 people monitoring 2,000 contractor factories worldwide, but they are looking only at companies sewing the clothes -- not the ones dying fabric.

Ultimately, that's no excuse. But our own experience in China confirms that even following these webs – never mind untangling them – is tremendously difficult. It is a challenge that will be at the centerpiece of our work in China in the coming months.

It's an area that Mr. Feldenkreis, Wal-Mart, the Gap and everyone else in the business needs to be looking at, too.

Everybody Talks About the Weather; China is Doing Something About It

2007-08-14T07:07:49Z

Coverage of the heatlh and environmental challenges that await athletes and spectators at the 2008 Summer Olympics in China is starting to heat up.

Chinese officials have been promising significant cuts the country’s famously terrible air pollution, but results so far are disappointing. June saw the worst air quality levels in seven years, with three times the particulate loading found in our not-so-fabulous New York City air. China’s nitrogen dioxide levels exceed World Health Organization standards by 78 percent.

Come next summer, U.S. athletes competing in the games will be equipped with activated charcoal masks, ibuprofen and asthma medication to combat Beijing's pollution, according to a team spokesman.

So far Olympic organizers are measuring their words carefully, and there has been little in the way of public criticism. But last week International Olympic President Jacques Rogge warned in an interview on CNN that said certain highly aerobic events like cycling at the games could be postponed if the city's air quality is too poor.

Watch the tea leaves carefully as this story develops.

Meanwhile the Chinese do appear to be making headway in efforts to prevent bad weather during the games. As reported in USA Today and elsewhere, officials have dispatched a fleet of 37mm anti-aircraft guns west of Beijing that will fire chemical shells into cloud system, triggering rains that are supposed to exhaust themselves before the weather can reach the capital.

China has been seeding clouds this way since 1958, but never for the sake of a sporting event. Never let it be said that this country lacks for ambition.

Can Beijing Clear the Air in Time for the Olympics?

2007-08-10T10:23:34Z

The hot topic in Beijing this week is whether the murky haze of smog that usually covers the city will be lifted when the world's athletes begin to descend on Beijing in August 2008. This summer certainly hasn't been pretty from an air quality perspective here in Beijing.

Dramatic things are possible though and we may be surprised at what we see come August 2008. One of the key measures Beijing is taking to clean the air is to remove a dramatic number of cars from the roads. There is going to be a trial run of this from August 17-20, when some 1.3 million of Beijing's 3 million motor vehicles will be taken off the road. A smaller scale practice run last fall (a mere 800,000 cars!) during a China-Africa forum showed drastic and virtually immediate reductions in NOx levels of 40 percent. There are some amazing satellite photos and stats on the NASA Observatory site:

Like many things in China, the scale of this endeavor is simply mind-boggling.

Other techniques to clear the air include shutting down factories, holding up the massive amounts of construction going on, and unleashing China's substantial artificial rain-making apparatus in the days before the Games. I've heard that the main concern is forcing clouds to rain themselves out before they hit Beijing so as to avoid a rainy opening ceremony; however, rain almost always whips up winds that blow pollution out of the city for the following day or two. If it helps to remove pollution, I can't imagine that Beijing will not use it in the lead-up to the big show.

So, I'm not too worried about the air during the Beijing Olympics. The real challenge is for China to sustain this long after the Olympics are done and gone. There are a lot of steps that China can take to make this a reality (while continuing to grow and improve economic conditions for the nation's people), but the devil will be in the details of implementation and making sure that leaders have the will to do what it takes. More on this later...