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How to know? China and climate change
Wed Jul 01 09:52PM
There are still a few months to go, but the sparring has already started. In December, the world's governments will get in the ring in Copenhagen to battle it out over a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that regulates global greenhouse gas emissions.China's role in the negotiations, as the holder of the little-coveted "world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide title", is uncertain.
The early diplomatic jabs have already been thrown. Beijing has insisted that the United States make deeper emission cuts than it is planning. It wants more access to advanced technology, sparking fury among US politicians. It has criticised Japan's emissions proposals as inadequate and suggested importers may have to pay for the pollution in China's factories.
Beijing is reluctant to make its own compulsory cuts, saying the west got rich on the back of coal and oil, why should the rest of the world's development be stunted by climate concerns?
Much of this is pre-Copenhagen posturing. But it also raises the tricky question of how serious China is about dealing with global warming?
There is little doubt that on the wider environmental story, China has a woeful track record. Pollution, both in the air and in the water, is awful in many Chinese cities. Deforestation, although recently halted, has been an environmental disaster over the past 50 years.
As for reducing carbon, the writers about the middle kingdom love to trot out the line "China builds two new coal-fired power stations a week," to show how far the country has to travel. But the reality is much more complex (for example, many of the new power stations are much more efficient than in the United States).
China has mooted a 440 billion dollar additional stimulus package, simply to green-up its energy supplies. It is one of the world's largest maker of wind-turbines and visitors to obscure parts of western China are always surprised to see traditional yurts equipped with small-scale solar generators.
Companies like BYD are pioneering new electric cars and the government has announced plans to make the Pearl River Delta, one of the most polluted parts of the country, into an example of green development.
Journalists often struggle to assess the competing claims. Official statistics are often mistrusted, and the technical details are hard to grasp and explain clearly. Perhaps as a result, specialist blogs on China's environment are becoming more common and arguing over this very issue.
The Internet has become a crucial tool for highlighting the worst polluters.
Many influential environmental bloggers claim the MSM (mainstream media) have fallen down on their job when it comes to the environment. The criticism is that reporters tend to give equal weight to opposing sides of the argument -- they are simply stenographers -- which does not necessarily reflect the consensus among the vast majority of climate scientists that global warming is happening and it is man-made.
While China's move to reduce its carbon emissions is a gargantuan task, the media faces its own challenge to test what is green and what is greenwashing.
In this blog, reporters and editors for global news wire AFP blog about the news they report and the challenges they face covering events from Baghdad to Beijing, the White House to Darfur. Guy Newey reports for AFP from Hong Kong.Comment on this article
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i remember in the 1980,s we where warned of a mini ice age was going to hit the planet an milk was good for you, salt was a must ... how things change
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phill_arcade - I have always been a fan of Nikola Tesla and read a number of books (this was pre-internet) regarding his life and development of new inventions - This Guy was well ahead of his time and the modern world would not have the technology today without him!
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Tesla did invent a free power system but he was NOT a businessman, many of his ideas were stolen by patent thieves (Thomas Edison being a main one) And George Westinghouse used and abused him withdrawing funds and support when he realised what Tesla was developing (no prizes for guessing why!)
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Tesla died in relative obscurity and poverty!
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now complain China?..yes true the greenhouse gas emissions are horrible here, thats the price for being a productive nation, same as the US was 10 years ago. so to cut greenhouse gas emissions, means to cut jobs, same as the US is doing now,cutting down on the US greenhouse gas emissions-or-Employment. american goverments idea of saing the climate. the jobless climate...
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now complain China?..yes true the greenhouse gas emissions are horrible here, thats the price for being a productive nation, same as the US was 10 years ago. so to cut greenhouse gas emissions, means to cut jobs, same as the US is doing now,cutting down on the US greenhouse gas emissions-or-Employment. american goverments idea of saing the climate. the jobless climate...
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Beijing says - "the west got rich on the back of coal and oil, why should the rest of the world's development be stunted by climate concerns?" - Can't blame them for that!! - Rather like the Nuclear powers, condeming other countries for developing their own!! - Just hypocracy!
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I too, remember being told by 'climate experts' in the '80s that we were heading for another Ice-age And I am totally unconvinced that phasing out incandescent bulbs in favour of 'myopia inducing' low energy bulbs will 'Save The Planet' !
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I think we are being misled slightly with this Global Warming malarky - as the planet goes through many cyclical changes anyway, I can't whether we have sped up the process but what I will say is 'Turning off some of my kit at night instead of leaving it on 'stand-by' - Is a load of rubbish in world terms!
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Ecologists (just like Nutritionists and health and safety experts) have been feeding us 'gobbledy @#$%' with their self imposed status and ever changing 'Opinions' !
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sanddhi: yes, Gaia rules and will take of herself.
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If we want to have an impact on reducing carbon emission, we should get rid of about half the world population, because people breathing contributes more to global warming than China's industry in the first place. If we want an even bigger impact on reducing carbon emission, we could start planting trees instead of cutting them. But the biggest thing of course would be accepting and admitting that we cannot control nature, and the harder we try, the harder it will hit us back. The world does what it wants, whether we are around or not. Global warming is irreversible, but politicians will never admit that, because ll they want to do is bring good news -even if they can't live up to it.
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I take issue with the idea that nuclear energy provides a"green" solution. Until the problem of disposing of nuclear waste is solved (never seems like the likely prospect) nuclear power stations will continue to be an expensive,risky and at best partial solution.
Living in China means having to face the reality of nuclear power stations as a part of the solution, just as the large numbers of coal and oil fired which blight the countryside. The government of China is far from clean, but it is not an evil fiend in the energy arena. There are many good attempts to address the energy deficit with cleaner plants and small scale collectors over here today.
Western governments need to recognise this and also to acknowledge the debt owed to China dating back to the first Industrial revolution.
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There's just one little question that keeps bugging me. If pollution from the use of coal as a fuel is so bad, how come the world didn't die in Victorian times? - think about it, coal fired mills, coal fires in all houses, hotels, factories, coal powered railways, ships, in fact, just about everything!!. Surely, if the climate were going to change dramatically due to emissions, we'd now be living in a desert!. Yes, the air quality was diabolical, water was polluted etc and, if for those reasons alone, the cleaning up of industry has been of fantastic benefit, but, you still have to ask the question - if co2 is such a threat, how did we survive?.
Nature is wonderful, natural cycles exist, are we having our collective legs lifted here???
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Yes, nature is wonderful, but not sympathetically disposed to humankind. That's our own responsibility and fouling our nest with carbon emissions and worse things (eg nuclear waste) does not improve our chances of living comfortably on this planet. I hate all the wowser talk of global warming and sustainable development, but its the background track for our lives from now on. Better get used to it and keep sorting the garbage.
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