First, the US-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC), established in 2009 during Obama’s visit to China, continues to put some meat on its bones with at least some ostensible agreement on how to handle intellectual property that comes from the $150 million joint project.

US Gov – The agreement protects American and Chinese researchers, scientists and engineers by ensuring their intellectual property rights to the technology they create. It also defines how intellectual property may be shared or licensed in each country. Participating members in each project may gain compensation on favorable terms, depending on their level of involvement in the final product.

“This innovative and enhanced framework for protecting intellectual property is an important step for the Clean Energy Research Center and collaborative research,” Chu said. “With both the U.S. and Chinese governments supporting these agreements, we are freeing our researchers to offer their best ideas and encouraging innovative thinking.”

China Daily – The suspects included a deputy general manager and an employee of the Luliang Chemical Industry Co., Ltd., which was found to have illegally dumped over 5,000 metric tons of chromium-contaminated waste near the Chachong Reservoir and on hills of Qilin District in Qujing from April to June…

And the local EPB officials are under investigation too.

China Daily – The Discipline and Inspection Commission of Qujing is investigating the case to see whether the local environmental protection department was paid to turn a blind eye to the dumping, as it claimed it was unaware of the transportation of the toxic waste even though it should have been, said He Hua, head of the local government’s publicity department on Wednesday.

The Economic Observer claims that 280,000 tons of slag were illegal dumped over 17 years, substantially more than has been reported in the official media.

EEO - Luliang Chemical Co., Ltd in Qujing City Yunnan Province has illegally dumped 280,000 tons of chromium slag over the last 17 years, polluting local soil and water. We cannot help but wonder: why our environmental institutions have done nothing? Why can’t environmental supervision be tougher?

Court looks to improve compensation for marine pollution as China sues ConocoPhillips

China Daily – The country’s top court plans to improve rules and regulations to better handle rising disputes over marine pollution, a senior judge has said. The remarks were made while ConocoPhillips China, the operator of two leaking oil platforms in northern China’s Bohai Bay, faces compensation demands for the oil spills.

Existing laws and regulations on pollution cannot keep pace with the rapidly developing marine economy, experts said. The maximum fine for marine pollution is just 200,000 yuan ($31,000).

NYTimes - The Chinese maritime authority is preparing to sue ConocoPhillips, the American oil company, over two oil spills in June that engulfed large swaths of Bohai Bay in north China, according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency.

Critical questions remain regarding the removal of Dalian PX plant 

China Green News – As one of the city’s six most important projects, bringing in around two billion RMB in tax dollars annually, city officials are unlikely to want the factory to move out of the city’s administrative region.

At Foreign Policy, Christina Larson provides some analysis and insight into the Dalian demonstrations.

State Council mandates better protection for underground water resources

Xinhua - The State Council ordered local governments to list “pollution prevention” and “underground water supply control” in their working agendas and to set up an underground water environmental supervision system by 2015.

Hydropower devlopment in Central China nature reserve raises concern

China Daily – Construction of small hydropower stations in a central China nature reserve has triggered worries among locals over the ecosystem damage to the best reserved forest zone in the country’s hinterland.

Four superiorities of China’s development path

People’s Daily – China’s development path is not a copy of the capitalist path but rather an innovative path of scientific development that is superior to the past development paths in human history. China developed a scientific outlook on development based on its experiences and has set a good example for other developing countries to follow.

More on China’s “illegal” golf courses

LATimes - The ban, imposed amid concern over the country’s dwindling arable land, clearly hasn’t stopped the boom in golf course construction in China. Over the last five years, the number of courses has soared from 170 to an estimated 600. Hundreds more are under construction despite signs of market saturation.

The South China Morning Post Reported earlier this month that,  “just 10 of 600 clubs on the mainland have full government approval, and many take water illegally, but crackdown efforts have been distinctly under par.”

China Daily – A cap on Chinese energy consumption is expected to be the highlight of a comprehensive low-carbon plan to be issued later this year, Reuters reported Thursday, citing experts. Capping energy use will form the cornerstone of China’s efforts to curb surging greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s highest and making up a quarter of the global total.

80 Percent of Waste Water Treatment Sludge Not Disposed of Correctly

China Wire – Nearly 2,200 tons of sludge is produced each year in the country, but 80 percent is dumped or even piled up in the open air, according to the 2011 Market Analysis Report of Sludge Treatment in China issued by h2o-china.com, the website of China’s water industry.

Red, Delicious, and Rotten – Christina Larson covers the troubles that Apple has created for itself with labor and environmental groups in China.

FP - And yet the same company that enjoys such a sterling, virtuous image in the global press and that’s now making buckets of cash in China is precisely the one singled out by China’s fledgling civil society groups for its alleged indifference to labor rights and environmental enforcement, as well as an apparent tendency toward secrecy and obfuscation. In a nutshell, just as Apple has been consolidating its success in China, it has been acting depressingly like the Chinese Communist Party.

13 of the 17 key rivers running into the sea tested as either unusable, or usable only in industrial parks

Xinhua- A large number of sites discharging sewage into the ocean are violating environmental standards, the State Oceanic Administration revealed.

More than half of the country’s seaside sewage discharge sites tested in March, and more than one-third tested in May, fell short of standards, the administration said in a report last week.

60 private cars for every 100 families in Beijing

People’s Daily – Currently, 11 cities have more than 1 million cars. In the first half of 2011, there were nearly 10.1 million new automotive vehicles nationwide, including 7.6 million new cars, higher than nearly 6.9 million new cars in the same period of 2010.

Daily fines could range from 10,000 RMB to 100,000 RMB. But this is not the first time that daily accrual fines of this nature have been proposed. Four years ago, during the revision of China’s water pollution and control law a similar fine was proposed but not included in the final law because it was deemed too burdensome on business.

Reuters - The report cited experts as saying that the law would provide a new “legal weapon” to ensure that enough compensation is paid for environmental disasters. By significantly raising costs, it would also force small and polluting enterprises to close, it said.

However, the new fines might not be enough to deter some larger state-owned firms. The paper said that state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), parent company of PetroChina, paid just 1 million yuan in fines and 5 million yuan in “aid” after an explosion at one of the company’s plants in northeast China’s Jilin province in 2005.

The blast contaminated the Songhua River with a torrent of toxic benzene that cost the government 7.84 billion yuan to treat, the report added.

The full article in Chinese provides additional insight and a decent discussion on China’s efforts to provide compensation to victims and money for remediation.

World Bank and GEF Support $38 million Huai River Water Project with Dongying Municipal Government

http://www.worldbank.org/projects/documents/2011/06/14554058/china-gef-huai-river-basin-marine-pollution-reduction-project-china-gef-huai-river-basin-marine-pollution-reduction-project

China Plans to Double Coal-bed Methane Production

Bloomberg - the world’s largest energy user, plans to more than double production of its coal-bed methane in five years by 2015 to cut reliance on oil and coal.

The country aims to increase its annual output to 21 billion cubic meters by 2015 from 8.6 billion cubic meters in 2010, China Petrochemical Corp., the nation’s second-largest oil and gas producer, said in its online newsletter today, citing a five-year plan. The fuel, also known as coal-seam gas, is a form of natural gas trapped in coal beds.

Drought and Pollution Sicken Town

China Daily – Residents in Huangchuan, Henan province, have seen an outbreak of diarrhea since mid-June, leaving hospitals and clinics jammed with patients and pharmacies running out of relevant drugs, Dahe Daily reported on Friday. However, officials have denied this.

Seven of the eight people in Zhang’s family have been ill for more than a month, he said, adding that many of his neighbors have had the same problem. He even started a thread on an Internet forum to find diarrhea patients to counter the official figure. …

Unprecedented drought this year dried up the reservoir, the town’s former source of water, said Liu Jianhua, director of Huangchuan’s utilities service center, which manages the water supply system. This prompted the authorities in May to start a new supply using a nearby water plant built in 1979 and closed since late 2008.

Greenpeace Report Links Major Brands to Polluters in China

Guardian - A Chinese conglomerate supplying Nike, Adidas, Puma and other leading brands has discharged hormone-disrupting chemicals and other toxins into the country’s major water systems, according to a new Greenpeace investigation that raises questions about corporate responsibility for the firms they do business with.

Interestingly, one of the Chinese manufacturers, Youngor, is itself a major brand within China that has several high-end clothing labels that cater to China’s well-off.

For a bit of analysis on the legal responsibility versus the social responsibility of the companies indicated see this blog by a Beijing based lawyer. He highlights that the Chinese companies’ emissions may be legal in China, so what duty does that really create for the major brands?

NYTimes – The Chinese government is considering plans to subsidize the use of energy-efficient materials and renewable energy technologies in new buildings and is encouraging provincial and municipal governments to impose stricter efficiency standards than the national minimums…

New Plan to Protect Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

China Daily – The State Council on Thursday published a comprehensive plan to protect the environment and ecology on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau over the next 20 years.

Geothermal Development Plans in China

Xinhua – “The use of geothermal power is expected to reach an equivalent of 68.8 million metric tonnes of coal by 2015, or about 1.7 percent of the nation’s total power consumption,” said Guan Fengjun, director of the Department of Geological Environment with the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR)

China to Host Wanted War Criminal, Sudan Leader Omar al-Bashir

Businessweek – China’s energy needs make the country deeply vested in Sudan’s future. Sudan is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest oil producer, producing 490,000 barrels of oil a day last year — two-thirds of it to China.

Kaoline plant blamed for massive river pollution in S. China

China Daily – Local residents complained on Sunday via Internet postings that huge amount of fish died as a result of water pollution. The postings also said thousands of residents along the river were affected by the pollution, and some began to store up bottled water.

Ex-Officials sentenced to prison for assisting pollution cover-up

China Daily – Two officials with the pollution monitoring station in Shanghang were sentenced to 21 to 27 months in prison for neglecting the duty of supervision, the spokesman added. The prosecutors are still preparing the charges for Chen Zhengping, former head of Shanghang’s work safety bureau.

From Drought to Floods – & – China’s Water Energy Nexus

Circle of Blue - The extreme weather, however, is the latest in a series of water shortages exposing the risks that limited freshwater resources pose for the world’s biggest agricultural producer, top energy consumer, and fastest-growing industrial economy.

CNN - At least 175 people have died from flooding this month in southern and eastern China, the country’s Ministry of Civil Affairs said Monday.

Lead Poisoning in China – HRW Report 

NYTimes – A report by Human Rights Watch released Wednesday states that some local officials have reacted to mass poisonings by arbitrarily limiting lead testing, withholding and possibly manipulating test results, denying proper treatment to children and adults and trying to silence parents and activists.

Global Times - Residents of the lead-poisoned small town of Linjiang in Guangdong Province blocked traffic to express their dissatisfaction with the county government’s handling of their medical treatment, media reported Monday.

“About 20 villagers were beaten and their heads were bleeding,” he said. “Most were victims of lead poisoning. A pregnant woman was also beaten.”

China Daily - Authorities have closed schools in two townships in East China’s Zhejiang province after industrial waste contaminated the water supply for 200,000 residents, officials said on Tuesday.

This is the second water pollution incident after carbolic acid spilled into a river that supplies drinking water to East China’s scenic city of Hangzhou, knocking out supplies to more than half a million people in the suburbs and creating a run on bottled water in the city of 9 million. [Xinhua also has more on the situation.]

China’s largest producer of antibiotics may finally be forced to control emissions – But only after a CCTV investigative report.

Global Times – Residents affected by pollution from the mainland’s largest antibiotics producer in Northeast China can expect to breathe easier from the middle of the month, according to the local environmental protection bureau on Wednesday.

A China Central Television report on Sunday showed the General Pharmaceutical Factory affiliated with the Harbin Pharmaceutical Group has serious pollution problems, including polluted water and putrid exhaust gas, which for years has affected nearby residents. [China Daily and WaPo both have more as well.]

China Ends Subsidies to Wind Industry Under US Pressure 

Bloomberg – China agreed to end hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies to wind-power manufacturers following a complaint the U.S. filed at the World Trade Organization, the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office said.

China’s Special Fund for Wind Power Manufacturing illegally required aid recipients to use Chinese-made parts, the U.S. said in a case filed in December at the WTO after getting a complaint from the United Steelworkers union. Individual grants were for as much as $22.5 million.

China’s CO2 Emissions Rose 10 percent Last Year - BP’s data says Coal use was up worldwide by 7.6 percent. China emitted 8.3 billion tons CO2, and the US 6.14 billion tons up more than 4 percent. More at Reuters.

Chinese GM Cows Produce Human Breast Milk – Video at China Real Time

Chinese Truck Driver Sentenced to Death for Killing “Environmental” Protestor

NYTimes – The charges stem from an incident on May 10 in which [the driver] ran over a herder [who with] other Mongols were blocking a road to protest environmental damage by trucks hauling coal from Mongolian mines that have only lately become a major source of coal for Chinese power plants.

China’s airlines may get EU carbon exemption

MarketWatch – The exemption would apply as long as they can demonstrate they’ve taken equivalent steps to help reduce environmentally harmful emissions from aviation.

New MIT Study Puts a Price on China’s Air Pollution - From MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change

MIT News – What makes this study unique is that researchers looked at long-term economic impacts that arise from health damages, and how pollution-induced morbidity and mortality cases may have had ripple effects on the Chinese economy beyond the time period when those cases actually occurred. …

Similar studies conducted by the World Bank have found that air pollution in China caused damages equal to 4-5 percent of the Chinese GDP between 1995 and 2005. However, these estimates are based on static measurements that do not measure the cumulative, long-term impacts of health damages. The MIT study found a significantly higher level of damage, equaling 6-9 percent of the Chinese GDP.

IEA Report “Golden Age of Gas“ - Predicts China’s gas usage will double soon.

The Chinese version of the full report is here.

Or for a quick overview, Jonathan Watts adds color commentary to the report at the Guardian.

Ministry: ”The task of reducing emissions of major pollutants has been met ahead of schedule. Since 2005, sulphur Dioxide emissions are down by 14.3 percent and Chemical Oxygen Demand has fallen by 12.5percent.”

Interpretation: We have cleaned up some of the nasty stuff in our air and water. There is still an awful lot out there, but it shows that when we make an effort, we can do it.

Grade: C+ An achievement that will next be expanded to the tougher task of reducing nitrogen oxide and ammonia. But mercury, ozone and smaller particulate matter are still not adequately addressed.

China’s finance ministry offers 1.5 bln yuan for rural environmental improvement - more at Xinhua - Interestingly, no mention of any role for MEP or how this will be spent.

Green Shoots of Hope - A retrospective look at the rise and struggles of environmental protection in China from the China Daily.

Reuters – The State Grid Corp of China (SGCC) added wind power grid connections in the first quarter, boosting overall connected capacity by 17 percent, the dominant Chinese power distributor said.  At the end of March, 33.16 gigawatts of wind power generating capacity was connected to its networks, SGCC said in a report on its website.

China Daily has SGCC’s plans for 2015.

New Stricter Centralized Wind Permitting Could Force Consolidation 

CB – 据媒体报道，国家能源局计划在近期出台有关规范风电项目审批制度的管理办法(以下简称“办法”)，收紧各地方风电项目审批权，严格把关新风电项目。

Beijing Drafts Clean Air Action Plan 

China Daily – [U]nder the “Beijing Municipal Clean Air Action Plan,” coal will no longer be used in Beijing’s six urban districts by 2015. Beijing will first control coal-smoke pollution by transforming the equipment of large coal-fired power plants in the six urban districts as well as 520 coal-fired boilers and coal stoves of local households.

Circle of Blue Reports on Responses to Its Research on China’s Water and Energy Dilemma (Disclosure: Vermont Law School supported COB’s China presentations)

Circle of Blue- [N]obody in China has yet identified how the northern and western coal sector will secure the balance—20 billion cubic meters (5 trillion gallons) of fresh water—that the coal industry will need each year by 2020.

These and other findings from Choke Point: China were greeted with a mix of intense interest, respect, and a good measure of surprise by Chinese audiences, particularly from scholars and government officials.

Dr. Changhong Chen, the deputy engineer in chief of the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, said he had read the online Choke Point: China reports and called them “stunning.” He said the findings had compelled him to recommend that the academy revise its research agenda on energy and water, as well as its teaching curriculum.

Dr. Yangwen Jia, a chief engineer of the Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, called the findings “impressive” and said they had compelled him to look at China’s water resources from a new vantage. He said his group had never undertaken research to understand the developing confrontation between the coal sector and water scarcity in the northern and western provinces.

Study: Chinese Consumers on Sustainable Consumption and Environmental Governance

Reuters – Chinese consumers are willing to pay a small premium for environmentally friendly products, but they place responsibility to fix China’s environmental woes on the government, a study released on Monday said.

Zhejiang Government Crackdown after Lead Poisoning Scandal 

Xinhua – A manufacturing town in east China’s Zhejiang Province has probed 33 pollution cases and arrested 24 people in an environmental policy overhaul following a lead poisoning scandal that sickened more than 100 villagers last month.

As of Tuesday, the environmental protection office in the Luqiao district in the city of Taizhou had fined 18 heavily polluting companies for a total of 2.85 million yuan (436,335 U.S. dollars) and demanded immediate changes ranging from the replacement of their facilities to relocation.

The relocation of heavy polluters from an increasingly vocal and active community to an area less populated and home to poorer less active citizens is an all too common event in China. This is one of the major weaknesses in having little central oversight of most environmental regulation – one group of officials solves their problems by pushing the polluter into a less visible area.

Shale Gas in China in the News:

Jonathan Watts on China’s first foray into fracking in Sichuan

Guardian – China has begun trials of a controversial drilling technique to exploit the world’s largest reserves of shale gas, as it attempts to cope with the increasing energy demands of a fast-growing economy while reducing its dependence on coal.

In the past two weeks, engineers have completed the country’s first horizontal shale gas well in Sichuan and government officials have begun drafting a national strategy to identify a trillion cubic metres of exploitable resources by 2020.

Reuters Special Report on Shale Gas in China (available in PDF download)

Reuters – The U.S. Energy Information Agency in a report last month estimates China holds 36.1 trillion cubic metres (1,275 trillion cubic feet) of technically recoverable shale gas reserves — significantly higher than the 24.4 tcm (862 trillion cubic feet) in the United States, which has the second-most.     Industry estimates in China peg shale gas resources slightly lower — but still huge — at 26 trillion cubic metres (tcm), although they have yet to give their own forecasts of how much of that is recoverable.

Sinopec in Major Gas Deal with Australia 

Reuters – Oil giant Sinopec on Thursday signed China’s second-largest gas purchase agreement, worth around $85 billion over 20 years by one estimate, in a deal that also gives it 15 percent of an Australian gas-export project.

China Leading World in Electric Vehicles Development: WB Study 

BBC – Analysts say that China’s policies, coupled with the investments it has made in the sector, are transforming it into a global leader in the field.

“From policy to technology to new business models, China is innovating on all the building blocks needed to successfully deploy electric vehicles,” said Ede Ijjasz, sustainable development manager for the World Bank in China and Mongolia.

Wang Shengjun, President of the Supreme People’s Court gave his annual report to the NPC this week and for perhaps the first time included specific data on the number of pollution compensation cases.  Of the 10.99 million cases concluded nationally in the People’s courts 12,018 were for pollution compensation, an increase of 2.83 percent from 2009.  More at Xinhua.

Choke Point China: New releases on south-north water project and water transfer rights to coal plants in Ningxia

Circle of Blue – If scheduling and operations projections are accurate, in 2014 some 13 billion cubic meters (3.4 trillion gallons) of water per year will pour through the tunnels of the central line, under construction here in Henan Province, and will be sent north to help curb water shortages in more than a dozen cities, including Beijing.

Circle of Blue – In late December 2010, the Huadian Power International Corporation—one of China’s largest electricity producers—opened a state-of-the-art, 1000-megawatt, supercritical, air-cooled coal-burning unit at the Lingwu Power Plant in the Ningdong Energy Base. The station—the first of its kind in the world—will use 9,000 cubic meters (2.4 million gallons) of water a day for industrial operations and cooling. A similarly sized conventional coal-fired plant would use 44,660 cubic meters (11.8 million gallons) of water daily, or nearly five times as much, according to an investment stock statement issued by the company.

Pollution blocking the eastern path of south-north water project

People’s Daily – Efforts to control pollution along the 1,400 km-route have run into new obstacles, largely because of population growth and industrial expansion in counties and townships along the route, Lu Zhenlin, office director in charge of the construction of the program’s eastern route in Jiangsu province, told China Daily.

US coal executive sees China as the “new Middle East” for coal

Guardian – In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, Palmer dismissed the idea that the world might ever experience “peak coal” – the point at which maximum global coal production rate is reached. “The Dakotas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas all have large, large amounts of lignite [brown coal],” he said. “Or in western China and Mongolia you have lower-ranked coals. So I don’t think there’s a peak coal problem. I think Xinjiang province in the west of China, where they say there’s a trillion tonnes of resources, will be the new Middle East. Anyone who has the notion that we’re going to move away from fossil fuels just isn’t paying attention.”

In other words: “We know you have a lot of investment options when it comes to the future of energy, but please do consider investing in the intensive digging and burning of dirt; it is the oldest of the investments, and we are getting much better at it, otherwise how could we justify the lengths we go to – to get dirt to burn.”

Shenzhen’s garbage powered pollution: trash incinerators pollute groundwater

Caixin - Filled with heavy metals, the run-off is a product of the discharge from the incineration of unsorted trash. Experts say seepage of industrial effluent into drinking water supplies or nearby aquifers can pose huge risks to human health, among them developmental abnormalities. But trash-to-electricity plants in China currently operate without adequate facilities to treat wastewater.

China’s big dam problem – Foreign Policy – photo journalism on China’s dam development

The good people at Circle of Blue and the China Environment Forum at Woodrow Wilson Center have released a major piece of reporting on China’s energy and water woes.

Circle of Blue – In a dozen chapters—starting today and posted weekly online through April—Choke Point: China will report in text, photographs, and interactive graphics the powerful evidence of a potentially ruinous confrontation between growth, water, and fuel that is already visible across China and is virtually certain to grow more dire over the next decade.

Choke Point: China, though, is not a narrative of doom. Rather, our journalists and photographers found a powerful narrative in two parts and never before told. The first important finding—left largely unsaid in and outside China—is how effectively the national and provincial governments enacted and enforced a range of water conservation and efficiency measures.

World Bank: $20 billion needed annually to improve urban water

Reuters – China needs to spend up to $20 billion a year to bring its urban water supplies up to standard, according to the World Bank.

Larger and wealthier cities have already started investing in the sector, but water supplies in smaller cities and the countryside still fall short, leaving about 800 million people without clean drinking water.

Half of China’s Installed Wind Not Getting to the Grid

China Daily – China, the world leader in wind power by installed capacity, is facing a growing problem with grid connection as more than half of the electricity its wind farms generate goes unused.

According to a report by the State Electricity Regulatory Commission (SERC), unused wind-generated electricity amounted to 2.8 billion kilowatt-hours in the first six months of 2010 due to insufficient transmission capabilities and grid connection.

Study examines effectiveness of Open Government Information Regs

China Dialogue – The study found it most difficult to obtain information on enterprises that have been involved in major or serious environmental-pollution incidents or exceeded emission-control targets, and information on the output and treatment of hazardous waste and pollutants. None of the EPBs surveyed provided complete and up-to-date information on their lists of excessively polluting enterprises. Some withheld the information completely. Beijing was the only city that published data on the output and treatment of waste and pollutants on their website; the other bureaus either did not respond to the requests for this information or only provided partial information.

Natural Resource Protection in Xinjiang

Caixin investigates the decline of biodiversity and ecosystem protection in Xinjiang, from licorice root to Tibetan antelope; and includes this doozy of an anecdote:

Caixin – A source said forestry police, tasked with enforcement, have initiated and participated in illegal hunting. Around the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, local officials in Xinjiang, led by forestry police, accidentally shot residents while wild boar hunting with guns, leaving one dead and one injured. But the forestry officials did not receive a reprimand, let alone the official punishment under law.

Heavy Metal in China’s Rice

Caixin - As much as 10 percent of China’s rice may be tainted by poisonous cadmium, a heavy metal discharged in mine and industrial sewage that makes its way into rice paddies, according to agricultural researchers at a major university.

Much of this poisoned rice is consumed by farm families or sold in areas of the nation’s food market beyond the reach of government safety regulators.

China Bans Animal Circuses / Shows

Telegraph - The ban will also force zoos to stop selling animal parts in their shops and zoo restaurants will have to stop serving dishes made out of rare animals, another widespread practice.

Bear Bile Company Runs Into Public Ire Over IPO

Reuters – A Chinese company that extracts bile from captive bears for traditional medicines has sparked fury on the Internet from bloggers accusing it of animal cruelty after news emerged that it hopes to list on the stock market.

WWF – The study found that China’s stimulus package has been successful in boosting economic growth mainly through investments in infrastructures. This has increased demand for energy-intensive industries and pushed up China’s energy consumption in the short-term (2009-2010). It is estimated, however, that the stimulus will have long terms benefits for energy conservation and that its net effects on carbon emissions will be positive from 2014 onwards.

Lessons from the Tiger: Professor Tang Hao Examines Environmental Governance in 2010

Professor Tang has some critical things to say about the state of environmental enforcement in 2010, including this poke at MEP.

China Dialogue – The system of government supervision is also full of holes. During all of these events, the voice of the environmental authorities was notably weak – a reflection of their lack of strength in the wider system. (It is worth noting that the Ministry of Environmental Protection was a more active protector of the environment before being promoted from bureau status.) An overly close relationship between government and business has led both the executive and the judiciary to neglect their responsibilities when responding to such events. The compensation received by the farmers, fishermen and locals affected by the Zijin Mining and CNPC leaks has been insufficient to cover their losses.

China’s GDP Enigma: Made all the more murky by pollution

Peking University Professor Michael Pettis offers a tutorial on understanding China’s GDP and examines why environmental degradation makes it smaller.

Business Insider - What if China’s GDP numbers seriously overstate the true value of China’s economy? There are at least two very good reasons to believe that they might.  The first is environmental degradation.  To understand why, it is worth remembering that if an individual earns $100, but in so doing destroys $100 worth of his own assets, then a strict accounting would say that he earned nothing.

The same is true with the environment, which has a real economic value that can be adversely affected by certain kinds of economic activity.  For example here is an article that came out four months ago on Bloomberg:

China, the world’s worst polluter, needs to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product a year — 680 billion yuan at 2009 figures — to clean up 30 years of industrial waste, said He Ping, chairman of the Washington-based International Fund for China’s Environment. Mun Sing Ho, a senior economist at Dale W. Jorgenson Associates and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put the range at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP.

Failure to spend that much — equivalent to the annual GDP of Vietnam — may cost the Chinese economy half as much again in blighted crops, health costs and pollution-related expenses, He said: “The cleanup can’t catch up with the speed of pollution” if spending is less.

This article suggests that a significant portion of Chinese growth came with a destruction of value that should have been deducted from that growth.  After all, if you create net $100 of chemicals, but in so doing you pollute a nearby river to the extent that future economic production associated with the river is reduced by $100 (there will be less fishing, perhaps, or less agricultural production, or less usable water, or more health care costs), then the net value you created is 0, not $100, although of course you as the polluter might earn $100 today while the rest of the country loses $100 over the future.

There is no objective way to figure out how much of Chinese GDP growth should be reversed because of environmental degradation (and in this China is simply an extreme case – most countries to a lesser extent have this problem), but there is no question that the number is big, and the result is that we overestimate China’s GDP growth today and will underestimate GDP growth tomorrow.  In other words environmental degradation simply causes us to take future growth and count it today.

Open the Sluices: A Flood of Hydro on the Way

Beijing’s cautious approach to hydro development is over and formerly controversial dams along the Nu River and elsewhere will be getting green lights.

Global Times - The trend will create a “golden decade” for the nation’s hydropower sector, analysts say, as high fuel prices continue to squeeze margins of coal-fired power plants that comprise the bulk of China’s electricity-generating capacity. Renewable energy sources like solar power have been slow to come on line on a big scale because of high costs and grid-configuration problems.

The Chinese government now aims to have 430 gigawatts of -hydropower capacity by 2020, increasing its earlier target of 380GW, the China Securities Journal -reported last month, citing unidentified sources.

“That means each year, the equivalent of one new Three Gorges Dam will be added in China over the next decade,” said Shao Minghui, an analyst at China Post Securities, using the 2020 target of 380GW as a base. “The market is really sizable.”

China Real Time – [A] coalition of environmental groups in China that are campaigning for technology companies to investigate failures to meet environmental and labor standards in their supply chains has singled Apple, saying in its most recent report that the company has ignored its calls for action.

A Critical Look at Public Participation in China (Failure to Engage)

A managing editor for China Dialogue, Meng Si, reviews some of the biggest environmental stories from 2010 and concludes that the public’s ability to influence policy or agency action is still far less than what is needed.

Looking back at China’s key environmental events of the past year – be it sweeping emissions-reduction and energy-saving moves by government or rapid developments in the domestic clean-energy sector; the Zijin Mining pollution incident or the Dalian oil leak; or the increasingly fierce debate over incinerators and genetically modified rice – one thing is clear: the public has been consistently left out in the cold. The Chinese people are still unable to participate in the making of public policy.

Meng Si highlights MEP’s December 31, 2010 rejection of a request from Chongqing Green Volunteers to review the fine for the Zijin mining disaster in Fujian as one example. The Chongqing group complained that the fine imposed on Zijin was too low and not in accord with law or actual damages.  In a short letter to the Chongqing group, MEP said that the group was not an interested party and therefore would not consider its request.

Beida Law Professor Wang Qin is quoted in a different article as saying that the request is appropriate and reasonable. In light of the recent trend to permit public interest standing for civil society groups to bring suits in some of China’s environmental courts, MEP’s espoused reason does appear to be counter to current trends and its own promotion of citizen involvement.

China’s Air Monitoring Far Behind Global Standards

China Daily – More changes are called for in China’s air quality monitoring after 20 inland cities failed a test of indicators used to inform the public how the air pollution damages their health, according to a report released Wednesday, 21st Century Business Herald reported on Thursday.

China lagged behind other major world cities in the Air Quality Information Transparency Index (AQTI) which measures the comprehensiveness of air quality indicators used in monitoring and public reporting.

Great Energy Stats and Charts

FT has some nice charts and graphs and some interesting numbers regarding China’s energy use. All these figures might explain why the editor chose the title, “Energy rivals scramble to secure resources.”

FT- Even after three decades of rapid economic growth, during which China became the world’s leading exporter and second-largest economy, the country imports only 10 per cent of its annual energy requirement. That is thanks primarily to vast domestic reserves of coal, which supply 70 per cent of its energy.

The 10 per cent that China must import is, however, still the same amount of energy that is needed to power the UK, the world’s sixth-largest economy.

McKinsey Director’s Watch List for 2011

Gordon Orr – Inflation in food prices will take longer than expected to control. The drivers of inflation are much more structural than cyclical. Indeed, the entire system is now so highly stressed that one snowstorm brings large spikes in food and energy prices as coal runs short. When ice shuts down the roads, as it does today in much of southwestern China, agricultural products simply cannot get to market.

Chinese consumption patterns are shifting as people become wealthier—more meat eating requires more cereals to feed the animals. The food supply chain, running at the limit, is close to breaking, and the pressures this problem creates will lead to further food quality crises.

The list continues and mentions rising bankruptcies as interest rates rise, and an increased promotion of outbound investment for Chinese companies.

Peabody, Calera and Huaneng Partner for Potentially Greener Cement

ClimateWire – Peabody Energy announced two partnerships with Chinese energy companies to build coal mines near newly planned high-efficiency power plants in China. Peabody; China Huaneng Group, the largest power generator in China; and California-based Calera Corp. agreed to develop a 1,200-megawatt high-efficiency power plant and adjacent coal mine in China’s coal-rich Inner Mongolia.

Peabody, the largest privately held coal producer, would operate the surface mine. Huaneng and Calera plan to deploy Calera technology that would convert a percentage of the plant’s carbon dioxide emissions into cement and other building materials.

It will be interesting to see how successful Calera’s technology can be once it is scaled up. Environmental concerns include Inner Mongolia’s extremely scare water resources which are required for the washing of coal, the cooling of thermal units, and the production of cement. Additionally, the amount of CO2 emissions that can be used to produce cement and for other industrial processes will likely be a small percentage of the overall CO2 emitted by large thermal coal plants.

Sinohydro Set to Build Another Controversial Dam In Sudan

IR’s Peter Bosshard has an excellent post regarding two controversial dams in Sudan that Chinese companies are prepared to build. The Kajbar Dam is strongly opposed by the Nubian population in the area. Allegedly, the dam threatens the continued existence of the Nubians and their traditional way of life.

Peter Bosshard – Since 2006, Chinese authorities have made increasing efforts to promote good community relations in overseas projects. The State Council and other government institutions have all called for the establishment of good community relations in Chinese investments. Sinohydro is currently preparing its own social and environmental guideline for overseas projects. Building the Kajbar Dam with a government that brutally represses the rights of the host population would fly in the face of such commitments.

In 2007, China (along with the majority of member states) voted in favor of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the UN. This document stipulates that indigenous peoples have the right of consent regarding “any project affecting their lands.” The Kajbar Dam, which is strongly opposed by the indigenous Nubian population, violates the UN Declaration.

Xinhua recently waded deeper into the air quality monitoring morass with this recent article that subtly seems to hint at skepticism toward the quality of a “blue sky” day.

The sky appears blue, but the air remains polluted, Beijing’s environmental watchdog ruled Thursday as strong winds blew away the murky haze that shrouded China’s capital for days. Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center’s daily report shows that Beijing’s average air quality from mid-day Wednesday to Thursday was “slightly polluted” (pollution reading 101 to 200). [BUT] Test results from 14 out of the 27 monitoring sub-stations in the city even show the day’s air was “poor” (201 to 300) or “hazardous” (over 301).

And in case you missed it, the Ministry of Environmental Protection released a new target to cut dioxin emissions by 10% by 2015 (look for this in the 12th FYP) to be achieved at least in part by targeting 17 key industries. Dioxin emissions are an increasing concern in China as trash and other waste product incineration increases; and because China’s standard is 10 times higher than the amount permitted in many other countries.

[AFP] However, the 10 percent target is not an outright cut in dioxin emissions, but instead a reduction in intensity — language that China has previously used to refer to the ratio of emissions to a unit of gross domestic product. ”By 2015, the country should have in place a sound, long-term mechanism for monitoring and preventing dioxin pollution,” said the notice, which was dated October 16 but appeared to have been published this week. ”The intensity of dioxin emissions in key industries should be cut by 10 percent to offset the increase in emissions,” it said. China’s national standard for dioxin emissions allows one nanogram per cubic metre — 10 times the amount legally allowed in the European Union and the United States, the official China Daily newspaper reported on Tuesday.

And finally, a recent study that identifies airborne lead isotopes by region of origin estimates that 29% of San Francisco’s air pollution comes from East Asia. China Real Time and Chemical & Engineering News both have more.

Beijing Tongying Turkey Farm

Climate Change Math in Treaties Flawed by Suspect Calculations

Bloomberg has a long and at times interesting article on the state of GHG measurements and why they matter. Think Cancun and carbon-trading.

[Bloomberg] Companies use bottom-up calculations and report their emissions estimates based on inputs: how much coal a plant burns; how much oil a factory consumes; how much lime is added to cement. Countries tabulate these estimates and add nationwide figures: how many vehicles drive within their borders; how much waste people plow into landfills; even how many methane-belching sheep graze in pastures.

Nisbet, Weiss and dozens of researchers say this bottom-up approach doesn’t reveal what we really need to know — what’s happening in the air. They’re sounding an alarm that greenhouse gases measured in the atmosphere can be double what companies and nations estimate on the ground.

Experts Cast Doubt Over Benefits of Hydro-power

Good example of an article that would not be widely circulated in the Chinese language press.

[Global Times] When the Ministry of Environmental Protection suspended the construction of the Ludila and Longkaikou hydropower stations last year, environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief, believing that the ecology of the Jinsha River in Yunnan Province had been saved.

However, their joy would prove short-lived. Authorities recently approved a number of similar projects, leading to fears that the two suspended stations would get the green light in the near future.

China’s Rapid Growth Rate Takes Lives and Impacts Life  Expectancy

[NYTimes] From 1990 to 2008, life expectancy in China rose 5.1 years, to 73.1, according to a World Bank compilation of United Nations data. Nearly every other big developing country, be it Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia or Iran, had a bigger increase over that span, despite much slower economic growth. Since 2000, most of Western Europe, Australia and Israel, all of which started with higher life expectancy, have also outpaced China.

The moral? Economic growth makes almost any societal problem easier to solve, but growth doesn’t guarantee better lives — or better health — for everyone. That’s been true for centuries. The rate of growth and the kind of growth both matter.

Over at the Economist, blogger Banyan uses a recent story about a former fisherman who now fishes human bodies out of the Yellow River downstream from Lanzhou in China’s wild west, and at times sells them to grieving families that come looking for their lost ones. Banyan cites to a BBC story covering the macabre fisherman but I suggest this earlier piece from Tom Lasseter. Regardless of the source it is a sobering tale, from which Banyan draws parallels to Charles Dickens’ 19th Century England.

[The Economist] The Dickensian echo is the first chapter of “Our Mutual Friend”, where the novel’s heroine, Lizzie Hexham, helps her father retrieve a corpse from the Thames, London’s river. This, it emerges, is his livelihood. The book is a sort of allegory of the perils of greed; or, at the national level, of the dangers of a race for growth that forgets its purpose is to improve human life.

Pingnan County Residents Back at It – Resist Landfill and Chemical Waste

Back in 2002, some Pingnan County residents were part of a groundbreaking class action suit against Rongping Chemical Company. Thanks to legal assistance from CLAPV, residents and farmers won compensation from Rongping, but now some of the same residence are complaining that chemical waste is leaching into their fields and harming crops and yields.

[China Daily] A protest by more than 100 villagers against a garbage landfill project in Pingnan county of East China’s Fujian province has entered its 40th day.

The protest, which started on Oct 11 in Houlong village of Pingnan, has forced the suspension of the project as the villagers take turns guarding the garbage pit to prevent trucks from pouring waste into the landfill.

Thankful: “Residents no longer carp about pollution in river”

[China Daily] It was unimaginable five years ago. In late 2005, the Songhua River, a tributary of the Heilongjiang River, called the Amur River in Russia, was severely polluted. An explosion upstream in Jilin province released a 100-ton spill of toxic chemicals, endangering the supply of drinking water for millions of residents along the river.

Following the spill, 34 percent of the river’s water quality was rated Grade V or worse – the highest level of poisoning, which meant it was unfit for human use, according to environmental protection bureau records.

They’re just saying it to save face,” Jumeau said of American officials’ pledges [to reduce GHG emissions]. “You’re promising something you don’t have. At least we can see China is doing something. The U.S. is doing nothing. Really, I don’t think there is any country that is doing more domestically than China to grapple with climate change.”

Quotes from Seychelles Ambassador Ronald Jean Jumeau from ClimateWire 11/19/2010 (subscription req’d).

China rules out linking climate aid to transparency

[Reuters] China said on Friday it will not agree to any deal linking rich nations’ aid to its acceptance of tighter oversight of efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The remarks from Huang Huikang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s special representative for climate change talks, laid bare rifts between Beijing and rich countries — especially the United States — that could trouble high-level negotiations in Cancun, Mexico.

US Embassy: Beijing air quality is ‘crazy bad’

[WaPo] Air pollution in Beijing was so bad Friday that the U.S. Embassy, which has been independently monitoring air quality, ran out of conventional adjectives to describe it, at one point saying it was “crazy bad.”

Coal barons undeterred and plan more exports from US to China

[Reuters] The world’s mining giants are keen to leap into the supply hole. Several are eyeing docks on the Pacific Northwest to export Western-mined coal to ports in China and other Asian countries for the first time.

Analysts are not surprised. “Obviously the mining companies are in the business of making money,” said Matthew Preston, principal North America coal analyst for Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland. “[In] the Asian markets, there’s a growing demand for coal. They’re just trying to take advantage of that marketplace.”

China MEP releases environmental management assessment for 655 cities & new pilot dioxin control program, read more at Greenlaw.

[People's Daily] Only 24 percent of groundwater in the North China Plain is safe to drink, a recent study by the China Geological Survey shows.

The four-year study found groundwater in the area has been tainted by heavy metals, chemical fertilizers and surface water pollution caused by leaks from garbage dumps and sewage water irrigation. …

The study said more than 75 percent of groundwater in the North China Plain is not safe to drink without being properly purified.

An earlier seven-year study by the Ministry of Environmental Protection on groundwater in 118 cities found 64 percent of them had groundwater that had been polluted, 33 percent was lightly polluted and 3 percent had access to a clean supply of groundwater.

China and France Agree on Uranium and Nuclear Cooperation; China Sells $10 billion in Coal Generation Equipment to India’s Reliance

[Reuters] France and China have agreed to form a strategic partnership in civilian nuclear power that ranges from building reactors in common to exploiting uranium mines, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Thursday.

His announcement came after a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao, in France for a three-day visit, and the signing of a slew of business deals including a $3.5 billion contract with energy firm Areva to supply 20,000 tonnes of uranium. …

“We have decided to work without limits on a strategic collaboration in the nuclear domain that will go much farther on the full spectrum of nuclear activity,” Sarkozy said in a speech after a deal-signing ceremony in the presidential palace.

Meanwhile global coal use continues to grow as well.

[Bloomberg] Shanghai Electric Group Co.’s $10 billion contract to supply coal-fired generators to India’s Reliance Power Ltd. shows Chinese equipment makers are increasing exports as the domestic market shrinks because of government measures to curb pollution, analysts said. …

“Chinese manufacturers are targeting the developing world for orders outside China, such as India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia,” said Simon Jiang, an analyst at Guotai Junan Securities HK Ltd. “They have a real advantage over competitors from the developed world because their costs are lower. And the technology now matches that in the West.”

Beijing Ranks First in China’s “Green Development Index”

[People's Daily] Beijing ranked first among all provinces and cities in China in the green development index, and the other nine areas in the top 10 are Qinghai, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Hainan, Tianjin, Fujian, Jiangsu, Guangdong and Shandong, according to the “China Green Development Index Annual Report 2010: An Inter-provincial Comparison” released on Nov. 4.

Of course everyone is curious to know just how Beijing was able to be ranked first, especially considering the latest news from MEP that shows that…

Auto Emissions are the Primary Cause of Bad Urban Air

[People's Daily] Emissions from motor vehicles have become the major source of air pollution in China’s large and medium sized cities, according to a report issued Thursday by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

According to the annual report on prevention and control of vehicle pollution, the volume of pollutants generated by motor vehicles across China in 2009 amounted to 51.4 million tons, with cars contributing most of it.

Just days after Greenpeace released a report, “Swimming in Poison,” which highlights high levels of endocrine disruptors found in Yangtze river fish, China’s State Forestry Administration announced major plans to clean-up the river. Those stories can be found at AFP and Xinhua.

[Xinhua] A weekly report released by the Environmental Monitoring of China agency on Aug 17 revealed that just two of the 18 monitoring stations along the Yangtze River graded the water quality as good.

China’s 26 Trillion cubic meters of Shale Gas Awaits Development- China Green News (translation from People’s Daily)

SPC Bestows Environmental Authorities with Power to Claim Compensation on Behalf of the State - Greenlaw has a Google translation

Tibetan Nomads Struggle as Grasslands Disappear from Roof of the World

[Guardian] Like generations of Tibetan nomads before him, Phuntsok Dorje makes a living raising yaks and other livestock on the vast alpine grasslands that provide a thatch on the roof of the world. But in recent years the vegetation around his home, the Tibetan plateau, has been destroyed by rising temperatures, excess livestock and plagues of insects and rodents.

China Sustains Blunt “You First” Message on CO2

[Dot Earth] Yu, who is now China’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, presented a tough — and appropriate — challenge to the world’s industrialized nations, which have largely built their wealth on a couple of centuries of burning fossil fuels.

In sum, he said that China’s national interests will always come first and, in any move toward binding steps for reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases, rich countries must go first.

China Goes Organic after Scandals of Cooking Oil From Sewers

[Telegraph] Night soil collectors typically visit the drains behind restaurants late at night to scoop up dregs of oil, which they filter and resell. The government, which released the figures, has promised to take action against the practice. But since there are no laws against skimming oil from drains, police have had to release any suspects.

China to Tackle Coal Bed Fires, One of the World’s Worst Ongoing Environmental Disasters

[Global Times] North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region launched an initiative Wednesday to extinguish fires which have been smoldering for nearly 50 years at Wuda coalfields in Wuhai city and have caused serious air pollution, according to China National Radio.

MUST SEE from China Daily: Inmates Present Low-Carbon Fashion Show

Bribery charges against China’s largest gold mining group upheld

[People's Daily] The bribery accusation against Zijin Mining Group, China’s largest gold mining group, stemming from its attempts to cover up a sewage spill was approved by the central government recently.

The General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) also confirmed that none of the journalists involved accepted the hush money.

Draft aims to protect country from soil erosion

Following landslides in western China that have claimed nearly 1500 lives and are blamed on severe deforestation and erosion, it looks like Beijing is attempting to react.

[China Daily] China may forbid projects that cause water and soil erosion following frequent geological disasters that have rampaged the country this year.

The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature, started its first reading of the draft amendment to the Water and Soil Conservation Law on Monday in a bid to protect the country’s fragile environment.

China Releases Ten-Year Forest Protection Plan

[Economic Observer] China’s State Forestry Administration (SFA) held a press conference yesterday to announce that the recently published “National Plan for the Use and Protection of Forest Land (2010-2020),” had been passed, in principle, by the State Council.

The document outlines the department’s ten-year program to expand and protect China’s forests.Currently, the area of forested land per capita in China is only 22% of the world’s average. According to the plan, China expects to have 312.3 million hectares of forested land (including land set aside for forestation) and 223 hectares of forest reserves by 2020, increasing total forest reserves by around 1.2 billion cubic meters.

Hormone Disruptors Found in Wild Yangtze River Fish

[Greenpeace] Greenpeace took samples of two commonly eaten fish, catfish and carp, from four cities scattered along the Yangtze, ranging from upriver Chongqing to near-coastal Nanjing and analysed them for two key groups of hazardous chemicals. Almost all of the sampled fish contained alkylphenols such as nonylphenol (NP) and octylphenol (OP), which are commonly used in detergents and in the textile and leather manufacturing process. They also contained perfluorinated compounds, including perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), typically used as a water- or grease-repellant coating in food packaging and textiles, as well as in cosmetics and plastic products.

The manufacturing of alkylphenols and PFOS has fallen sharply around the world, mainly as a result of restrictions enacted in the last decade. In contrast, in China, production of NPEs (NP derivatives) more than doubled from 1995 to 2003 , while PFOS production quadrupled from 2004 to 2006 . “This trend means that wildlife and people will be increasingly exposed to these hazardous chemicals, especially if China does not immediately put a stop to their use and discharge,” warned Wu.

Much of Bloomberg’s story comes from a July 26 article in China Energy News, in which the deputy director of the National Energy Administration, Wu Yin, states that  “[t]here must be a ceiling on coal output in the future, and energy needs can be met with new and renewable energy.”

[Bloomberg] China may set targets for consumption of energy, including coal, for certain industries and regions, Wu told the newspaper, without giving details.

Any cap on coal, energy consumption, or emissions would be good news for China and the world. But in all likelihood a  cap on coal use or emissions would be variable based on energy demand growth, and any energy consumption cap would be targeted on specific industries or sectors.

By 2015, coal may meet 65 percent of the country’s energy needs compared with 70 percent currently, Wu [Yin] said in the July 26 issue of the paper.

Therefore, if overall energy demand continues to grow at around 10% annually, even while targeting to increase the share of non-fossil fuel based energy to 15% by 2020, it is still likely that China’s overall coal use by 2015 or 2020 will be higher than it is today. And that is what U.S. and Australian coal mining companies are hoping for, as they see China as a promising export market. If China’s coal usage continues to increase as its current rate then China will likely be consuming half of all the coal consumed annually in the coming years, for more on this go here.

But China does appear determined to aggressively spur the development of renewables, as this story on China’s solar-power tariffs illustrates. Now, if we could just get a majority U.S. legislators to consider their children and grandchildren as much as they consider their own reelections, we might have a winning combination for combating climate change.

A new report by Chatham House took an in-depth look into the global illegal logging trade and found that illegal logging was down 22% from a 2002 high. But…

(Reuters) Illegal timber still accounted for between 35 and 72 percent of logging in the Brazilian Amazon, 22-35 percent in Cameroon, 59-65 percent in Ghana, 40-61 percent in Indonesia and 14-25 percent in Malaysia. In 2008, five importers studied — the United States, Japan, Britain, France and the Netherlands — bought 17 million cubic meters of illegal timber and wood products worth around $8.4 billion, much of it from China.

“China is the world’s top importer and exporter of illegal wood,” it said, estimating annual Chinese imports of 20 million cubic meters.

In the United States, the 2008 Lacey Act makes it illegal to handle illegally harvested timber and the European parliament approved similar legislation on July 7 this year. Lawson said other nations, including China, should tighten laws.

Interesting to note that most of the illegal lumber imported to China comes from Russia, a country that the Chatham House report did not focus on.

Guangzhou Breaks Records with Successful Bus Rapid Transit System

Saqib Rahim at Climatewire (subscription req’d) has a good article on bus rapid transit (BRT) in Guangzhou and its potential for easing traffic congestion throughout China. Guangzhou’s BRT system opened in February and broke world records with over 800,000 trips a day, more than any of Guangzhou’s train lines.

(Climatewire) Comprehensive statistics on the system won’t be available till Fall, but ITDP said that according to an accounting method being developed by the U.N. Environment Programme, Guangzhou’s BRT reduces about 20,000 tons of CO2 a year — the equivalent of the emissions from about 4,000 cars in the United States.

Most of that comes from the fact that the buses can move faster without cars in the way; the BRT can also use longer buses, which means fewer total vehicles are needed.

Cars can move more quickly without buses crowding the lanes; pedestrians and bicyclists can also breathe a bit easier. If one were to include these indirect impacts — not a trivial point, Hook said — the Guangzhou BRT may save as much as 200,000 tons of CO2 a year.

Worldwide, BRT tends to draw converts: Between 10 and 15 percent of riders are thought to be riding in lieu of driving their cars. Observers agree that cities aren’t choosing BRT for its climate benefits and that beating congestion still rules the roost.

Statistics Bureau Revises Energy Intensity Figures

(istockanalyst) The National Bureau of Statistics on Thursday revised the energy consumption per GDP unit during 2006-2009.

Decline of energy consumption per GDP unit during 2006-2009 were revised from 1.79 percent, 3.66 percent, 4.6 percent and 2.2 percent to 2.74 percent, 5.04 percent, 5.20 percent and 3.61 percent, respectively.

This announcement comes after a reported 3.2% rise in energy intensity for the first quarter of this year. That rise resulted in Wen Jiabao’s call to use an “iron hand” to combat rising energy intensity. Evidently the number crunchers at the Statistics Bureau don’t need iron hands, they just need erasers and new calculations.

China to Stop Subsidizing Polluting Industries

China removed tax rebates for steel, corn starch, and fertilizer producers, as well as many other energy and pollution heavy industries. More at Marketplace.

Hundreds protest against metals plant in S.China

(Reuters) More than 1,000 people threw rocks at police and blocked roads in southern China in protest at pollution from a plant owned by one of the country’s largest private aluminium producers, state media said on Thursday.

Bad Week for Mining in China:

Mine pollution ravages farmland in south China’s Guangdong Province – People’s Daily

A provincewide survey conducted by the Guangdong Institute of Eco-Environment and Soil Sciences shows 40 percent of the province’s soil is tainted with heavy metals, Thursday’s China Daily quoted Wan Hongfu, a researcher with the institute, as saying.

Zijin Executives Detained and Local EPB Chief Resigns after Massive Pollution Leak – Xinhua

Three managing personnel of a copper plant have been detained and a county official has resigned after the plant contaminated a local river in Shanghang County, east China’s Fujian Province.

And that brings us to the “new” aspect of the News Roundup. In the future I will suggest readers to get their news fix from the aforementioned sites, while this site’s News Roundup will focus on selecting a few important stories with the addition of news that these other sites might have missed, as well as providing some, hopefully welcomed, commentary.

7 Sentenced to Prison and Fines for Illegal Discharge/Dumping of Waste Water

A court in Foshan Guangdong found 7 people guilty of criminally damaging the environment by dumping 400 tons of waste water illegally. The Chinese article (Information Times, link broken) is thin on facts, but we are told that the sentences range from 10 months to 2 years with fines from 5,000 – 10,000 yuan a month. The fines total 310,000 yuan and just might be enough to cover the local government’s cleanup costs which exceeded 300,000 yuan according to the Information Times. The illegal dumping scheme appears to involve a Mr. Shi, who ran a waste management facility in the area, he contracted with a Mr. Li who had a deal with a pottery factory to take away some of its waste water. That waste water was then taken to Mr. Shi who then dumped it illegally in local water channels.

Evidently there was intent to break the law, but in China that is not always enough to warrant the attention of the local procuratorate which needs to bring the criminal action. In China, even if there is mens rea there must also be damages before criminal charges can be brought for environmental harm, unless an environmental law states otherwise, but even then there is debate. It appears that it was the local government that had an incentive to get someone else to pay for the cleanup and that was likely a motivating factor for the procuratorate’s involvement. No one though should be surprised if this same local government turns a blind eye to other factories that pollute. It is easy to see how the business arrangement between the 7 criminals here, essentially an illegal dumping operation, is different than that of a polluting factory that slowly over the course of a year discharges waste beyond the amount in this case, and how a factory through taxes and connections can protect itself from the type of prosecution found here.

Exceeding Discharge Permits Not a Violation of Law?

The China Daily reported that MEP recently undertook a study of paper mills.

The ministry inspected 461 paper companies across 53 cities nationwide, and found 21 percent of those breaking the environmental protection laws and another 312 factories discharging pollutants that exceeded stipulated standards.

Hmm… so exceeding stipulated discharge standards is not a violation of law? Otherwise, nearly 70% of China’s paper mills would be in violation of the law. One disconnect could be the role that local EPBs play in issuing permits and whether those permits have any real connection to the national standards and national law.

Pollution? What Pollution?

A letter from China over at the NYTimes covers the feeling that many foreigners in China feel regarding the quality of the air there and how the Chinese, and eventually foreigners, come to terms with its seeming inevitability.

Clean Energy and China: China’s New Energy Law!

NRDC’s Barbara Finamore has a post that sums up a Chinese article which leaks details of the law and some of the contentious issues confronting the drafting of the law, including whether the new law will “prioritize” or just “encourage” renewable development. She also highlights what NRDC and others have advised China to put in the new law.

Black lung remains lethal. Pneumoconiosis, or black lung, remains the top occupational disease in China, accounting for 80 percent of new cases of occupational diseases in 2009, the Ministry of Health said on Wednesday.China Daily. 29 April 2010.

Resisting the urban dinosaurs. Naive utopian development projects, such as those in drought-stricken Kunming, only exacerbate social and environmental problems, writes Zhu Xiaoyang. ChinaDialogue

Shanghai puts on a green face. With sustainable urban development practices as a key goal, the Shanghai World Expo champions priorities that hardly seem to square with the construction of nearly 200 booths and buildings, nearly all of which are designed to last only for the six-month duration of the show. New York Times. 30 April 2010. [Registration Required]

Millions of toxic food boxes seized in swoop. Quality inspectors in East China’s Jiangxi province seized more than 7 million toxic disposable food boxes in a one-day raid on Saturday. China Daily. 28 April 2010.

China faces water deficit. China will face a water supply deficit of up to 201 billion cubic meters in the next two decades if the country does not adopt proper water-saving technologies and practices, a report by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company has found. China Daily. 27 April 2010.

China Daily – More policy tools are being worked out to encourage energy conservation and the use of renewables to propel the development of China’s energy-saving industries, an official from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said.

In the meantime, a “responsibility system” has been developed to hold various government agencies to account for national and regional targets in energy saving and emission reduction. As a result, they have rolled out their own policies and matching technological solutions, Xie said.

The (Clean Energy) Revolution Will Not Be Patented

Slate – The last few years have seen perhaps the largest energy technology transfer in human history. In 2004, China paid about $5 billion for four state-of-the art nuclear reactors from Pennsylvania-based Westinghouse Corp. In exchange, Westinghouse agreed to transfer the technology and know-how to Chinese state-owned firms. French state-owned company Areva lost out, because it refused to turn over its intellectual property. Now China is set to use Westinghouse intellectual property to build an additional 28 nuclear plants based on the same technology.

Why Has the Fixed-gear Fashion Bike Craze Skipped China?

Slate – this bike-saturated nation has—so far—managed to skip entirely what is arguably the biggest global bicycle fad in a generation: the fixed-gear. And the absence is notable. Despite the rise in car ownership, China remains the world’s largest bike market, with 51 million sold in 2009, according to the China Bicycle Association.

China’s New Dam Seen as Water Hog

USA Today – Wearing cloaks of tree bark strands, villagers from the Yi ethnic minority tend wheat terraces that cascade downhill toward the riverbank. It is a scene unchanged for centuries, and it takes place in the shadow of a modern wall of concrete as high as a 66-story skyscraper that fills a gorge of the Lancang River in remote southwestern China.

The Xiaowan dam in the hills of Yunnan province is one of eight hydroelectric projects that will bring China’s industrial revolution to the impoverished region. It is by far the biggest of the four dams built so far that when done this year will be the biggest arch dam in the world.

Kunming Environmental Court Establishes Public Interest Litigation Fund to Encourage Law Suits Greenlaw has more

Reuters – In a split between the world’s top two emitters of greenhouse gases, Washington said it wanted talks in 2010 to build on a non-binding Copenhagen Accord for limiting global warming reached by more than 110 nations at the December summit. Beijing insisted negotiations should be guided by other draft U.N. texts…

SW China Drought Intensifies (with video)

Guardian – Until last summer, Damoguzhen was home to a lake that stretched across a mile-wide expanse of water in Yunnan, a southern Chinese province famed for its mighty rivers, moist climate and beautiful views. Today, it joins 310 reservoirs, 580 rivers and 3,600 pools that have been baked dry by a once-in-a-century drought that is evaporating drinking supplies, devastating crops and stirring up political tensions over dam construction, monoculture plantations and cross-border water management in south-east Asia.

Beijing Restaurant Napkins Tainted and Poisoned

People’s Daily – About 80 percent of the paper napkins used in Beijing restaurants have been tainted with poisoned chemicals and are unsafe, according to a food-packaging expert.

Yitong Coal Company Uproots Reforested Trees for 36 Hole Golf Course in Water Deprived Inner Mongolia

China Sports Review – China’s water authority launched an ecological improvement project in 1998 to plant 200 hectares of sea buckthorn to improve the soil and water supplies. Yitong Coal Co Ltd launched the golf project in the ecological protection zone in 2005, calling it a “new agricultural project” because China bans golf course construction, the report said.

If you were as intelligent/corrupt as the local officials that have permitted this project you would understand that this is a “new agricultural project” that will merely appear and function like a golf course.

Profile of Environmental Lawyer Zhang Jingjing

Chinese Walker – In April 2008, I accompanied Zhang on a visit to a mountain village in the north of Guangdong in southern China. It was her fourth time there, where she was attempting to persuade residents to sue the state-owned mining company, which has for over half a century piled up waste around wells and fields for over half a century. Several of the villages in the area are known for having high rates of cancer caused by the pollution. But the local people could not make the decision to sue. They had become used to annual rounds of protests at the mine and petitioning the government, all in exchange for a little compensation.

Greenlaw – Recent Climate Change News in the Chinese Media

Australia Wants Answers – Chinese Coal Freighter a “ticking time bomb”

BusinessWeek – The threat of pollution from the Shen Neng 1 is “like a ticking time-bomb,” Australia’s Greens party leader Bob Brown told Sky News. “This is a A$60 billion ($55 billion) a year largely foreign-owned coal industry that’s making a coal highway out of the Great Barrier Reef,” he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio earlier today.

Surveillance showed a thin oil sheen near the 230-meter bulk carrier, Patrick Quirk, general manager of Maritime Safety Queensland, said in an e-mailed statement today. The oil patch measured 600 meters by 300 meters.

FT – China and Malaysia on Monday signed a deal to build large projects in a controversial development corridor in resource-rich Borneo, one of the world’s last great wilderness areas. Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister, said the agreement could result in projects worth $11bn (€7.6bn, £6.9bn) in the Sarawak corridor of renewable energy, which runs along the northern coast of the island his nation shares with Indonesia and Brunei.

However, development on this scale is also likely to require the relocation of some of the 608,000 people who live in the area, generating international concern about the future of indigenous people.

Meena Raman of Friends of the Earth in Malaysia said there would be concerns about the scale of the investment, especially since environmental protection laws were weaker in Malaysian Borneo than in mainland Malaysia. “If there is going to be [an aluminium] smelter there will be massive environmental impact, and we don’t need more dams when we already have Bakun, which has more than enough energy to supply the whole of Borneo,” Ms Raman said. The 207m-high Bakun dam is designed to generate 2,400MW from a reservoir about the size of Singapore when it opens this year or next.

Radio Australia reported that “since the Bakun Dam was approved back in the 1990′s the federal government passed special legislation exempting Sarawak from the need to publish environmental impact assessments on development projects, a boon for any investor.”

Future Kenya port could mar pristine land

NYTimes – The snaky alleyways of the island’s old town (which the United Nations recognizes as a World Heritage site), the omnipresent smells of donkey dung and sweetly rotting fruit and the crescent-sailed dhows plying the sea make the island feel like a glass museum case — one with a living culture inside. But all that may be about to change.

To the dismay of many residents and tourists, the Kenyan government is planning to build the biggest port in East Africa here. It is an ambitious, multibillion-dollar project that could transform trade in this region and knit together Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Congo and southern Sudan as never before.

The Chinese government, one of the most aggressive investors in Africa, is backing the project and has already begun feasibility studies.

Company sells 1000 barrels of toxic waste to farmers as scrap metal – farmers told to use the toxic liquid as fertilizer in their fields – Company fined $322,000

China Daily – Xing Binghua was given the contract to process the waste last year, but he reportedly sold the waste to Woyang and Lixin farmers instead. The buyers reportedly wanted to recycle the metal barrels at low cost and were told the waste could be used as crop fertilizer. The farmers then bought the waste, shipped it back and dumped it in their counties.

“To a great extent, the accident is the local environment authorities’ fault,” said Professor Chen Zhenlou, deputy director of the school of resources and environmental science of East China Normal University.

Bullish on oil demand or electric vehicles? With China’s rise, maybe both

China recently overtook the US as the world’s largest car market in autos sold. And Chinese automaker BYD is preparing to launch the first plug-in electric vehicle (EV) for retail sale in the US in 2011. But a new study by McKinsey predicts that New Yorkers are more likely to buy an EV in 2015 than Shanghainese. McKinsey attributes this to the fact that New Yorkers are more likely to purchase an EV as a second car or specifically for urban use. Whereas the Shanghainese are expected to buy only one car that must meet all the family’s needs and that includes long road trips on China’s expanding highway system.

But perhaps McKinsey failed to consider the opinion of Tom Friedman, who is very optimistic that Beijing will be putting the right incentives in place to spur technology and demand to ensure that Shanghainese are buying more EVs than New Yorkers. One thing is for certain, auto trends in China will be a major factor influencing energy and environment issues.

And in somewhat related news, Shanghai’s EPB chief urged his fellow citizens to pursue a low carbon life after mentioning that  the per capita carbon emissions for a Shanghai resident are nearly that of their Japanese counterpart.

Vehicles in China

China’s global search for oil

The National – To feed the growing energy appetite of the world’s second-largest economy, state-controlled enterprises have been given the mission of securing oil and gas supplies wherever they can be obtained, and the country is spending handsomely.

Mystery of super deadly coal in China is revealed

Wired – It’s long been known that the lung cancer mortality rates in the region were the worst in the world among female nonsmokers and some anomaly in the coal had been suspected. Lung cancer mortality in the region is up to 20 times the Chinese average. But it’s only in recent years that scientists have focused in on silica in the form of very fine quartz as the mineral that makes burning the stuff so deadly.

Could China’s growing dependence on international coal cool its love for coal fired power plants? Some think so, more at FT’s Energy Source.

Jiangsu Province to roll out open electronic government data collection system

MEP’s China Environment News hails the development with this headline “How to exercise your rights? Search the internet and know.” The article notes that Jiangsu’s EPB will use the new information technology to enhance the transparent flow of information, environmental governance and public participation.

Inner Mongolia overtakes Shanxi as China’s top coal producing province

China Daily –  Last year, Inner Mongolia’s coal production increased 37 percent year on year, and it was expected to hit 730 million tonnes in 2010, the statement said. Shanxi saw a decline of 4.7 percent of its coal output year on year in 2009, it said.

China to launch first water conservancy survey

China Daily – The project will cover rivers, lakes, water conservancy projects, water conservancy institutions and key water users in the Chinese mainland, said the statement on the website (www.gov.cn).

The survey will focus on the numbers of lakes and rivers, the conditions of water conservancy projects and the protection of rivers and lakes.

China needs to cut use of chemical fertilizers

Reuters – China, the world’s largest grain producer and top consumer of fertilizers, should reduce its reliance on chemical fertilizers by as much as 50 percent because excessive use has resulted in serious pollution, according to a research report.

This article claims that agriculture is the largest polluter in China. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is by far the largest problem. China uses twice as much nitrogen fertilizer as the US to produce nearly the same amount of crops. For more on the dangers of nitrogen fertilizer see this article in CSM.

Ministry of Environmental Protection produced movie “Green Water” debuts in Beijing

The movie portrays EPB employees as heroes as they fight to protect the water for villagers. You can find pictures of the debut and all the stars here and CCTV coverage here.

Chinese courts equipped with anti-corruption supervisors

Xinhua – The SPC said in a statement Sunday that 24,521 anti-corruption supervisors had been in place in 2,392 courts across the country. In local courts, the posts of anti-corruption supervisors were concurrently held by senior judges, it said.

The system was born out of the efforts “to better combat corruption and redress injustices in a timely manner,” said Shen Deyong, SPC executive vice-president.