http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1022-05.htm
Published on Wednesday,
October 22, 2003 by the New York Times
China's Boom Adds to Global Warming Problem
by Keith Bradsher
QUOTE:
"China is the world's second largest emitter of such gases,
after the United States. But China's per-person energy use
and greenhouse gas emissions remain far below levels found
in richer countries. The emissions are, for example, roughly
one-eighth of those per capita in the United States."
ZHANJIANG, China - China's rapid economic growth is producing
a surge in emissions of greenhouse gases that threatens international
efforts to curb global warming, as Chinese power plants burn ever
more coal while car sales soar.
Until the last few
months, many energy experts and environmentalists
said, they had hoped that China's contribution to global warming
would be limited. Its state-owned enterprises have become more
efficient in their energy use as they compete in an increasingly
capitalist economy, and until recently official Chinese statistics
had been showing a steep drop in coal production and consumption.
But new figures from
Chinese government agencies confirm what
energy industry executives had suspected: that coal use has
actually been climbing faster in China than practically anywhere
else in the world.
To the extent that
global warming is caused by humanity, as many
scientists believe, this is a serious problem because burning
coal
at a power plant releases more greenhouse gases than using oil
or
natural gas to generate the same amount of electricity.
China's rising energy
consumption complicates diplomatic efforts
to limit emissions of global warming gases. The International
Energy Agency in Paris predicts that the increase in greenhouse
gas emissions from 2000 to 2030 in China alone will nearly equal
the increase from the entire industrialized world.
China is the world's
second largest emitter of such gases,
after the United States. But China's per-person energy use
and greenhouse gas emissions remain far below levels found
in richer countries. The emissions are, for example, roughly
one-eighth of those per capita in the United States.
As a developing country,
China is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol,
the pending international agreement to limit emissions of greenhouse
gases. When President Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol two years
ago,
he portrayed China's exemption as a serious flaw. The protocol
has
been embraced by most other big nations, however, and only requires
ratification by Russia to take effect.
Another developing
country exempt from the protocol, India, is also
showing strong growth in emissions as its economy prospers. General
Motors predicts that China will account for 18 percent of the
world's
growth in new car sales from 2002 through 2012; the United States
will be responsible for 11 percent, and India 9 percent.
Official Chinese statistics
had shown a decline in coal production
and consumption in the late 1990's, even as the economy was growing
8 percent a year. But many Western and Chinese researchers have
become suspicious of that drop over the last several years.
They point out that
the decline assumed that local governments
had followed Beijing's instructions to close 47,000 small, unsafe
mines producing low-grade coal and many heavily polluting small
power plants. Yet researchers who visited mines and power plants
found that they often remained open, with the output not being
reported to Beijing because local administrators feared an outcry
if they shut down important employers.
China's National Bureau
of Statistics has not revised its coal
figures for the late 1990's, but its latest data show that coal
consumption jumped 7.6 percent last year. A Chinese official
said the bureau was likely to report a similar increase for
this year. Even those figures may be low: Chinese coal industry
officials have estimated that coal consumption may be rising
more than 10 percent a year.
China is now the world's
largest coal consumer, and its power
plants are burning coal faster than its aging railroads can
deliver it from domestic mines, most of which are in the north.
So the country is importing coal from Australia. This steamy city
of 640,000, with its deep-water port, is the main receiving point
in southern China.
As fishermen in wooden
boats brought conical wicker baskets
full of silvery, sardine-size fish ashore at dawn on a recent
morning, the sun began illuminating an enormous, coal-fired power
plant with a big freighter from Australia tied up next to it.
The plant is only nine
years old. Zhanjiang drew its electricity
over high-tension lines from other cities to the north before
then.
But the power plant is already inadequate for the area's needs,
even though it is twice the size of a standard coal-fired plant.
With blackouts frequent here for lack of power, construction has
just begun on another, adjacent power plant, that one oil-fired.
Other figures from
the Bureau of Statistics have also shown very
large increases in energy consumption lately. China's electrical
power generation, the main use of coal in China, jumped 16 percent
in the first eight months of this year, nearly four times as much
as Western experts expected. Power generation is poised to grow
swiftly in the years to come, with China's output of equipment
for new power plants rising by two-thirds in a single year.
China has also become
the world's fastest-growing importer
of oil, with foreign purchases surging nearly a third this
year, although some of those imports went into stockpiles
in January and February as a precaution in case the war in
Iraq disrupted shipments from the Middle East.
The Chinese are using
more energy in their homes, too,
as China has turned into the world's largest market for
television sets and one of the largest for many other
electrical appliances.
A 53-year-old retired
saleswoman here said that for more
than half her life, her only electrical appliance at home
was a light bulb.
She and her husband
bought a black-and-white television
set in 1984, then a refrigerator in 1988. Now she has an
air-conditioner, which she acquired in 1998, along with
two color televisions, an electric rice cooker, a radio,
the refrigerator and many lights.
"Only the old
people do not have air-conditioning now,"
said the woman, Ms. Long, who, like others interviewed
in this militarily important city, insisted on giving only
her family name.
Environmental groups
that once promoted China as a good
example are now increasingly worried. "If they're seeing
6 and 7 percent growth, that is obviously a concern," said
Dan Lashof, a climate change expert at the Natural Resources
Defense Council, which has done several studies of Chinese
energy use.
But environmentalists
are also loath to criticize China too
strongly, partly because Chinese emissions per person are
still so much lower than those in the developed world, and
partly because China has been trying with some success to
improve the energy efficiency of its industries. Programs
like requiring electrical appliances and building designs
to waste less energy show considerable promise, said Barbara
Finamore, the director of the Clean China Program at the council.
The central government
in Beijing has had repeated difficulties
in forcing provincial governments to pursue recent efficiency
programs. China no longer has the central planning mandates to
order improvements, but has not yet developed market-based
incentives, like higher prices, to encourage people to curb
their consumption of fossil fuels, Ms. Finamore said.
China's central bank
is nervous that some sectors of the
economy, especially luxury housing construction, are growing
too fast, and it is trying to restrain them. If it succeeds,
that could temper somewhat the increase in energy use.
China is not alone
in consuming a lot more energy, although
its enormous population of roughly one and a quarter billion,
and rapid economic growth mean that its increases dwarf those
of any other country in the developing world. India, for example,
is also showing rapid growth in energy use. In populous countries
from Indonesia to Brazil, power plants are burning more and
more coal and oil to meet ever growing demand for electricity
from industry and households.
Even some climate experts
in developing countries are conceding
that their emissions need to be addressed when international
talks begin in 2005 on what will follow the Kyoto agreement,
which calls for industrialized nations to reduce their emissions
by 2012. Considerable reluctance persists among developing
countries, however, to accept the kind of specific limits
prescribed for wealthy countries by the Kyoto Protocol.
"There's going to be a fairly heated debate about what
developing countries should do in the next round," said
Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian engineer who is the chairman
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United
Nations group that assesses the causes and consequences of
rising temperatures.
The Chinese government
is drafting a series of new economic
policies, some of which will concern energy, and is expected
to release them soon. Senior Chinese officials did not respond
to requests for interviews over the last two months.
Two fairly senior Chinese
officials said in earlier, separate
interviews, after President Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin
in March, that an active debate was under way over the extent
to which conservation should be balanced against economic growth.
Growth in Chinese coal
consumption should slow somewhat in
the next four years. Completion of the Three Gorges dam and
five nuclear power plants will provide considerable additional
electricity for China's national grid by 2007, although posing
different environmental risks from coal. But Larry Metzroth,
a coal and electricity specialist at the International Energy
Agency, warned that with no further large hydroelectric or
nuclear power projects planned in China, coal consumption
"is going to pick up again after 2007."
Beijing's official
New China News Agency recently predicted
that China's capacity to generate electricity from coal would
be almost three times as high in 2020 as it was in 2000.
If China can continue
to sustain 8 percent annual economic
growth, then the next big growth area in greenhouse gas
emissions is likely to be cars. China is already the world's
fastest-growing car market, with sales up 73 percent this year.
China has just one-twentieth
as many cars now as the United
States, because car sales were tiny until the last three years.
But a swift expansion of auto factories in China, together
with rising household incomes and the growing availability
of auto loans, has led to the surge.
Here in Zhanjiang,
downtown streets are already clogged with
cars. One of the best businesses in town seems to be a corner
store in the city's old quarter, an area of tightly packed
three-story homes with traditional tile roofs. The corner
store sells every possible kind of fuse, tubing and wiring
for electricians, and it was so busy that the store's owners
barely had time to speak.
"People are rewiring
a lot," said Mr. Pong, the patriarch of
the family that runs the store. "Or they just demolish the
old
and build new."
Copyright 2003 The
New York Times Company
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