China’s GREEN Motivation
China is continuously criticized by Western powers for the lack of environmental action to combat their increasing pollution. However, I think China will be one of the leaders in GREEN living and technologies within the next decade.
Having visited China on business several times and traveled through many parts of the country for work, my eyes have been opened to the massive changes going on over there. China is trying to urbanize as many of their 1.3 billion + people as they can, create a domestic and export economy, and raise their standard of living to something comparable to the West. Obviously this is no easy task and China is going through incredible growing pains having to carefully
balance between economic expansion, infrastructure expansion, population displacement, employment, and environmental issues with the overall goal of minimizing social unrest during the country’s evolution.
If one listens to the Western media and Western leaders, one would think China is doing nothing to clean-up their environment. Although the environmental problems are getting worse through their relentless, fast paced march to modernization, China is making incredible strides to try to reverse the environmental damage that this march has created. In my opinion, there are four challenges that China is having to deal with when it comes to their environmental efforts- 1) old out of date power and industrial infrastructure, 2) drastically increasing power requirements to deal with the increase in living standards and commercial endeavours, 3) the dramatic increase in purchases of automobiles by the consumer base, and 4) corruption.
It is generally reported in the West that China is opening up a large number of coal facilities. What is not widely known is that China is closing down many of its dirtiest coal power plants. What makes it more interesting is the plants that they are closing down are using the same technology that the US is currently using in their operating coal power plants. So many of the coal plants that are going on-line in China are cleaner than most of the plants in the US.
As mentioned in President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address, China is the number one producer of photovoltaic solar cells in the World. It is also the largest producer of wind turbines in the World. Not only that but it is the largest consumer of solar and wind power in the World. China is on the path to increase installed capacity of solar power generation to 20,000 MW by 2020 with several mega-projects located across China and has many large scale wind projects on the go, all in the attempt to reduce its reliance on coal.
China is now the leader in domestic car sales in the World with 13.3 million cars sold in 2010 alone. Obviously the amount of pollution given off by the exhaust of these vehicles is a booming problem for China. Also, given that it does not produce its own oil, it has to import all of its oil, making it vulnerable to international influences. To assume control over this resource problem, China is putting a large amount of financial and technical resources and exerting pressure on automakers to ensure that cars driven in China will be EVs, sooner rather than later.
China is also investing a significant amount of money into clean public transportation infrastructure, including high speed rail between cities, subways, light-rail, trolleybuses, and eco-friendly buses to make it more attractive for Chinese citizens to take public transit than to drive cars.
Given the pace of growth and the size of the country, corruption has become a big problem in China. The policies enacted by the Central Government aren’t necessarily enacted by the regional governments especially as regional government officials get bribed to look the other way. The checks and balances aren’t necessarily in place to oversee the implementation and on-going enforcement of environmental regulations on the industrial sector so there are many parts of China that are suffering, especially when it comes to industrial air and water pollution. Water tables are being poisoned, food crops are being contaminated, and people are getting sick and dying as a result. China has been cracking down on many of these factories and arresting and convicting many corrupt government officials but it would be a lie to say that the problem has been solved. Looking in our own back yard though, we can be easily accused of the same issues, with the contamination of the Great Lakes, the water tables and land surrounding where the oil sands are being mined, our plastic and toxic waste contaminated oceans. I think part of the reason that our Western governments are pointing a finger at China is to drive attention away from the lack of action by them.
Although China has been a big contributor to the global problem, on a per person basis, China is still a relatively small polluter in comparison to the Western countries. The pollution in the air is evident within most of China and the Chinese government officials breath the same air and eat the same food as their people and also are wanting to avoid massive social unrest to reduce the chance of being toppled so are motivated to seek alternative solutions to bring about environmental harmony in their country.