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China and India face pollution timebomb
Beijing's eerily mild winter has provoked anxious media coverage in the Chinese capital. In India, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the country's great river systems is alarming policymakers.
- By Richard McGregorand Jo Johnson, Financial Times
- Published: 00:00 March 3, 2007
Beijing's eerily mild winter has provoked anxious media coverage in the Chinese capital. In India, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the country's great river systems is alarming policymakers. The world's two fastest-growing large economies are growing increasingly conscious of the global warming in which their rapid development is playing a part.
The politics of pollution has also been brought home in recent weeks with the publication of the report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - containing a fresh and, in Beijing and New Delhi, unwelcome focus on the role of the two Asian behemoths.
The UN report signals a decisive shift in the debate, drawing attention not just to overall levels of carbon emissionsreleased into the atmosphere over time - largely from industrialised countries, led by the US - but also to the rising flow of greenhouse gases from big developing nations.
Investment frenzy
After a quarter-century of improvements, China's surge of investment in heavy industry and power capacity since 2000 has seen energy efficiency levels retreat and pollution measurements soar. China added power capacity last year equal to the entire grids of the UK and Thailand combined, 90 per cent of it coal-fired, to feed its growing stack of steel, aluminium and cement plants and the like.
By 2009, says the International Energy Agency, China will have overtaken the US as the largest emitter of the portion of greenhouse gases that are energy-related. "In the past three to five years, [China] has gone on this frenzy of investment, and in this frenzy, they have lost a lot of their energy efficiency," adds Jim Brock, a Beijing consultant. Although China and India acknowledge their emissions are rising, they argue that, per capita, they remain a tiny fraction of those from developed countries. Moreover, China's cumulative emissions are only one-third of those of the US and one-sixth of those of all the developed countries grouped in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to the World Bank. The cumulative emissions of India, which has a higher energy efficiency rate than China, are about one-tenth those of the US.
The initial reaction in both countries to international pressure has been to point to the refusal of the US and rich fellow-travellers such as Australia to sign the Kyoto protocol for mandatory emissions caps. "As the biggest developed country and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gas, the irresponsible remarks and behaviour of the US government will only leave an impression of it being 'heartlessly rich'," sniped the People's Daily, mouthpiece of China's ruling Communist party, in the wakeof the UN report.
Gao Guangsheng, the director of China's Climate Change Co-ordination Office, pointedly singled out Australia, population 20 million, at a recent conference in Nairobi, saying that if it had as many people as China's 1.3 billion, its carbon emissions would total 8.6 billion tonnes a year. China's emissions are now about 1.3 billion tonnes a year.
"China uses coal not because we love coal but because that is the resource we have," he said. The US and Australia in turn cite China and to some extent India to justify their own refusal to move on the issue, arguing that new caps are pointless until Beijing and New Delhi come on board. "Climate change to date is an area where the US and China seem locked in an unholy alliance of inaction, at least at the federal level," says Elizabeth Economy, of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Beijing and New Delhi have already begun to rehearse their arguments ahead of any new global negotiations for a post-Kyoto accord. In an interview with the Financial Times, Palaniappan Chidambaram, India's finance minister, reiterates what amounts to the country's doctrine of its "right to develop", a view also advanced by Beijing. "We are prepared to assume our share of the responsibilities and obligations, provided the world recognises we have a right to grow and that means that we will consume large quantities of energy and, second, that we need to be given access to clean technology, including civilian nuclear energy," he says. "If these two points are recognised, I have no doubt that India and other developing countries will come forward to assume their share of the responsibilities. But we are not the largest polluter: our carbon emissions are still very small."
China is in the crosshairs of the global community more so than India because its economy has grown faster than that of its neighbour, is more reliant on heavy industry and is thus more energy intensive. In recognition of the problem, China's top leaders have set stringent numerical targets for improving energy efficiency per unit of economic output by 4 per cent annually in the five years from 2006. So far, however, they have failed to meet the benchmark, an embarrassment for Beijing as it was one of only two numerical targets in the latest five-year economic plan.
"Without major incentives to support energy efficiency technologies and discourage wasteful practices, it is almost certain that the target won't be met," says Jiang Lin, of the China Energy Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Both China and India suffer from acute air and water pollution. In 83 Indian cities for which air quality monitoring data are available, more than 84 per cent of the population was in 2004 forced to inhale poor, bad or dangerous air.
Mongolian coastline
Only 3 per cent had access to air that was rated good. China is home to 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities, with dirty air causing the premature deaths of 400,000 people a year. About 340 million people, about one-quarter of the population, do not have access to clean water.
Still, both China and India are clearly concerned about climate change for their own sakes, let alone the impact on the rest of the world. In China, scientists warn that the impact of rising temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau could alter the amount of water flowing into the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, which originate in the region. The same sort of impact may be felt in key Indian river systems. Glacial melt would lead to increased summer flows in some directions for a few decades, followed by a reduction as glaciers disappear. A Beijing-based econ-omist says he has a simple message he uses to remind Chinese officials of the urgency of the issue.
"There are a lot of low-lying areas in China," he says. "And if the Greenland ice caps melt, [landlocked] Mongolia will have a coastline."
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