[The severity of the
pollution — extreme even by Chinese standards — has rattled Chinese leaders.
While they have, on occasion, closed factories and restricted traffic to clear
the air for special events such as the 2008 Olympics, so far they have lacked the
will or the capacity to reduce air pollution on a sustained basis.]
By Steven
Mufson
.tif) |
Feb. 28, 2013
A Chinese flag flies in front of Beijing Telegraph Building on a hazy morning in central Beijing.
Petar Kujundzic / Reuters
|
BEIJING — Early on in
Beijing’s winter of pollution-wracked discontent, one of China's biggest power
companies, Huadian, turned off the coal scrubbers at its Datong plants and let
emissions of sulfur dioxide, a leading cause of acid rain and respiratory
illness, soar to more than four times government standards.
Huadian saved money by
turning off the scrubbers, which suck up power. What’s more, Huadian falsified
paperwork and sold its electricity at a premium rate that the government offers
to power plants with low emissions. Regulators caught the company. Twice.
Beijing is downwind of
Datong, and coal-fired power plants like Huadian’s are just one of the culprits
for the extreme bout of air pollution here over the winter, when the city’s
air-quality index went off the charts that regulators use elsewhere. At a level
of 755, U.S. Embassy readings in mid-January were more than twice what
the Environmental Protection Agency calls so “hazardous” that people should avoid going
outdoors.
The severity of the
pollution — extreme even by Chinese standards — has rattled Chinese leaders.
While they have, on occasion, closed factories and restricted traffic to clear
the air for special events such as the 2008 Olympics, so far they have lacked the
will or the capacity to reduce air pollution on a sustained basis.
But as people rushed to
buy air filters and flooded China’s Web sites with comments such as
“horrifying,” the state-run People’s Daily in a front page editorial Jan. 14
said, “the fog and haze obscured our line of sight, but it made us see the
urgency of controlling environmental pollution.”
Chinese officials
recently told World Bank President Jim Yong Kim that Beijing’s winter air
crisis had “really changed the public discussion” about climate change and
pollution.
“In China, I sat down
and not five minutes into my conversation with Premier Li Keqiang, he said, ‘We
want to work with you on urbanization,’ ” Kim said in an interview. “We are
working day and night with a huge team to come up with a plan to come up with clean,
liveable cities. The Chinese want to do it. . . . This is a huge issue with
them.”
But while the
government has vowed to step up enforcement of existing regulations, clamping
down on polluters is a difficult task. Maximum fines are minimal, and evasion
is rampant. In this respect, China’s command and control economy has more
commands than control.
The war on air
pollution is being waged on three fronts: policing big coal and industrial
plants like Huadian’s, enforcing standards on thousands of small boilers and
dealing with the rapidly growing fleet of cars and trucks, which emit the small
particles most harmful to human health.
As China’s economy
booms, so do electricity needs. Zhou Xizhou, director of the energy consulting
firm IHS CERA in China, estimates that the rate of coal plant construction has
slowed from about two a week to a still-daunting one a week — and will keep
that pace for another five or six years. That’s roughly equal to adding the coal-fired capacity of Texas and West Virginia combined every year. Coal’s share
of China’s new power generation has dropped, but it still generates about
three-quarters of the country’s electricity.
Some experts say that
China’s pollution problems could be reduced with regulations and equipment
already in place. “Eighty percent of the coal-fired units in the country have
sulfur scrubbers,” Zhou said. “Whether people run them is another question.”
An episode last year
illustrates Zhou’s point. Like the Huadian example, this one is on the Web site
of the Institute of Public and
Environmental Affairs, which has compiled data on more than 4,000 firms,
including 800 of the country’s biggest polluters.
In February 2012, a big
electric power generator, Huaneng, switched off coal scrubbers at its Pingliang
power complex in Gansu, and let emissions soar past permitted levels on at
least two days. Because Huaneng was a repeat offender, irritated regulators
imposed an especially severe fine of about $13,000. Given the energy saved by
not running the scrubbers, Huaneng was probably saving more money than that
every day. In November, the same plant was caught violating emissions standards
again and fined again.
Small boilers
are a problem
Small boilers used to
power or heat urban buildings pose similar problems, but are harder to monitor.
The pollution spike
last winter galvanized many government agencies. Starting Jan. 28, Beijing’s
Environmental Protection Bureau fined a property developer three times in less
than a month to force it to put anti-pollution equipment on boilers being used
to heat 80,000 homes.
The developer, Beijing
Dalong, is owned by the city’s Shunyi district government, which has $1.6
billion in assets. But the company had failed to install or use equipment to
capture potent pollutants that were spewing from its coal-fired boiler.
There are thousands of
boilers in Beijing like the Shunyi boilers, according to Zhou, and monitoring
them all is a nearly impossible task. And, as the Shunyi case shows, government
regulators are facing a host of recalcitrant companies, many of them owned by
or in cahoots with local governments.
Proliferation
of automobiles
The proliferation of
cars is also fouling China’s cities. Yale Zhang, managing director of
consulting firm Automotive Foresight, predicts that the number of vehicles per
thousand people could quadruple over the next two decades.
Fuel efficiency could
be higher, but so could the quality of gasoline. China’s refineries have not
invested enough to meet government standards for cleaner fuels. On April 25, a
government inspection board released the results of a spot check: Fifteen of
120 gasoline samples and five out of 60 diesel samples in 13 provinces failed
to meet standards for sulfur, benzene or other contaminants. By some estimates,
China’s gasoline contains around 20 times the U.S. limits on air pollutants.
China’s refineries have
complained that they don’t have the money to invest because they have been
importing crude oil at world prices and selling refined products at
state-controlled prices. Sinopec, the world’s second largest refiner, recently reported $1.8 billion in operating
losses from its refining
division in 2012.
Recently, the
government raised retail gasoline prices and ordered refiners to make upgrades.
But for years, says Fred Zuliu Hu, chairman of the investment firm Primavera
Capital Group, “the government took a lax attitude and turned a blind eye
because its own policy made reform fundamentally unprofitable.”
Even now, China’s
government is entwined with state-owned behemoths that it has trouble
regulating or punishing. Chinese oil industry officials dominate the boards
that set fuel standards. A key standard-setting technical committee on
petroleum products falls under the research institute of Sinopec, which owns
nearly half of China’s refineries. Of the committee’s 37 members, only two have
backgrounds in environmental protection. According to China Chemical Industry
News, 90 percent are from the oil industry.
Not surprisingly, the
national boards have not set a strict nationwide standard. Beijing has adopted
the most stringent European standard, limiting sulfur emissions to 10 parts per
million. Shanghai, the Pearl River delta, and Jiangsu limit emissions to
50 parts per million. But the most common standard in the rest of China limits
sulfur emission to 150 parts per million — five times the
U.S. limit.
Ma Jun, director of the
Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing, says the only way to
bring about change in the highly polluting energy and industrial sector is for
groups such as his to publish violations and galvanize customers, neighbors and
others to bring pressure for change.
“We need stakeholders
to come together,” he said. “We cannot rely simply on the government agencies.”
Liu Liu, Zhang Jie and
Howard Schneider contributed to this report.