Environmental Issues in China

1
Environmental Issues in China
2
Major Problems China is Facing

• Population
• Energy use
• Food Production
• Water Pollution, shortages.
• Coal Pollution
• Air Pollution

3

• Well discuss
• Energy, growing society
• Food production, water shortages, feeding China
• Population as it relates to all of these problems
• Dr. Bray will cover
• Air pollution
• Water pollution
• Deforestation
• Other issues

4
In reality

• No country in history has emerged as a major
  industrial power without creating a legacy of
  environmental damagewhich can then take decades
  and lots of public concern to be addressed.
• It was the case for the U.S., European countries,
  and other MDCs. In the U.S., environmentalism and
  environmental laws came about in order to deal
  with the big mess we created in the first place
  (water, air, and land pollution).
• So, whats the big deal if China is now doing
  the same?
• Scale pollution affects
• millions of people. Pop. size
• Everyone is watching
• Global problems
• (i.e., global warming)

5
Some issues

• China is doing what the U.S. and European nations
  diddeveloping, demanding vehicles, using more
  energy, and consuming and polluting accordingly.
• In China, the difference between the rich a poor
  is tremendousmuch of the country is still faced
  with LDCs problems such as poor water quality,
  malaria, malnutrition. Yet the affluent are
  purchasing more than one vehicle, consuming more
  meat, and mimicking the EU and U.S.
• China has surpassed the U.S. as the largest green
  house gases emitter. This was not predicted until
  2010
• Coal is the major culprit, and provides about
  two-thirds of Chinas energy needs. China has
  abundant supplies and already burns more coal
  than the United States, Europe and Japan
  combined.
• Now McDonalds have drive-thrus in major cities
  what will that do to air pollution, water,
  agriculture, and overall health of population?

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Cheap Energy good energy?

• Electricity is the fastest- growing part of
  Chinas energy demand
• Growth of electricity is projected to continue at
  no less than 7 through the year 2000 and beyond
• Chinas total electrical generating capacity has
  to double every decade to keep pace
• There are plans to build thirty to sixty new
  electricity power plants every year for the
  foreseeable future
• 75 of these plants will be coal- fired, most of
  the rest are nuclear

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Cheap Energygood energy?

• Coal reserves are enormous. For China, this is
  important because it can develop without relying
  on foreign countries to supply energy needs.
• Overall, it is not a clean source and the
  environmental and health impacts are great.
• Last year, China burned the energy equivalent of
  2.7 billion tons of coal, three-quarters of what
  the experts had said would be the maximum
  required in 2020. To put it another way, China
  now seems likely to need as much energy in 2010
  as it thought it would need in 2020 under the
  most pessimistic assumptions.
• The ravenous appetite for fossil fuels traces
  partly to an economic stimulus program in 1997.
  The leadership, worried that Chinas economy
  would fall into a steep recession as its East
  Asian neighbors had, provided generous state
  financing and tax incentives to support
  industrialization on a grand scale.

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Cheap Energy good energy?

• Are they mining efficiency?
• Chinese buildings rarely have thermal insulation.
  On average, twice as much energy is used to heat
  and cool as those in similar climates in the
  United States and Europe. A vast majority of new
  buildings 95 percent do not meet Chinas own
  codes for energy efficiency.
• New buildings require China to build power
  plants, which it has been doing prodigiously. In
  2005 alone, China added 66 gigawatts of
  electricity to its power grid, about as much
  power as Britain generates in a year. Last year,
  it added an additional 102 gigawatts, as much as
  France.
• Coal-fired plants are quick and cheap to build
  and easy to run. While the Chinese government has
  set goals for increasing the use of a long list
  of alternative energies including wind,
  biomass, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear they
  all face obstacles, from bureaucracy to
  bottlenecks in manufacturing.
• The problem is particularly acute because
  governments across Asia, from China and India to
  Indonesia and the Philippines, are turning mainly
  to coal to meet their soaring electricity needs
  and prevent blackouts, even though coal produces
  more global warming gases than any other major
  source of electricity.

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Solutions?

• Plans have slowed to expand the use of natural
  gas, which burns more cleanly and produces less
  greenhouse gas than coal or oil. It has proved
  costly and difficult to build pipelines .
• The future of hydroelectric power in China is
  clouded by severe environmental problems at the
  Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.
• One of the strangest features of Chinas energy
  policy is the paucity of environmental controls
  on coal-fired plants, because rules governing
  them were written long ago. Renewable energy
  projects actually face a more stringent review of
  their environmental impact.

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Solutions?

• Move factories outside of the city centers. NIMBY
  issues
• Wash the coal that factories and power plants use
  before burning it. Clean coal technology however
  the amount of CO2 released is the same
• Install sulfur dioxide scrubbers in power
  plants.
• Install electrostatic precipitators to remove
  small cancer causing particles from coal smoke.
  Particulates create health problems locally and
  globally.
• Improve efficiency so less coal is burned.

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Obstacles to solutions

• Chinas yearning for economic growth
• We must reduce the health affects of coal
  burning while we increase the production of
  coal.
• The government only directs 6 to 10 of its
  energy budget to efficiency
• Some people in China assume the market will take
  care of everything.

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Politics in China

• Authoritarian government makes it hard to shift
  into environmental action.
• The focus is on growth. There is concern about
  health and the environment there are some
  targets for cleaner air and water, however it is
  still inexpensive for industry to pollute and
  there are no tax or market-oriented policies in
  place that help discourage pollution.
• There is corruption, and if a coal mine is shut
  down, it often reopens thanks to officials
  looking to profit.
• China does not want to stop growing its economy
  and argues that the boom is in part due to demand
  for cheap products from countries like the U.S.
• Therefore the argument is that environmental
  problems are not their own doing, but that of
  MNCs opting to operate in China. The pollution
  remains local, but the good and profits are
  shipped elsewhere.
• Chinas position is that the U.S. and Britain
  polluted their way to the top, and caused global
  warming. Industrialized countries only worried
  about environmental problems when they were
  wealthy enough to do something about themnot ye
  the case for China.

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Water and Food Production

• 60,000 people a year die from diarrhea, bladder
  and stomach cancer, and other diseases caused by
  water-borne pollution. China suffers more deaths
  from water pollutants than from coal mine and
  vehicle accidents combined.
• Compared with the United States, China has 1/5
  the water supply, but almost 5 times as many
  people. China has about 7 percent of the worlds
  water resources and roughly 20 percent of its
  population.
• It also has a severe regional water imbalance.
  About 4/5 of the water is in the South, while ½
  the population lives in the North. Northern
  parts of China are under such water stress that
  there is a threat of it becoming the worlds
  biggest desert.

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Water and Food Production

• Farmers in the north once used shovels to dig
  their wells. Now, many aquifers have been so
  depleted that some wells in Beijing and Hebei
  must extend more than half a mile before they
  reach fresh water.
• Industry and agriculture use nearly all of the
  flow of the Yellow River, before it reaches the
  Bohai Sea.
• About 5/6 of the wetlands have dried up,
  according to one study. Scientists say that most
  natural streams or creeks have disappeared.
  Several rivers that once were navigable are now
  mostly dust and brush.

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Addressing the problem?

• Chinese leaders have undertaken one of the most
  ambitious engineering projects in world history,
  a 60 billion network of canals, rivers and lakes
  to transport water from the flood-prone Yangtze
  River to the silt-choked Yellow River. But that
  effort, if successful, will still leave the north
  chronically thirsty.
• But water remains inexpensive. Chinese industry
  uses 4 to 10 times more water per unit of
  production than the average in industrialized
  nations, according to the World Bank.
• In many parts of China, factories and farms dump
  waste into surface water with few repercussions.
  Chinas environmental monitors say that one-third
  of all river water and lakes are not even good
  enough for industrial or agricultural use.

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If there is no waterwho will feed China?

• China has lost some forty million hectares of
  arable land since the late 1950s. This amounts
  to nearly one- third of all the land currently
  under cultivation.
• If China were to rely heavily on irrigation, then
  it should be able to feed between 1.3 and 2.0
  billion people. But things are drying up

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Grain Consumption

• A dietary shift towards more meat would increase
  Chinas total grain demand.
• This places more pressure on existing
  agricultural land, water supply, and
  pollutionkeep in mind, its about feeding 1.3
  billion people, not a small town.

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Food Shortages

• The future gap between supply and demand in China
  will be closed only by importing food.
• It is estimated that China would need to import
  175 billion tons of grain by the year 2025
• The current level of global grain exports is 200
  billion tons
• The global community may not be able to supply
  the amount of grain that China will need in the
  future

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Threats to Sustainable Agriculture

• Long term collective investments have declined in
  rural China
• Get rich quick and every peasant for himself.
  Peasants cannot afford to use organic fertilizer
  anymore, they intensify production and aim for
  immediate returns.
• Typically this results in more water needed,
  greater soil degradation, and overall future
  diminished cropsvicious cycle.
• In twenty years when they may need it most, the
  water and soil will have been poisoned beyond
  repair.

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Mitigating the Food Crisis

• China has limited the loss of arable land,
  reclaimed idle land, and increased crop yields
• Better seeds, irrigation, and other technical
  improvements
• The government now insists on maintaining 95
  self- sufficiency in grain production
• Implement more real prices for water to
  discourage waste

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Sound Familiar?

• In 1963, a flood paralyzed the Northern region,
  prompting construction of a flood-control system
  of dams, reservoirs and concrete spillways. Flood
  control improved but the ecological balance was
  altered as the dams began choking off rivers that
  once flowed eastward into the North China Plain.
• The new reservoirs gradually became major water
  suppliers for growing cities like Shijiazhuang.
  Farmers, the regions biggest water users, began
  depending almost exclusively on wells. Rainfall
  steadily declined in what some scientists now
  believe is a consequence of climate change.
• Before, farmers had compensated for the regions
  limited annual rainfall by planting only three
  crops every two years. But underground water
  seemed limitless and government policies pushed
  for higher production, so farmers began planting
  a second annual crop, usually winter wheat, which
  requires a lot of water.

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Sound Familiar?

• The rising water demands in the North China Plain
  make it unfeasible for farmers to continue
  planting a winter crop. The international
  ramifications would be significant if China
  became an ever bigger customer on world grain
  markets. Some analysts have long warned that
  grain prices could steadily rise, contributing to
  inflation and making it harder for other
  developing countries to buy food.
• Scientists say converting farmland into urban
  areas would save enough water to stop the drop in
  the water table, if not reverse it, because
  widespread farming still uses more water than
  urban areas. Of course, large-scale urbanization,
  already under way, could worsen air quality
  Shijiazhuangs air already ranks among the worst
  in China because of heavy industrial pollution.
• Keep in mind that around 1900, Shijiazhuang was a
  collection of farming villages. By 1950, the
  population had reached 335,000. This year, the
  city has roughly 2.3 million people with a
  metropolitan area population of 9 million.

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Is there a right answer?

• Population will keep growing, and growing, and
  growingthough it may stabilize, it is still a
  lot of people trying to own a car.
• China simply wants to develop to end poverty and
  feed its people. The goal of developing countries
  is to become developed.
• With such a growing economy, can you blame them
  for enjoying McDonalds and not worrying about
  where the meat comes from and what that means for
  the environment?
• These issues are relevant because most of the
  worlds population falls under a similar category
  as China. They are on the verge or in the middle
  of economic growth, with large populations, and
  cheap and dirty energy is the most readily
  available means for development.