The New York Times Looks at the Cost of China's Single Minded Focus on Economic Growth
In a series of articles published between August 26th and December 29th of last year, the New York Times has examined the epic pollution crisis facing China and, increasingly the rest of the world, as a result of the country's phenomenal growth over the past two decades.
The series includes 10 articles accompanied by multi-media presentations that illustrate the discussions. Three of the articles are of particular note from an energy and energy investment perspective, including:
The series overview, looks at the scale of the pollution that has resulted from the country's unprecedented economic growth.
"... just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut."
It highlights the fact that the problem is not just the result of growth, but how that growth has been achieved.
"Its energy needs are compounded because even some of its newest heavy industry plants do not operate as efficiently, or control pollution as effectively, as factories in other parts of the world, a recent World Bank report said.
Chinese steel makers, on average, use one-fifth more energy per ton than the international average. Cement manufacturers need 45 percent more power, and ethylene producers need 70 percent more than producers elsewhere, the World Bank says.
China’s aluminum industry alone consumes as much energy as the country’s commercial sector — all the hotels, restaurants, banks and shopping malls combined, Mr. Rosen and Mr. Houser reported.
Moreover, the boom is not limited to heavy industry. Each year for the past few years, China has built about 7.5 billion square feet of commercial and residential space, more than the combined floor space of all the malls and strip malls in the United States, according to data collected by the United States Energy Information Administration.
Chinese buildings rarely have thermal insulation. They require, on average, twice as much energy to heat and cool as those in similar climates in the United States and Europe, according to the World Bank. A vast majority of new buildings — 95 percent, the bank says — do not meet China’s own codes for energy efficiency.
All these 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.
That increase has come almost entirely from small- and medium-size coal-fired power plants that were built quickly and inexpensively. Only a few of them use modern, combined-cycle turbines, which increase efficiency, said Noureddine Berrah, an energy expert at the World Bank. He said Beijing had so far declined to use the most advanced type of combined-cycle turbines despite having completed a successful pilot project nearly a decade ago."
And that the scale of the pollution problem is ensuring that it is not just China's.
"China's problem has become the world's problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China's coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China."
Far From Beijing's Reach ...., examines the failure of the governement's campaign to increase energy efficiency and install cleaner energy sources, as provincial officials continue to promote growth above all else.
China Grabs West's Smoke Spewing Factories, highlights the kinship between two steel towns, Dortmund, in the Ruhr Valley, that sold its mothballed steel making facilities and Handan in China, which purchased them. And it illustrates the costs of transfering industrial production from Europe, Japan and North America to China.
While the shift has fueled the latter country's growth, in the case of the steel industry, this transfer has often included the sale and transfer of the West's mothballed, second-hand (antiquitated???) production facilities, which have moved from a regulated environment that constrained emissions and environmental damage to to one that is largely unregulated.
"In its rush to re-create the industrial revolution that made the West rich, China has absorbed most of the major industries that once made the West dirty. Spurred by strong state support, Chinese companies have become the dominant makers of steel, coke, aluminum, cement, chemicals, leather, paper and other goods that faced high costs, including tougher environmental rules, in other parts of the world. China has become the world’s factory, but also its smokestack.
This mass shift of polluting industries has blighted China’s economic rise. Double-digit growth rates have done less to improve people’s lives when the damages to the air, land, water and human health are considered, some economists say. Outmoded production equipment will have to be replaced or retrofitted at high cost if the country intends to reduce pollution.
China’s worsening environment has also upended the geopolitics of global warming. It produces and exports so many goods once made in the West that many wealthy countries can boast of declining carbon emissions, even while the world’s overall emissions are rising quickly."
The writers cite the International Energy Agency's estimate that up to one-third of China's emissions relate to production of industrial goods for export and a Carnegie-Mellon University study that suggests that if the U.S. had to include the emissions associated with the products it imports from China in its inventory, its greenhouse gas emissions would be 30% higher than they currently are.
Overall, the series points out the costs of China's single-minded focus on GDP growth and how in this factory to the world, these costs are increasingly becoming a global problem rather than just China's problem.
The problems that are illustrated also point out the scale of new, sustainable energy development needed in the world today, both in China and in the rest of the world as it must cope with the avalanche of environmental problems rolling out of China in its rush to become an industrial superpower.
The index to the series can be found here, together with the balance of the articles and multi-media presentations.
