China to make industry pay for pollution

The Australian
Rowan Callick, China correspondent
August 04, 2006

CHINA will order industry to pay for the right to discharge noxious sulphur dioxide in a market-driven attempt to tackle its chronic air pollution problem. Under a plan to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions by 10 per cent, China, which leads the world in air pollution as well as driving economic growth, will also introduce emission trading deals.

The World Bank says 16 of the world's most polluted cities are in China, and that 400,000 people a year die from related illnesses.

Department of Pollution Control director-general Li Xinmin said yesterday that sulphur dioxide emissions rose 27 per cent in the five years to the end of last year, during which the country's coal consumption - the main culprit - grew by more than 800million tonnes.

He said restricting the sulphur dioxide rise to 27 per cent was an achievement, given soaring coal-fired power generation.

"That means it's still under effective control," he said. "Without restrictive measures it would have been much worse.

"Coal accounts for 70 per cent of China's energy consumption. This fact is hard to change in the short term." Half of the coal is used to generate power.

But overall, he said, during 2000-05, 22 per cent more cities brought their air quality up to a required national standard, while the number with unacceptable air quality fell by 24 per cent.

Last year, 357 out of 696 cities being monitored were found to have acid rain.

Mr Li said that during the new five-year plan that had just started, the Government was seeking an ambitious 10 per cent fall in sulphur dioxide emissions.

He said the State Environmental Protection Administration would tackle this task through pilot projects on selling emission rights and establishing emission trading, through technological change - including installing desulfurisation units in coal power plants - and through publishing more often and more publicly the names of enterprises that meet pollution targets and those that do not.

The Government would also introduce tougher vehicle emission standards and phase out the vehicles that failed to meet them.

In Beijing alone, he said, the city authorities were planning to take 300,000 unacceptable cars off the roads by the end of next year - in time to help ensure the tough target of a clean, green Olympic Games in August 2008.

Mr Li said this push to remove polluting vehicles, plus measures to improve fuel quality, was the 12th stage of Beijing's Olympics-driven environmental program. The other 11 stages, he said, had each cost up to $16 billion.

He said that by 2008 all heavy industry, led by Capital Steel Company, would be moved out of Beijing, and that the boilers in the heart of the city would be converted from coal to liquefied petroleum gas. Beijing Chemical Works has been closed down.

In surrounding provinces, 185 businesses that failed to comply with environmental standards were shut down last year, he said.

Partly as a result, Beijing had met its target of 63per cent of the days in 2005 meeting national air quality standards.

Mr Li said that "after years of stable and rapid growth", the Government was now shifting to a more balanced strategy "to optimise growth by environmental measures. Faced by such rapid growth, we are strengthening our supervision".

He said a claim published yesterday that almost 25 per cent of Los Angeles's air pollution came from China was "not trustworthy because such findings don't have a solid scientific basis".