Coal in China: Am i missing something?

I`m looking at coal in China. Perticularly at potential inernational responses and the widely different solution of carbon caputre and storage and a mixed renewables/combined heat and power infrastrucuture. There are many issues but cost and speed are the overriding ones.

What do you think of the plan so far?
http://coalinchina.pbwiki.com/Coal+in+China

I have 3 sections, each with around 5 parts, i have started to break down each of these parts into facts i need to research and i have a series of tables for my references.

As i was emailed my someone at IGES i will also point out that they have published a new white paper as an update on there 2005 work ‘asian perspectives on climate change’. I will be reading both the 2005 and 2008 white papers as background for this bit of work i`m doing. IGES are one of the few asian centred energy/climate specialists that i know about…perticularly if we are talking freely accessible work in english.

Chinas emissions…only 2/3rds theres.

A very interesting piece of work on China’s emissions…

Exports are now responsible for one-third of China’s emissions, according to a study that will appear in the journal Energy Policy. The researchers describe their analysis as the most systematic study of the subject to date.

It must be said however that historic emissions are the real locus where the Developed Worlds’ and Chinas’ climate responsibilities intersect.

China set to lead the world in wind power.

It’s nice to see that the US and Europe are being joined by a third renewable energy super power.

According to projections at Renewable Energy World, China is going to be a world leader in wind power by next year!

China steps it up on environmental protection.

In this statement, highlighted by the Worldwatch Institute (and translated by Google)  it looks like that the Chinese State Environmental Protection Agency sees the challenge ahead.

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Pan Yue, deputy director of State Administration of Environmental Protection

“The introduction of economic policy environment can not wait! We should release several policies within one year, set up major pilot projects within two years, and create a fundamental framework for an environmental economic system in China within four years..”

The State Environmental Protection Administration Pan Yue, deputy director in the 9th Twelfth “Green China Forum” that outlined China’s economic policy environment timetable. Forum on Pan proposed for the first time a new environment of economic policy framework and the road map, and called on the macroeconomic sector and professional sectors together environmental and economic policy research pilot.

Pan said that the economic policy environment system is the most effective solutions to environmental problems, the best way of a long-term mechanism is an important component of macroeconomic measures part is implementing the scientific concept of development and system support.

Economic policy environment is in accordance with the laws of market economy, adopt a price, taxation, financial, credit, fees, insurance and other economic means to influence the market behavior of the main policy instruments.

Pan’s economic policy environment will be divided into seven areas:

• First, the green tax. To the development, conservation, the use of environmental resources of taxpayers units and individuals, according to the environmental resource development and use, pollution, destruction and the extent of protection levy or relief, the implementation of environment-friendly behavior tax preferential policies on the environment unfriendly act , and establish a basis for the amount of pollution emitted by the direct pollution taxes, indirect pollution based on the products of environmental taxes.
• Second, environmental charges. Raising the level of charges, in the resource price reform to take full account of environmental factors, pricing and fees to promote energy-saving reduction.
• Third, it is green capital markets. In the indirect financing channels, the implementation of “green loan” of the environment-friendly enterprises or institutions providing loans to support and implement preferential interest rates on the new projects of the enterprises in investment and liquidity lending limits and the implementation of punitive high interest rates in the direct financing channels on a set of “two high” enterprises, including the initial capital market access restrictions, limitations and the follow-up funds from the stock market and other punitive content of audit monitoring system. (a good idea which i haven’t heard much about here in the UK or in the US)
• Fourth, it is ecological compensation. This policy is not just an environmental and economic needs, but also political and strategic needs. It is necessary to improve the developed areas of less developed regions, urban to rural, affluent crowd on the poor, on the lower reaches of the upper reaches, beneficiaries of the injured party, the “two high” industries of environmental protection industries to the financial transfer payment methods ecological compensation policy . (translation not good enough for me…perhaps reperation in rural areas for resources required in cities? An attempt at stabilising social tensions using the logic  of environmental rights?)
  
• Fifth, it is trading. The use of market forces to achieve environmental protection objectives and optimize the environmental capacity of the allocation of resources, reduce the total cost of pollution control, and mobilize the enthusiasm of polluters to prevent water pollution. (water qaility credits in a market system, i believe the US currently uses this kind
• of mechanism for water qaulity)
• Sixth, green trade. For the developed countries more and more green trade barriers, China must change the simple pursuit of volume growth to the neglect of environmental capacity and resource constraints of the development model, the import and export trade and balance the interests of environmental protection at home and abroad.
• Seventh, Green insurance. Environmental liability insurance which most representative, on the one hand, by insurance companies and unforeseen pollution compensation to the victims of the government and enterprises to reduce the pressure on the one hand and enhance the market mechanism to force the supervision of enterprises sewage. (I believe that this is a requirement for environmental insurance, insurance on a large scale is often only obtanable on the conditions of an insurance company such as monitoring and independent assesment of pollution risks, this gives central govornment a way to introduce monitoring of business on business)

Pan said that any one sector and macroeconomic environment with the professional competence to lead the departments are willing to implement economic policy environment, Environmental Protection Agency will meet to be willing to do supporting roles.

Yangtze – a polluted lifeless trickle?

The Yangtze may be slowing to a heavily polluted, lifeless trickle, but as long as we can still get plastic novelties and cheap fashion items courtesy of a booming Chinese economy, all’s right with the world.

Clean Development and Coal : Boosting Health by Fighting Coal

The Worldwatch Institute have just released ‘Powering China’s Development‘, a report on Chinas renewable energy status and policy environment.

Here are two issues from the books introduction:
1. Coal and Health as a national emergency
2. Coal as a global emergency.

1. Earlier in the year a world bank report was not released because the Chinese govornment felt it would build social unrest. What did it say? More that 400’000 people a year are dying prematurely due to air pollution. As >70% of Chinas primary energy (c.f. 20% in the US) comes from coal most of these deaths are due to old fossil fool (sic) technology. Clean development is therefore attractive from both local and global perspectives. In cold economic terms, ill health and environmental degredation are placing strain on the economy. It is estimated that just one percent of all Chinese urban dwellers breathe air within EU permissible standards!

2. The Chinese government have many problems in the area of sustainability. In the area of Energy however, things are rather one dimensional. The question is one of coal. How can the exponential growth in coal powered fire plants be limited or the effects ameliorated? First the good news. The Chinese government released a report in June 2007 stating categorically that climate change was a great threat to the nation, and the worlds, development. Perhaps a couple of years ago this wouldn’t have happend in the US and China are at the car ownership levels of the US when the Model T Ford was on forecourts! The debate is advanced for the nations state of development. This is reflected by the fact that central government has ordered vast closures of small inefficient coal fired power plants which are being replace with larger more efficient ones: would the US government, or European governments do this?

The bad news is that during 2006 China built 101GW or 101,000MW of power plants (mainly coal). That is more grid capacity than the whole of France! Equivalent to more than two 600MW coal fired power plants per week.

Which leads to my conclusion: we don’t have enough wind, solar, biomass capacity in the world to replace this much incremental installed capacity if we wanted to. It cannot go on: we need carbon capture and storage to be rolled out. A global top priority for governments and NGO’s must be to make sure that all new coal is CCS enabled and as efficient as possible.

We have a global carbon budget, if China continues building Coal power plants then to meet that budget it will have to decommission them again. This would be an economic nonsense. I can’t stress strongly enough how badly the developed nations are failing in allowing this to happen. Funding, technology transfer and a real commitment to anything but coal without CCS must be international priorities and must receive funding commensurate with the global scale of the challenge.

China and Climate Change: Policies and Measures

Clearly with a booming economy and a population of 1200 million people much depends on China’s approach to the challenge of climate change.

The Climate Group have started a bi-monthly publication looking at Chinese policy. The first report is here the second here and they are updated to this website.

All Climate Change Action posts on China can be found here.

Climate Change and Rice

Rice is the staple diet for 40% of the worlds population. Effects of climate change on rice are therefore of great significance.

As with all outcomes from climate models when we are looking at precipitation, temperature, and other factors, along with non-climatic factors the conclusions are not definitive or precise. However, the heterogeneity of the situation is significant of itself, and indeed is perhaps the most important aspect of the models. With more than 2-3 degrees warming all the trends are negative and the yields of many crops in many areas are declining, before that point there are a lot of areas making gains, and a lot loosing out. This is not a situation that farmers are going to easily adapt to and large scale migrations from one area to another will be significant without the yield necessarily decreasing.

Unfortuntely areas of Africa are amongst the hardest hit in Tyndall Centre projections:

• Between 0.9 and 1.4°C above 1990, poor farmers income declines globally (Hare 2003). This information may not show in model results for countries whose farmers have a range of incomes.
• Even if there are no overall impacts on the yield of a crop within a country as a whole, this picture can mask a large amount of local variation. For example, in Venezuela where a global temperature rise of 1.4-1.7°C has been predicted to decrease maize yields by 10-15%, 15% decrease maize yield (Gitay . 2001); adaptation could offset 10% of this but it hides huge local variation (Jones &Thornton 2003.

The results are more mixed in China.

Relevant Documents:
Introduction to Rice and Climate Change (effects on rice and contribution by rice farming)
Climate Change and Impacts on Grain in China
Feeding Billions, A Grain at a Time (WSJ, Article)
Least Developed Countries and Climate Change.(IIED)
*Understanding the Regional Effects of Climate Change (Tyndall Centre)

Urban Management In Asia: Recommended Reading

My interest for the last week or two has been urban planning and sustainable transport. Well, to be honest it was sustainable transport and has broadened out into planning.

In particular i have been reading about bus rapid transit, cycle cities, suburban sprawl, transport and health etc., I have been reading about cases from all over the world but i thought i would be nice to look at what is (or could be) happening is Asia.

The institute for global environmental stratgegies (IGES) has done pioneering research on post-2012 priorities for Asian nations. It does, however, get a touch less theoretical.

There are a great series of report/articles/papers on climate change and urban development on this page. Including entire books for free download!

A few highlights:

‘Air pollution control in the transport sector‘ is a publication most interesting to me for its case studies, which i ususally find to be far more interesting than discussion in the abstract. Atleast for an amateur it is easy to understand the issues through comparison.

The fourth chapter consists of six case studies and one comparative analysis on policies related to transport and environment in Asian cities.

‘Urban Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Asian Mega-Cities‘ is a lot broader than transport policy however it maintains the comparative approach and takes care to analyse the data. If you can see the numbers then there is a good chance you can realistically appraise the issues for yourself. As with many issues related to climate change good data is really the start.

[the report] aims to quantify CO2 emissions from energy use and analyse their driving factors for selected Asian Mega-Cities-Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai.

China Climate Plan (English Translation At Last)

The pew centre for global climate change has just started a China page.

The first item to be posted is the first Chineese climate plan, when this came out earlier in the year i couldn’t find an english translation. Well, here it is.

China’s First Climate Change Plan (PDF)

China Releases New Climate Change Plan

On June 4, 2007, China released its first national climate change plan. Prepared by China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the plan outlines China’s strategy for addressing climate change through national programs aimed at mitigation, adaptation, science and technology research, and increasing public awareness.

Information on China and climate change is not the easiest thing in the world to come across but one good site for keeping up with the debate is ChinaDialogue a great site, which, due to it’s team of transltors, allows you to leave comments that are then translated…also all the articles are in both english and chinese.