China clears the way for Kyoto trade
February 15, 2005
Greenhouse gas reduction is about to boost the country's global status, writes Hamish McDonald.
South of Beijing an unusual hill rises out of the flat landscape of fallow fields and drab brick villages: a mountain of garbage, built by a steady stream of big blue compactor trucks delivering the solid waste of a city of 13 million people.
What is somewhat bizarrely called the "landfill" at Anding is actually the cutting edge of China's emerging contribution to preventing global warming by curbing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The project is the first approved in China for the emerging trade in carbon emission savings among developing countries and the advanced economies that have committed themselves to emission reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, which comes into effect tomorrow. Credits for greenhouse gas captured at Anding will be sold, probably in the Netherlands.
Big gas pipes with valves and meters stick out of the mountain, while concrete gutters channel liquids oozing from its mouldering core. Methane collected by the gas pipes is burned to evaporate the toxic "leachate" fluids channelled from the base of the garbage deposit, leaving a solid sludge that can be added to the landfill without finding its way to the underground watertables.
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The system was installed by a garbage contractor, Er Qing, in partnership with Dutch company Energy Systems International, one of a growing number of traders in the new carbon emissions trade underpinned by the Kyoto treaty's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) - an activity that meets deep suspicion among non-government environmentalists.
Methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases. Each tonne is equivalent to 21 times as much carbon dioxide. The two partners at Anding earn the equivalent of 800,000 tonnes of CO2 savings each year, which can be sold to Western or Japanese companies or governments needing to cut emissions for a price starting at $US1 a tonne. Beijing gets a cleaner garbage dump at a price subsidised by the buyer in the Netherlands.
Several other projects are in the process of approval for CDM trading, including a methane capture system in a big Shanxi coal mine, a wind farm in Inner Mongolia, a hydro-electric dam, and waste-heat capture systems in cement works and other industries.
Similar carbon-trading swaps have long been in preparation across many other developing countries that, like China, were not required to commit to emission reductions in the first round of the Kyoto process.
Some are truly inventive, such as a cattle feed developed by an Australian scientist to reduce the methane-rich belches of India's holy cows and other ruminants.
The Kyoto Protocol binds about 40 developed countries among its 128 signatories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.5 per cent from the emission level of 1990. The US and Australia are the two main holdouts among the rich countries.
Greenhouse gas activities in countries such as China belie the widespread belief among Western conservatives opposed to Kyoto that the Third World is set on polluting its way to prosperity, while the existing rich countries - beset with slow growth and high unemployment - have to take sacrificial cuts to economic activity.
Although its per capita energy consumption is only a fifth that of the score of rich OECD countries such as Australia, China knows all about air pollution. About 11 per cent of China is affected by acid rain, caused by the 1.9 billion tonnes of coal produced and burnt last year.
In 1997 the World Bank reported that 178,000 premature deaths were caused each year in China by low air quality. Another 110,000 early deaths were caused by indoor pollution from cooking and heating fires. With 346,000 hospital admissions and 6.8 million outpatient visits from respiratory ailments, the cost was put at $US43 billion ($54.8 billion) a year.
China is starting to learn about global warming, too. In November, a team of Chinese and US scientists reported an alarming acceleration in the shrinkage of the great glaciers of the Tibetan plateau, the source of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, as well as the big rivers of South-East and South Asia.
"Awareness is growing," says Professor Liu Deshun, a climate change expert at Beijing's Tsinghua University, who belongs to an international panel advising the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on global warming. "But it's still not enough."
As trends stand, air quality and emission of greenhouse gases are set to worsen, with coal production set to exceed 2 billion tonnes this year. Oil imports rose by more than 35 per cent last year. China is expected to produce almost 6 million vehicles this year to become the third biggest car producer after the US and Japan.
By 2020 China is expected to reach the ranks of today's moderately developed countries, such as Malaysia or Thailand, in per capita income. It will use three times as much energy as now, and will have 140 million vehicles on its roads, seven times as many as now. By then China will overtake the US as the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter.
China and other big developing countries are not due to accept reductions in Kyoto's second round until 2012. But Beijing is already moving to limit emissions. After some hesitation, China has embraced the CDM as a way of getting foreign countries to subsidise new clean technologies. But critics such as Greenpeace worry that rich countries will cherry-pick the easier and cheaper opportunities for emission savings in places like China, leaving them with much harder options when their own reduction commitments kick in after the Kyoto second round.
Projects such as Anding reduce greenhouse emissions, accepts Greenpeace International's Ben Pearson in Sydney. "But as a result of that, Dutch companies that would have had to reduce emissions in the Netherlands don't have to do that," he says.
"The value of the Kyoto Protocol as a driver for real change in the Netherlands is reduced, because you can claim these credits from China. Holland is going to meet 50 per cent of its reduction target offshore, through projects like Anding. If it had to meet 100 per cent at home, its government would have to get serious."
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