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A canary in the Chinese coal mine
GEOFFREY YORK
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
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LINFEN, China — The wheat farmers of Donglu village can't sell their harvest. The wheat kernels are dark, sooty, hollow and twisted.
"Nobody wants to buy it, so we have to eat it at home," says Zhang Xiaojiao, a farmer in the village.
"Look at it," she says, brandishing a handful of the stuff. "It doesn't taste good. It tastes bitter. It's because of the coal pollution. But nobody cares about us, and nobody comes to investigate."
All around this valley, thousands of peasants are trying to carve out an existence against the thick dust that chokes the air and settles heavily over every living thing. The soil is covered with a layer of grey soot. Tree leaves are laden with dust. The cabbages are blackened.
The farmers say their wheat harvests are becoming smaller and poorer every year. Some say they have to buy grain to feed their families. Others say they had to abandon crops such as cotton because they were too fragile to survive.
"In the past, the wheat plants were very green," says Yi Maosheng, a 62-year-old farmer. "But now, as you can see, they are covered in grey dust. The bees don't come to the flowers of the apple trees any more."
This is the toxic centre of China's coal-producing heartland. It's an apocalyptic vision of clanking factories, spewing smokestacks, burning flames, suffocating fumes, slag heaps, constant haze and relentless dust.
Donglu village has been swallowed up by Linfen, a city of about 4.3 million, possibly the most polluted place on the planet. It is certainly one of the dirtiest cities in China, a status confirmed by annual government surveys for the past five years. A World Bank study a few years ago concluded that it was the most polluted city in the world.
On a winter morning, the smog is so thick that a visitor can barely see 100 metres ahead. Buildings disappear into the haze. The Buddhas in the ancient temples are black with coal dust. Even the sun is barely visible in the darkened sky. Linfen is a ghost city, inhabited by people who loom out of the smog like spectral presences.
Dust is choking the farmers and destroying crops, yet these might be the least dangerous of the coal industry's side-effects. From a global viewpoint, the most disturbing is one that China has largely ignored: the carbon dioxide that contributes massively to global warming.
Carbon dioxide is responsible for about 80 per cent of the world's human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases. Most of this comes from coal, and China is responsible for 90 per cent of the rise in world coal consumption in recent years. This country is hooked on coal. With 21,000 coal mines across the country, it is cheaper and more easily available than any other form of energy in China. It is the lifeblood of its booming economy, producing 70 per cent of the energy that fuels its dramatic growth.
Coal is the biggest reason for China's rapid climb to the top ranks of the world's worst contributors to global warming. The latest projections show that China will overtake the United States to become the world's top producer of carbon dioxide by 2009, nearly a decade quicker than projected in previous studies. China will soon produce 20 per cent of all the carbon dioxide on the planet.
Yet China's impact on the global environment is rarely debated here.
"In China, global warming is not under discussion at all," says James Brock, an energy analyst and consultant in Beijing. "China is 10 to 15 years behind the United States on this issue."
Of course, the West has been guilty of many of China's bad environmental habits, too. The average Canadian, for example, consumes far more energy than the average Chinese and is responsible for releasing far more carbon dioxide. But with China's massive population, and its reluctance to enforce the use of modern anti-pollution equipment, China is quickly catching up to the industrialized world as a cause of global warming.
China is officially striving to restrain the rapid growth of its coal consumption, but mainly because of concern for its coal reserves, not because of the global-warming issue. And its efforts so far have been weak and ineffective. Even when it shuts down an illegal coal mine, the mine is often reopened by local workers and businessmen who don't want to lose the revenue.
China aims to limit its coal production to 2.6 billion tonnes by 2010, a moderate rise from the 2.3 billion tonnes it produced last year. But this target is certain to be missed, Mr. Brock says. He expects China's coal production to hit three billion or even 3.2 billion tonnes by 2010. And he expects China eventually to produce twice as much carbon dioxide as the United States.
"China is going up the intensity curve in its energy use, and it has four times the population of the United States," he says. "Coal is what China has, and people use what they have."
CHINA and other developing countries are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol's rules for cutting the production of greenhouse gases. They argue strenuously that they should be allowed the same historical privileges that allowed the industrialized nations to develop their economies, even if it means a sharp increase in global-warming gases over the next decade or two.
China, like India and other developing countries, has always seen the environment as something that can be sacrificed to the god of economic growth. Their air and land are being surrendered to the overriding goal of catching up to the industrialized world. But global warming has pushed the stakes to a much higher level.
Now China is gambling with the fate of the planet itself, and as its greenhouse-gas production expands, the country has increasingly felt the heat of the global media spotlight. It is fighting back with a political campaign that seeks to blame the developed world, accusing it of "environmental colonialism" by transferring its resource-intensive industries to China.
At a meeting last fall of the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development, Chinese officials argued that China is a "victim" of the developed world's excessive consumption of resources. They accused the industrialized world of spreading an "environmental threat theory" that portrays the country as a menace to the planet. They maintain that the world should actually be grateful to China.
"China has been playing its role as a global workshop in the past two decades," Chinese environmental expert Shen Guofang says.
"We import the raw material, produce, send the products abroad and keep the waste and pollution ourselves."
Beijing rejects the criticism of its carbon-dioxide output. "Too much stress on the negative environmental externality will limit China's rights to development," a report by a task force of the Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development says.
Linfen, a city that includes a large swath of surrounding farmland and villages, is a vivid example of the vast power of China's coal industry. Coal is everything here. The city is surrounded by coal mines, including dozens of illegal ones, which supply the raw material for the dozens of coking factories and steel factories inside the city.
Coal has brought a dramatic rise in living standards for the people of Linfen, just as it has in the rest of China. Within a generation, their homes have become bigger, their diets have improved and some can even afford cars. Linfen's growth rate of 12 per cent annually is higher than the national average. But the cost to its health and environment has been enormous.
"We are living in better economic conditions and we don't need to eat rough grains and corn flour any more," says Yi Maosheng, the 62-year-old farmer. "But the air has turned bad. I'd rather have fresh air."
A former coking-factory owner, who gives his name as Cui, boasts about the city's living standards. "Our life is certainly better," he says. "In the past, three generations would live in one home, but now an apartment is for one generation. And we've bought cars. Without the coal industry, how could we have enjoyed these benefits?"
The wealthiest coal bosses can afford to escape the smog. Many have purchased villas in seaside towns, about a 12-hour drive from Linfen, where the air is fresh and clean. But the vast majority of Linfen's inhabitants are too poor to flee.
"We would like to move away, but we can't," says Yang Xia, a 32-year-old school teacher in Linfen. "If I have a child, I'll try to send him away from here and I'll never allow him to move back. This is what all the Linfen parents say."
LINFEN'S descent into this hellish existence has been surprisingly rapid. As recently as the 1980s, the city planted fruit trees on its streets and called itself the "Modern Flower and Fruit Town."
But as China launched its economic reforms, its booming factories needed energy. Hundreds of coal-fired power plants were hastily built, and entrepreneurs rushed into the coal industry, often digging illegal mines or creating makeshift coking factories that blatantly violated environmental laws.
Cities such as Linfen have prospered from the coal industry, and paid a horrendous price. "If you hate someone and want to punish him," the Chinese media say, "arrange for him to live in Linfen."
The pollution in Linfen is so bad that even the red lanterns outside the restaurants are sometimes black from soot. Cars turn on their headlamps in the daytime. Nobody wears a white shirt because it soon becomes grey. Half of the local drinking wells are polluted and unsafe. Elderly people stay indoors, afraid to breathe the air on the streets. Young children have grown up without ever seeing the stars at night because of the haze.
Medical clinics in Linfen are filled with patients who suffer bronchitis, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses. Many people have a permanent cough, and their lungs and eyes ache.
"When they spit or cough, I can see the black dust from the coal," says Pei Hongchuan, a doctor at a street clinic in Linfen. He estimates that 80 per cent of his patients are suffering from respiratory illnesses. "It's hard to live a healthy life here," he says. "I worry about my own health. I worry that my life could be shortened, or I could get lung cancer."
One of his patients, 26-year-old Fan Liang, had been studying for three years at a British university. As soon as he returned to Linfen to visit his parents, he began to cough. He went to the clinic to ask for medicine, but he knows his health won't recover until he leaves the city.
"At this time of year, everyone is coughing," Mr. Fan says. "I'm coughing every day, I can't breathe in the morning and my eyes are dry. There's so much pollution here. It's horrible. Everyone would leave if they had a chance. They should shut down every factory here."
In a desperate effort to reduce Linfen's pollution crisis, the local authorities have been closing dozens of factories and ordering the use of anti-pollution devices. They claim to have improved the air quality in Linfen over the past three years, but most residents say there is little sign of any real improvement.
"People often wear masks when they do their morning exercises," says Wang Linping, a health researcher in Linfen. "If their mask is white, you can see the black dust on the outside of the mask."
LINFEN might be an extreme example of China's environmental woes, but the rest of the country is suffering similar consequences of failed government and weak regulation. An estimated 400,000 people die prematurely every year in China because of respiratory illnesses caused by air pollution. Environmental targets are routinely ignored. Studies have found that about 60 per cent of Chinese companies are violating environmental rules.
China's environmental spending is far behind that of the developed world. Anti-pollution equipment is often antiquated or malfunctioning. Only 20 per cent of China's coal-fired power plants are using scrubbers, or coal-washing devices, as opposed to 32 per cent in the United States. And with the economy booming, the government is planning to build another 500 coal-fired plants, on top of the 2,000 that already exist.
Despite state edicts in support of energy efficiency, China continues to waste colossal amounts of coal and other energy sources, consuming three times more energy for every dollar of national output than the global average.
Chinese authorities admitted last month that they had failed to reach their official targets for reducing pollution and cutting energy consumption in 2006. And they admitted this week that China had failed to improve its international ranking on environmental quality over the past three years. China still lags far behind most other countries, a government report said. Small wonder, then, that China has failed to tackle the global-warming issue in any serious way. China today is still consuming 40 per cent of the world's coal production, more than Europe, Japan and the United States combined. And by 2030, China will account for more than one-third of the increase in greenhouse gases.
With coal prices soaring, entrepreneurs are continuing to dig new coal mines, despite all the orders from Beijing. "Because of the huge profit incentive, more and more people are investing in new mines in China," said Yu Jie, environmental program adviser in Beijing for the Heinrich Boll Foundation, a German organization.
"They're using low technology and they're very wasteful. The local business interests are against the interests of the central government, but the Chinese political system allows them a space."
Ms. Yu, who had observer status at recent Kyoto Protocol conferences, has watched the Chinese government telling the conferences that development must be its priority. It has also called for a share of the environmental technology of industrialized country — a demand that many Western countries are resisting for fear that their technology could be quickly pirated if it is shared with China. "China wants to buy the technology, but nobody wants to sell it to them," Ms. Yu said. Surveys show that many people in China's biggest cities are aware of the global warming issue, she said. But in a country still preoccupied by growth and a relentless drive for wealth, a vague awareness of climate change among some of the urban elite is not enough.
"Compared to other issues, global warming is not seen as a priority," Ms. Yu said.
"People in China don't really know how to deal with this issue. Very few people are aware of energy efficiency and renewable energy as solutions. And for the government, it's not very high on the agenda." |
