The Green Leap Forward 绿跃进

Organizers of the Beijing Olympics are boasting of all the renewable energy and water conservation technologies that are incorporated into the Olympic infrastructure, as well as the recent opening of the 680 hectre “green lung” in the form of the Olympic Forest Park.

But this wasn’t what anyone had in mind when Beijing pitched the concept of a “Green Olympics”:

The problem is Hydra-like. Just as authorities are containing the algae outburst in Qingdao, the site of the Olympic sailing events, FT reports that the green invaders have hit the coastal resort areas of Baishatan, some 150 km north of Qingdao.

In truth, the Olympic organizers have been bombarded with a series of PR nightmares in the months and weeks leading up to the opening ceremonies. Much attention by foreign media has been focused on China’s pollution woes. See, for example, Slate’s Summer Olympics Disaster Guide.

Water problems are well-chronicled. Beijing is in chronic water shortage, so how is it that it is able to install lush new green landscaping across the city in the weeks leading up to the games? It is diverting water from neighboring Hebei and Shanxi, themselves already drought-ridden, agrarian provinces. Can someone tell me if the Olympic Forest Park is filled with native plant species that won’t require addtional water diversion? And just how much energy was required to treat the water that now fills the park’s man-made lakes?

In terms of air quality, James Fallows of The Atlantic, has been chronicling the smog situation on his website in a series of very telling photographs. The Times Online recently reported that smog levels remain five times over the safety limit. Apart from heavy polluting industrial plants, Beijing’s air quality has been worsened by a construction boom like no other. Perhaps nothing epitomizes China’s (false) economy-environment dilemma than these Olympic Games—it feels the need to prove to the world that Beijing has arrived to the world stage as a credible international city through the construction of modern iconic buildings while at the same time staging a “Green Olympics” that it promised.

Then, there are locusts.

But none of the above tops the social dislocation cause by forced evictions related to Olympic construction:

Less anyone thinks that I am wrongly conflating environmental issues with human rights issues, I assert (as I have before) that the concepts of equity and fair public participation are essential elements of sustainable cities.

Stopping the Gaps

With just three weeks to the Beijing Games, the scramble to clean up China’s capital is at full steam ahead. The short-term measures undertaken include:

• Heavily polluting factories, especially those in the steel, cement and iron ore industries, are being shut down, relocated or restricted…or as the office Olympic website says, “wiped out.” Much has been written (here and here) about how iconic steel giant Beijing Shougang Group has had its belt tightened.
• The halting of city-wide construction starting July 21 until September 20. Construction is clearly a major source of particulates that have been plaguing Beijing’s air quality.
• Leading by example, half of the municipal and central government’s car fleet taken off Beijing’s streets starting July 1, to be upped to 70% of the fleet in a few days starting July 20.
• Taking half of Beijing’s 3.3 million private cars off the roads beginning July 20 by alternating the days which cars are allowed to take to the roads based on whether their license plate number ends with an odd or even number. From wht I have heard, the penalties for flouting this rule are not that high, however—in the region of RMB 100 (USD15). The wealthy offset this inconvenience by purchasing a second car with an appropriate license plate number..
• Heavy polluting “yellow labeled” vehicles (mostly freight trucks which do not meet Euro I emission standards) will be barred from Beijing roads from July 1 to September 20.
• Neighboring Tianjin is also mirroring Beijing’s short term measures.

These short-term measures come at a price. The car bans will pose logistical challenges to businesses in the region and beyond, notes Business Week. Steel, cement and petrochemical production will be significantly decreased during the Olympic period as well.

But I digress. My point is, what happens after September 20? Just how green would the legacy of the Olympics be then? The measures in the above bullet points are exactly that—bullet points. Stop-gap. If anything, the construction madness has probably offset any sort of benefits that pilot-scale renewable energy projects at Olympic venues have brought. In the longer run, Beijing has to stop stealing other peoples’ water. It has to deal with the nationwide smog problem It also has to deal with the country’s woeful grid capacity. China’s power grid is already bursting at its seams, with the power load hitting record highs this summer while coal supplies struggle to keep pace.

And, just how much longer can it afford to continue sweeping social discloation issues under the rug.

Silver Lining?

Before I get overly critical (if I haven’t already), a dose of perspective is warranted.

Thanks to the Olympics, the capital has become the beneficiary of new subway lines, with at least three more to be opened just this weekend. Public busses have been upgraded to more modern fuel efficient models, with some even running on cleaner-burning compressed natural gas (CNG). New subway cars have been installed that are much more comfortable and commuter-friendly than before. Fares for the subway and bus have actually been decreased to encourage uptake, with subway rides costing a flat 2 yuan and local bus rides just 0.4 yuan. These fares may go up post-Olympics, but the much needed boost to the public transportation infrastructure may go a long way in promoting an ethos of using public transportation. (But I still insist, as I have before, that the central government’s promotion of the auto industry as a pillar industry works at cross-purposes to all energy and environmental policy.)

As flawed as some of the stop-gap measures may be, the true assessment of how Green the Olympics are is not what the world sees on TV from August 8 through 24, but the longer term impact of increased environmental awareness amongst all segments of Chinese society, and the resulting shift towards more sustainable pathways to development, argues the Huffington Post:

Ultimately, Beijing will get to show the world what it wants to show it, and the world will see what it wants to see. But however the skies over Beijing look to the world during the Games is less important than what they look like to citizens afterwards.

James Fallows, for one, is optimistic, having penned a much publicized expose—China’s Silver Lining—in last month’s issue of The Atlantic Monthly on the greening of policy, business and energy use in China that is already underway. Fallows sums up the golden opportunity that green presents like this:

[T]he business of improving China’s environment can be a very attractive business indeed. For corporations, it can mean profits, as with the newly efficient cement factories. For the world as a whole, it opens the possibility of a longer-term profit, in dealing with shared climate-change problems. Over the past 20 years, the world got used to a “China price” for manufactured goods—the rock-bottom price for anything coming out of a factory. In the coming 20 years, the world could make use of a “China price” for pollution control, especially greenhouse gases—the rock-bottom requirement of money and resources needed to reduce emissions by a given amount. Precisely because many Chinese systems are now so wasteful, it can be cheaper and easier to eliminate the next thousand tons of carbon-dioxide output or the demand for the next million watts of electricity-generating capacity here than anywhere else.

In other words, if the green credentials of the Beijing Games are to be evaluated, let China not be judged by the state of the skies on August 24, but periodically over the next decade or two as China strengthens its environmental institutions (the newly-elevated Ministry of Environment is adding two departments and 50 new staff members), social justice mechanisms and rule of law, and evolve into the largest exporter of renewable energy technology, eco-city design, smart automobile technology, and an international model for environmental finance.

July 18th, 2008 | Tags: air pollution, automobiles, car ban, China, equity, Green Olympics, policy, Rule of Law, social justice, traffic, water scarcity | Category: automotive, policy, transportation | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL