Understanding Northern China's Water Crisis
Christine E. Boyle talked about the Northern China’s water crisis at a Beijing Energy & Environment Roundtable (BEER) last week on Jan 21.
Christine (pictured right) is a doctoral candidate in University of North Carolina’s program in environmental planning and policy and recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy. Her doctoral dissertation examines the changing nature of irrigation governance in northern China. Her expertise is broad, covering sustainable rural development, the fiscal policy of urban and rural water distribution, and strategies to mitigate the impacts of municipal and industrial development on local water quality. Christine can be reached at cboyle [at] email.unc.edu
Here are her slides and synopsis of her presentation: Read the full story
Green Eggs and Ham
The Green Leap Forward visited in the Shanghai Green Foods Expo in December, and ponders about why food matters in the whole energy-climate context.
Happy Lunar New Year and Year of the Ox! It is rather fitting that in this post coincides with Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, a festival for Chinese worldwide to get together with family and relatives to catch up on old times, and of course, EAT.
This is a long overdue post, covering the Shanghai Green Food Expo that The Green Leap Forward attended (with Leigh Billings of Crossroads) last month. But the issues that the expo raises are ever present, and in fact become more urgent with each passing day. More on the urgency of the food crisis after we take a look at some of the sights of the expo:
The duck eggs are green, literally (slight tinge if you can zoom in on the pic) and figuratively. According to Dalian Green Garden (大连绿园畜产发展有限公司), Read the full story
Electrifying Singapore: Drivers and Roadblocks
The Green Leap Forward travels to Singapore to look at three start-up companies–Zeco, AmpleMotion and The Green Car Co.–trying to make Singapore’s electric transportation dreams come true, and ponders the road blocks that lie in the path towards a renewable electron economy.
Singapore and the Renewable Electron Economy Proposition
The electrification of Singapore’s transportation has received growing interest ever since it was reported that an international panel of experts pegged Singapore as an ideal place to launch an electric vehicle (EV) network. For anyone who’s lived here, it really doesn’t take an expert to recognize that the island-state has a number of things going for it: a contained urban area (the longest east-west stretch is just over 40 km and north-south stretch about 20 km), one of the most efficient and reliable electrical grids, sophisticated IT sector, ambitions to remain at the forefront of maintaining its already world-class transportation infrastructure, and a top-down policy environment which will ensure rapid deployment of a complicated and ambitious system once there is buy-in from the top. Moreover, the potential of sunny and tropical Singapore to harness its hitherto mostly untapped solar resources to feed into its grid completes the puzzle of the vision for a “renewable electron economy,” whereby everything in the economy essentially works of electricity generated by clean renewable power. Read the full story
Solar at a Crossroads
Solar is been making the news in China for a mixed bag of reasons.
[Pictured right: a solar installation on a German football stadium using panels by Yingli Green Energy, a Chinese solar company based in Baoding in Henan province]
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced their Action Plan for Solar to ramp up research, development and deployment of solar photovoltaics (PV) in China. People’s Daily vaguely describes the Plan’s has three scheduled milestones:
- distributed utilization of solar energy by 2015,
- substitution utilization by 2025 and extensive utilization by 2035, and
- aiming to make solar energy one of China’s important energy sources around 2050.
There are no further explanation of what these milestones mean in the article or in Read the full story
MEP Recalibrates for 2009
Last month, Caijing ran a story on the difficulty of the government in achieving various environmental targets (h/t Cleaner Greener China), specifically with regards to the reduction of energy intensity and increasing forest coverage. Indeed, China Environmental Law blog (CELB) has highlighted the unease that the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) feels with respect to economic policies promoted by other branches of government that work at cross-purposes with the nation’s environmental goals.
Ren Yong, deputy director of MEP’s policy research center for environment and economy, was quoted as saying in China Daily:
The globalization has left China in an awkward situation, which enjoys a trade surplus, but meanwhile an ecological deficit.
In light of the “slippage,” the MEP has adopted eight New Year’s resolutions Read the full story
Green Hops: Green Car Washing; Pearl River Delta; Solarizing Qaidam Basin
Mobility
In the wake of more bad (good if you are for green) news in China’s auto sales trends, GLF is observing an increasingly resonant cacophony of green washing in the auto sector…
“Small is beautiful” seems to be the message by industry analysts to Chinese auto makers. The government agrees, as evidenced by the new tax breaks given to cars with smaller engines.
Haifei Automobile Group joins the electric vehicle race and sets its sights on launching the Haifei Saibo electric vehicle in the U.S. markets later this year. Lithium-phosphate battery maker China BAK is getting government support for R&D. GreentechMedia debates if the U.S. will move from Arab oil dependence to Asian car battery dependence. Another angle is if both the U.S. and Asia moves towards South American lithium dependence.
Beiqi Foton Motor (SHSE: 600166) established China’s first manufacturing and R&D base for new energy vehicles in Beijing. The base covers an area of 1,000 mu (around 66.67 hectares), with a total investment of Read the full story
Have a BEER (or two) with BEN!
Some of our astute readers may have noticed in recent months some vague references to an organization called the Beijing Energy Network or the Beijing Energy & Environment Roundtable, e.g. here and here. Indeed it does exist, as The China Daily exposed yesterday.
[Right: Attendees of a recent Beijing Energy & Environment Roundtable (BEER) drinking up on green knowledge.]
To set record straight, the Beijing Energy Network (BEN or 北京能源网络) is a grassroots organization with a mission of promoting networking and collaboration amongst individuals and organizations from all walks to better understand, and to eventually start to take action in tackling, China’s energy and environmental challenge. As the China Daily article suggests, the early incarnations of BEN was founded in Read the full story
The Different Shades of Green Finance
Somehow, we missed a November 2008 report by Friends of the Earth and BankTrack called The Green Evolution: Environmental Policies and Practice in China’s Banking Sector (click here for Chinese version) (henceforth the “Report”) which provides an excellent overview of the green finance activities, including China’s nascent Green Credit program (one of the Green Whirlwind policies we gave an overview of previously), and a bank-by-bank assessment of China’s green finance practices. In this post, I’d like to (i) describe the significance of using the financial industry as a lever point for environmental change, (ii) summarize the different ways in which the concept of “green finance” plays out with Chinese banks, (iii) discuss some of the more interesting observations by the Report, and (iv) conclude with the Report’s recommendations. Read the full story
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