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Chinese Environmentalists Accuse 1,000 Companies Of Polluting

Chinese Environmentalists Accuse 1,000 Companies Of Polluting

By Stuart Leavenworth, McClatchy Foreign Staff (TNS)

BEIJING — Environmental groups in China issued a report Tuesday detailing more than 1,000 companies that they say regularly exceed emissions standards, an attempt to “name and shame” Chinese industries that contribute to the country’s notorious air pollution.

Some of the industries “are in repeated violation of discharge standards and so have become a serious source of risk,” according to the report, which was released by the nonprofit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and two other nongovernmental organizations.

Alleged violators include highly profitable publicly traded companies in China, including Kingboard Chemical Holdings Ltd., Aluminum Corp. of China and SinoChem Cokechem Co., a subsidiary of SinoChem International.

On any given day, much of eastern China is smothered in gases and particulates from factories and plants that health officials say contribute to tens of thousands of deaths yearly. By putting a spotlight on publicly traded companies that they say contribute to the smog, Chinese environmentalists hope shareholders will pressure corporate executives to speed up the installation of pollution controls and conversion to cleaner fuels.

Ma Jun, the director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said Beijing’s recent pollution-control efforts during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference showed that bluer skies were possible. The quick reduction in smog demonstrated that China’s air pollution could be reduced much more quickly than the 30 or 50 years some experts have predicted, he told a news conference.

“Although the APEC blue was short, it gives us great hope,” Ma said.

China’s foremost environmentalist, Ma has been marshaling data since 2006 to pinpoint the nation’s biggest pollution problems — a daunting task, given the size of China’s economy and the lack of government oversight. In recent years, local and provincial governments have made increasing amounts of emissions data available online. That’s aided Chinese pollution watchdogs in the same way that, starting in the 1980s, “right to know” laws helped U.S. environmentalists.

Last year, Ma’s institute and two provincial environmental groups, Green Jiangnan and Green Hunan, issued their first “Green Stocks Investigative Report.” Tuesday’s was their second report.

The new report goes into detail about the scale of the alleged emissions violations, the impact on communities and the sources of investment in the companies, including some from Wall Street firms.

Kingboard Chemical operates a factory in Hebei province south of Beijing with a long history of problems. The company has also been accused of “deliberately discharging in secret, discharging in breach of set limits and fabricating online monitoring data,” according to a news release issued with the report.

Kingboard, which makes laminates, circuit boards and other products, has about 60 factories in China and Thailand.

Two big investors in Kingboard are Fidelity Management and JPMorgan Chase & Co. An Oct. 3 article in Barron’s profiled one of Fidelity’s star financial advisers who was urging investors to buy Kingboard stock.

Attempts by McClatchy to obtain comment from the company’s headquarters in Hong Kong were unsuccessful Tuesday.

Ma said investors should think twice before investing in Chinese companies that violated pollution standards. New environmental laws will go into effect in 2015 that expose violators to higher fines from the government. Such companies also could face court actions or increasing “not-in-my-backyard” resistance from affected communities.

One big question, however, is how strongly Chinese regulators will enforce the new environmental laws, given government mandates that provinces achieve certain growth targets each year. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Environmental Protection dispatched an inspection team to Kingboard’s coal-to-chemicals factory in Xingtai, a city in Hebei province. The factory was allegedly trying to avoid detection by increasing its emissions at night.

According to an account posted on the ministry’s website, private security officers blocked inspectors from entering the factory. Kingboard went on to record a net profit of about $200 million, a 51 percent increase over the same period last year.

Tuesday’s report was released on a day when Beijing was far from being “APEC blue.” Levels of fine particulates topped 400 micrograms per cubic meter, 16 times the level that the World Health Organization considers safe. Skyscrapers remained shrouded in a cloud of soot.

According to Ma, the biggest source of China’s air pollution is industrial, as opposed to emissions from the growing numbers of cars and trucks.

“There’s a regional characteristic of this haze,” he said. “It is not a problem of one city or one region, but a huge problem.”
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(McClatchy special correspondent Tiantian Zhang contributed to this report.)

Obama Heads Home After ‘Pretty Good Week’ Overseas

Obama Heads Home After ‘Pretty Good Week’ Overseas

By Anita Kumar, McClatchy Washington Bureau (MCT)

BRISBANE, Australia — President Barack Obama Sunday wrapped up what was arguably the best week he’s had in years. Then he had to go home.

Stung by low approval and the loss of the Senate to the Republicans, Obama enjoyed a surprisingly successful weeklong trip to China, Myanmar and Australia. He secured the first commitment by China to control its greenhouse-gas emissions, broke a trade impasse with India and persuaded other nations to help fight the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa. And he was greeted warmly throughout.

Back in Washington on Monday, he’ll face Republican talk of a government shutdown if he acts unilaterally to allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S., and charges that the Affordable Care Act was deceptively sold to the American people. But for a week overseas, he was able to work and bask seemingly in a different world.

“You’re always popular in somebody else’s country,” Obama told students at Mayanmar’s Yangon University. “When you’re in your own country, everybody is complaining.”

Obama arrived in Beijing last week further weakened by the Democratic party’s losses in the midterm elections. Obama managed to secure a number of successes in a region of the world he has long tried to embrace while aggressively moving forward on domestic issues as if his party hadn’t lost the election.

“I’d say that’s a pretty good week,” Obama said at a news conference before departing Brisbane for Washington late Sunday. “American people can be proud of the progress we made. I intend to build on that momentum when I return home.”

In addition to the foreign agreements, he dove head-first into the debate over net neutrality by calling for Internet service providers to be treated like public utilities and subjecting them to tight regulations. He hinted he might veto a bill to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline. And he said Sunday that he expects this week to put the finishing touches on the order that could shield as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, despite complaints from Republicans that such a move would defy the will of voters in the midterms and poison relations in Congress.

Republicans on Capitol Hill began debating whether to hold up the federal budget if Obama continues with his plan to act on immigration unilaterally.

Obama said he believed Mitch McConnell, the incoming Senate majority leader, when he said Congress would not advocate any more government shutdowns. “We traveled down that path before,” Obama he said. “It was bad for the country. It was bad for every elected official in Washington.”

Obama also tried to brush aside the brouhaha over recorded comments by Jonathan Gruber, one of the paid consultants on the Affordable Care Act, that it was deliberately designed to get it past not only Congress, but also the public.

“The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is not a reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama said.

“Pull up every clip and every story. I think it’s fair to say there was not a provision in the health-care law that was not extensively debated and was fully transparent,” he said. Asked if he himself misled people, he said, “No, I did not.”

In Asia and Australia, Obama came to the region with the upper hand economically, with the U.S. growing while many other nations in Europe and Asia are struggling.

U.S. officials hoped to use that leverage to convince other nations to follow their lead on boosting the economy by favoring programs that push for growth over austerity.

In Australia, at a gathering of leaders of the world’s largest economies, they agreed to programs to boost infrastructure investment, bring more women into the labor force and close tax loopholes used by some international companies. All are programs Obama has pushed at home with little success. They agreed to aim for a boost in global economic growth of at least 2 percent by 2018.

“As our Australians friends say, this just wasn’t a good ole chin wag…. It was a productive summit,” he said. “These were not just goals set without any substance behind them.”

AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan

China And The U.S. Strike A Deal

China And The U.S. Strike A Deal

How Realistic Are The U.S.-China Climate Change Goals?

How Realistic Are The U.S.-China Climate Change Goals?

By Neela Banerjee, Tribune Washington Bureau (MCT)

WASHINGTON — The newly announced landmark plans by the U.S. and China to limit their greenhouse gas emissions left open the question of how realistic the targets are. The plans feature a number of ambitious goals for each nation, but they face serious challenges. A look at the status of the climate change fight in the two countries, the new goals, and the feasibility of achieving them:

Question: What are the U.S. goals?

Answer: The U.S. plans to double its pace of emissions reduction to meet a targeted decline of 26 percent to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

Q: How feasible is it for the U.S. to achieve that target, from a technical standpoint?

A: The Obama administration has said that the building blocks are in place to achieve the reductions the president promised. Central to the effort is the plan to cut emissions over the next 16 years from power plants, the single biggest source of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, by 30 percent from 2005 levels.

The administration is also reducing emissions from cars and light trucks and plans to add limits for heavy trucks. The Environmental Protection Agency is also expected to roll out measures in the coming weeks to address methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. It is working to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, gases used as coolants in consumer goods and propellants in aerosols. The EPA could also move to cut greenhouse gases from oil refineries.

Q: What are the major political obstacles?

A: Republicans, who will take control of Congress in January, are expected to fight those steps, and the energy industry is suing to block new rules.

Administration officials say they will not have to turn to Congress, but can instead tighten rules already proposed. They could require, for instance, a 40 percent — rather than 30 percent — reduction in power plant emissions by 2030, analysts say. New measures that would help the U.S. hit its emissions reduction goal by 2025 are poised to draw an even more virulent political backlash, because they would affect industries beyond the power sector, such as oil and gas and manufacturing.

Such ambitious goals also are “going to be really tough to meet without new laws,” which would require congressional action, said Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Q: What are the Chinese goals?

A: China plans to shift its economy away from coal-fired power generation and create a network of zero-emission plants, including nuclear and renewables, that is larger than the entire U.S. electrical grid.

Q: What are the major obstacles?

A: At first glance, it appears that China, as an authoritarian state, has the tools to make industries and localities comply with new rules. But its efforts to get local leaders to follow through on imperatives such as pollution reduction and fair labor practices have made spotty progress, suggesting that emissions cuts might also prove tough to enforce, said Mary E. Gallagher, associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

China’s impetus for addressing carbon pollution stems from its own domestic realities, analysts say. Besides corruption, air pollution from the combustion of fossil fuels is the single biggest domestic issue the government faces, Gallagher said.

Cutting fossil fuel use to address climate change would also clean the air. But the government has had a hard time getting localities and the industries with which they are allied to act on anything besides economic growth, in part because promotion in Communist Party ranks is tied to economic output. Companies have pollution-control equipment but often keep it idle because of the expense and extra work, Gallagher said.

“In the U.S., the trick is to get the laws passed but then you can assure their effective implementation,” Gallagher said. “In China, they will pass laws but they could fail with implementation. Our two political systems have bottlenecks at different places.”

Another challenge is the scale of the alternative-energy infrastructure China plans to build within a relatively short period.

Q: How will it be confirmed that China is actually trying to cut emissions?

A: An accountability standard has yet to be put in place, but it is part of international talks to draft a climate change plan in Paris next year. The Chinese about-face on climate caught many people off guard and gave rise to speculation, especially among conservatives, that its pledge is empty and that Obama was duped.

Yet China’s plan to hit a peak in its greenhouse gas pollution within 15 years and then curtail it afterward is an enormous step. Where that peak will be, however, is unclear, though important. Will China’s pollution be 15 percent above 2005 levels when it finally scales back? Or will it be more like 40 percent?

Q: Will the deal put the planet on track to avoid the worst consequences of global warming?

A: In a word, no. To avert the worst disasters, global average temperatures must be kept from rising by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from the average temperatures in pre-industrial times 150 years ago.

The American and Chinese initiatives, even when taken with a recent European Union announcement to cut its emissions by 40 percent by 2030, are not enough in and of themselves. Other big emitters, most notably India and Russia, must make similarly ambitious cuts.

Further, so much warming has been baked into the atmosphere through more than two decades of squabbling over emissions cuts that much deeper reductions would need to occur fast. In the case of the U.S., that would amount to a 70 percent cut in emissions from 1990 levels by 2030, an all-but-impossible goal over the next 15 years.

But Wednesday’s announcement is “a down payment” on meeting the 2-degree goal, the first of many steps needed to rein in emissions, said Alden Meyer, director of strategy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Photo: Mikael Miettinen via Flickr