One-third of China's Yellow river 'unfit for drinking or agriculture'

Factory waste and sewage from growing cities has severely polluted major waterway, according to Chinese research

• Tania Branigan in Beijing
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 25 2008 16.01 GMT

A worker clears rubbish from the Yellow river in Lanzhou in north-west China's Gansu province. Water quality along one third of China's Yellow river is now unusable because of pollution. Photographer: AP

Severe pollution has made one-third of China's Yellow river unusable, according to new research.

Known as the country's "mother river", it supplies water to millions of people in the north of China. But in recent years the quality has deteriorated due to factory discharges and sewage from fast-expanding cities.

Much of it is now unfit even for agricultural or industrial use, the study shows.

The survey, based on data taken last year, covered more than 8,384 miles of the river, one of the longest waterways in the world, and its tributaries.

The Yellow River Conservancy Committee, affiliated to the ministry of water resources, said 33.8% of the river system's water sampled in 2007 registered worse than level five. That means it is unfit for drinking, aquaculture, industrial use and even agriculture, according to criteria used by the UN Environment Programme.

Only 16% of the river samples reached level one or two, the standard considered safe for domestic use.

The Yellow River is China's second-longest after the Yangtze, flowing west to east across the country through areas with high concentrations of factories.

The report said waste and sewage water discharged into the system last year totalled 4.29bn tonnes. Industry and manufacturing made up 70% of the discharge into the river, with households accounting for 23% and just over 6% coming from other sources.

"It's not surprising," said Wen Bo, China programme director of the US-based environmental group, Pacific Environment. "They are just treating the river as a dumping site. It's basically a sewage channel for the provinces that share the river."

He told Associated Press that many polluting firms in the upper and middle reaches of Yellow river have avoided close local government scrutiny or had been protected because they provided jobs. There was no mechanism to allow richer provinces downstream to help poorer, polluting neighbours clean up, he added.

Li Xiaoqiang, publicity chief with the Yellow River Conservancy Committee, told the state news agency, Xinhua, that people needed to become aware of saving and protecting water if the problem was not to spread further.

China's State Council launched a nationwide campaign among industrial enterprises to save energy and slash the discharge of pollutants in the second half of last year.

"I wish a harmony could be achieved between development, utilisation, and protection of the river someday," said Li.

A survey taken the previous year showed that 31.1% of the water was of level five standard, although the area sampled was slightly smaller. The total waste and sewage water discharged into the system was also slightly lower.

The ministry of environmental protection warned this summer that pollution of China's waterways remained "grave". More than 20% of water tested in nearly 200 rivers was not safe to use, it added.

The ministry has tried to shut down polluting factories along China's main waterways, but its power is limited because local environmental protection bureaus are under the control of local governments.

Environmentalism with Chinese characteristics

November 17, 2008 Greenpeace.org

Greenpeace's Climate Rescue Station bathed in the light of a beautiful Polish evening.

Enlarge Image

China — What do you get when you combine a giant man-made planet, a vast open coal pit in Poland and four 20-somethings from China’s so-called post-80’s generation? A new Chinese youth movement whose ideological battle isn’t political revolution but saving the environment.

Greenpeace volunteer, 23-year-old Wei Jian from Beijing arrived in Konin, Poland at Greenpeace’s Climate Rescue Station on the weekend. The station is perched next to the ugly scar that is Jozwin IIB open-cast coal mine. Wei (pictured below), who is a freelance writer when he’s not trying to save the planet, is joined by Liu Shuang, 26, who is Greenpeace’s Climate and Energy campaigner. In a few weeks, 21—year-old Han Chu, another Greenpeace volunteer from Beijing, and 28-year-old Li Yan, Greenpeace climate campaigner, will jump on board. Their mission? To tell the world that China’s youth also care about the planet, worry about their future, and demand world leaders do something concrete now to stop the earth’s most serious environmental threat – climate change.

The two volunteers are keeping a blog -- Voices from the Climate Rescue Station -- to spread the world among their peers about the climate change threat. What on earth is the Climate Rescue Station?

The station is a four storey tall planet earth that will be used as a platform to tell the world that we can save the climate, but only if we quit coal, the most polluting of all fossil fuels. Greenpeace activists and volunteers took four days to get it all up. The earth dome – using electricity generated from clean renewable energy - is a visual representation of the climate tipping point that the earth is currently perched on – showing the dark future ahead of us if we don’t get serious and quit coal now.

Why is the station there? Because from the 1-14 December, senior officials from across the world will be meeting in nearby Poznan for the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference. On 2 December, the Climate Rescue Station will be moved to Poznan Wolności square, where it will continue to send a message to delegates attending the climate talks to get serious about climate change, quit coal and work towards a meaningful deal to save the climate. What's the big deal about coal anyway? Unless all governments make concrete plans to shift to clean energy instead of increasing their reliance on coal - we will face catastrophic climate change. Poland depends on coal for 93 percent of its power. Similarly, some 80 percent of China's energy needs are met by coal-fired power stations. Burning coal is China's single biggest source of greenhouse gases. Greenpeace China's current key campaign is in convincing China to move away from coal, which is costing the country an extra US$250 billion in hidden costs to the environment and society. Our message to delegates in Poznan will be simple – in order to save the climate – Poland, China, the world, has to quit coal. And we can do it. Renewable energy can provide us with six times the energy the world currently consumes. And that's using today's technology.

Obama’s Climate Challenge: What to do About China?

Wsj.com November 24, 2008, 2:35 pm

Posted by Keith Johnson

As if it needed one, here’s another dilemma for the Obama administration: How to move aggressively to tackle climate change without getting China on board?

With or without you (AP)

During the campaign, Obama officials said it would be politically all but impossible for the U.S. to impose curbs on greenhouse-gas emissions unless big emitters like China also play ball; China already emits more greenhouse gases than the U.S. and its fast-growing economy means that lead will grow wider in coming years.

But last week, President-elect Obama said he’d make climate-change legislation the starting point of his energy revolution, reaffirming his campagn pledge to cut emissions by 80%, and that the U.S. should reclaim global leadership in fighting climate change.

What would that mean in practical terms? This summer, the Center for American Progress put together a primer for the next administration’s approach to China. In it, CAP fellow Robert Sussman said:

Early in the next administration, the new president should announce that the United States is committed to substantial, mandatory reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that are not conditioned on the actions of China or other countries.

He said the U.S. should instead urge China to expand upon recent improvements in energy efficiency, renewables, and the like, and open the door to accepting binding emissions limits under the next version of the global Kyoto treaty.

But getting both China and the U.S. Congress to agree to such a deal won’t be easy, Mr. Sussman argued: “We can expect negotiating such a package will be challenging because of China’s misgivings about adopting even nonbinding goals, and due to the risk of U.S. domestic political backlash against an agreement that is perceived as imposing unequal burdens on the two countries.”

That isn’t just idle policy-shop speculation: Robert Sussman, a former Deputy Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, is Team Obama’s point man for the EPA transition. The EPA would be responsible for implementing whatever climate policy the administration and Congress come up with.

The tricky point for President-elect Obama: Taking steps to protect U.S. industry left at a disadvantage from unencumbered Chinese rivals could run afoul of World Trade Organization rules as well as Bejing. And Chinese goodwill, as Fareed Zakaria noted today, is crucial to financing Mr. Obama’s ambitious stimulus plans.

Maybe it won’t matter, anyway. Monday, a pair of researchers from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said slow government response makes it “almost unfeasible” to cut global emissions as much as needed by 2020 to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

China's journey to the dark ages

Biggest cities becoming murky as smog clouds block up to 25 per cent of sun, UN study finds

GEOFFREY YORK

From Friday's Globe and Mail

November 14, 2008 at 4:28 AM EST

BEIJING — In the skies over China and South Asia, the sun itself is disappearing. The biggest cities are becoming darker as they fall beneath a vast brown cloud of soot, and even North America is vulnerable to the drifting toxic cloud.

That's the conclusion of a new United Nations study: that warns that the smog clouds have become so enormous they could kill 340,000 people annually in China and India.

The study says the toxic clouds - more than three kilometres thick - are contributing to a huge range of dangerous effects: extreme weather; damage to crops; melting of glaciers; the dimming of big cities; shifts in rainfall; massive economic losses; higher food prices; and a growing number of human deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

Up to 25 per cent of the sunlight has disappeared in Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, India's New Delhi and Karachi, Pakistan, the study concluded. In India, the dimming of cities has more than doubled since 1980, it said.

Although the clouds of haze are worst in China and South Asia, there are also "regional hot spots" in Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and the Amazon Basin of South America, the study found.

The smog clouds are also found in North America and Europe, but those are less dangerous because they tend to be removed or reduced by winter precipitation. The clouds from Asia, however, have drifted as far east as California.

The clouds, known as "atmospheric brown clouds," are filled with ozone, black carbon, and soot particles. They are caused by a "soot stream" of fossil-fuel and biomass burning, deforestation and other man-made factors. Coal-fired power plants and rising auto traffic are among the chief causes.

A team of scientists, commissioned by the UN Environment Programme, has been studying the toxic brown clouds since 2002. Their first reports met with considerable cynicism and criticism, but their latest report is much more detailed, prompting the scientists to issue a stronger warning of the importance of the issue.

Achim Steiner, the UNEP executive director, said he expects the phenomenon of toxic brown clouds to be "firmly on the international community's radar" as a result of the latest study, which was released yesterday. The clouds need "urgent and detailed research," he said.

In China alone, the clouds have cost an estimated $82-billion in losses to the national economy, he said.

One of the most disturbing problems is the impact of the smog clouds on global warming. This happens in two ways. By absorbing sunlight and heating the air, the clouds are aggravating the effect of greenhouse gases. But at the same time, the clouds can be "masking" the global-warming trend, since they contain sulphates and other particles that can reflect sunlight and cool the Earth's surface. So any action to eliminate the brown clouds would trigger a dramatic rise in global warming, the study warns.

The clouds could be dampening the rise of global temperatures by 20 to 80 per cent, the study said. "Simply tackling the pollution linked with brown-cloud formations, without simultaneously delivering big cuts in greenhouse gases, could have a potentially disastrous effect," the UNEP said in a statement yesterday.

It also warned that the clouds are reducing rainfall in India and South Asia, which could "further aggravate the recent dramatic escalation of food prices and the consequent challenge for survival among the world's most vulnerable populations."

In parts of India, for example, the brown clouds - combined with global warming - have slashed the rice harvest by 6.2 million tonnes annually, which is enough to feed 72 million people, the study found.

Another dramatic result is the melting of glaciers, partly due to the toxic clouds. The latest study found "substantial soot concentrations" in the Himalayan mountains, even up to an altitude of five kilometres. And this soot, along with greenhouse gases, is a major cause of the melting and shrinking of glaciers.

"If the current rate of retreat continues unabated, these glaciers and snow packs are expected to shrink by as much as 75 per cent before the year 2050, posing grave danger to the region's water security," the study concluded.

Under a Sooty Exterior, A Green China Emerges

You’ve heard the environmental horror stories: rivers running black, air unfit to breathe, two new coal-fired power plants a week. But thanks to a surging entrepreneurial spirit and new policies, China is fast becoming a leader in green innovation, from recycling to developing electric cars to harnessing the wind.

by fred pearce Via Yale Environment 360 Call it the new China Syndrome. Putting the world’s most populous country in the environmental doghouse is a game anyone can play. You’ve heard the litany of sins. China is buying up whole mountains in Latin America to get at the copper inside. It is the world’s largest importer of tropical hardwood, most of it hacked illegally from rain forests. Its carbon emissions are now the world’s largest, exceeding even the United States. Many of its rivers are little more than industrial discharge pipes. And didn’t you see all that smog in Beijing around the time of the Olympics? All true, of course. But even so, much of what is said about China and its attitude toward the environment — even by usually fair-minded folk — is hypocritical and decidedly unfair. In my travels as a journalist, I have seen the bad side. I have visited the wharves at Zhangjiagang on the River Yangtze, where they turn the rain forests of Asia, Africa and the Amazon into floors for apartments in Shanghai and Beijing. I have literally held my nose at the foul air in industrial cities from Hong Kong to the North Korean border. I have wondered at how Beijing, once the city of the bicycle, now has a new ring road every time I visit

Just as we have off-shored our manufacturing to China, so we have off-shored our carbon emissions.

(there were seven at the last count). And I have read the statistics about how, as it builds its infrastructure, China is pouring 50 percent of all the world’s concrete. China, in other words, does the bad things that most of the world does, but sometimes with more vigor because it is so big and growing so fast. Its development zeal feels like the United States must have felt in the late 19th century — only with a population an order of magnitude greater. And there’s the rub. China is huge. For most of human history, it has been home to as much as a fifth of the world’s population. And many of the scary statistics simply reflect that. China, as WWF reported recently, consumes 15 per cent of the world’s resources. But with 20 percent of the world’s population(1.3 billion people), is that really surprising? Likewise, should we be shocked that the world’s most populous country has the world’s largest carbon footprint? If China were instead a series of smaller countries each reporting their statistics separately, we probably wouldn’t turn a hair. The people of China don’t have lesser rights because there are so many of them. China may now emit more carbon dioxide than the United States, but its per-capita emissions are only a quarter those of the U.S. And that is before we take account of the Chinese carbon footprint generated by goods that are manufactured there and then exported to the rich world. A study by the British Tyndall Centre at Sussex University recently concluded that 23 percent of

Greenpeace

China’s carbon emissions were produced in manufacturing goods for export. Just as we have off-shored our manufacturing to China, so we have off-shored our carbon emissions. “But passing on our emissions to someone else is not cutting our emissions,” points out the author of the study, Tyndall's science policy researcher Jim Watson. Thus far, off-shoring has proved an efficient way of passing on the blame, however. Nor should we forget that the eager new industrialists of Shenzhen and Tianjin, Suzhou and Shanghai, have been pumping poisons into the air for much less time than us in the industrialized world. And that matters, because greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. Most of what Britain puffed into the air as James Watt’s steam engine kick-started the industrial revolution is still there. China will take several more decades of breakneck industrial growth before it can exceed the accumulated volumes of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere that should be labeled “Made in America.” So China is not responsible for where we are today on climate change. And I doubt that either its cumulative or its its per-capita emissions will ever approach those of the U.S. Why? Because, believe it or not, China is going green. We hear a lot about China building a new coal-fired power station every week. I checked the stats. It’s worse. It has recently been building two new 1000-megawatt plants each week. But last year, China also built more wind turbines than any other country. And its biogas and solar power industries are also growing fast. China’s green credentials are surprisingly good in many respects. China has long led the world in aquaculture. By raising most of its fish in artificial ponds it has done a huge good turn for the world’s ocean fisheries. On an island at the mouth of the Yangtze river near Shanghai, they are

Last year, China built more wind turbines than any other country. And its biogas and solar power industries are also growing fast.

currently building the world’s first eco-city, powered by renewable electricity, with citywide water recycling and plans for a car-free transport system. Similarly, the recently completed 1,200-kilometer railway into Tibet employed “green construction” methods, according to a paper in Science last year. And the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 is devoted to green urban design. In June, the country officially banned free plastic bags in shops. The world’s largest plastic bag manufacturer (Chinese, of course) shut down as a result. And the Chinese are now the world’s leading recyclers. Some people worry that much of the trash from Europe and North America gets shipped from Los Angeles, Rotterdam and Seattle to China for recycling. They seem to think that the Chinese secretly landfill it. Why would they do that? In fact, China is so desperate for raw materials to keep its industrial revolution going that it finds uses for almost any waste it can get its hands on: plastic packaging, the metal in old computers and other electronic goods. Just as the country used to run its agriculture on “night soil” (a handy euphemism for human feces), now it runs its industry on as much trash as it can get its hands on. Witness the success of China's "Queen of Trash," Cheung Yan. Ten years ago, when China stopped logging its own natural forests to prevent a recurrence of big floods, she anticipated a paper shortage. She went to the U.S. and drove around in an old pick-up begging municipal garbage dumps to sell her their waste paper. She was so successful that today her company, Nine Dragons, ships more than 6 million ton of waste paper a year into China, which she recycles into boxes for electronics goods that will be taking the next container ship back to Europe and North America. Nine Dragons is now the world’s largest manufacturer of packaging. Cheung is reportedly mainland China’s richest person — and possibly the

The problems that China is finding in obtaining raw materials for its manufacturing plants is pushing it into taking a world lead in waste recycling.

richest self-made woman on the planet. I don’t want to be too starry-eyed. China’s pollution problems are extremely serious, and they have global repercussions. But my guess is that China will be forced into adopting ever-greener policies. Its use of coal will soon be curtailed by urban middle-class uprisings against the smog (much as happened in Europe and North America half a century ago). And the very problems that China is finding in obtaining raw materials for its manufacturing plants is already pushing it into taking a world lead in waste recycling. It is doing out of necessity what environmentalists have been demanding for a long time — “closing the loop” in natural resources, by mining waste to make new. China already is the world's largest manufacturer of both wind turbines and biogas fermenters and is in the forefront of developing electric cars. Who can doubt that if the United States makes a once-for-all shift to greener energy generation in the coming decade, then the Chinese will be scrambling to become its major supplier of wind turbines and solar panels and much else. Or that if China sees the U.S. switching to renewable energy, it will rush to take the same path. Last month, consultants McKinsey and Company advised China in a new report to “charge up” for manufacture of electric cars to meet likely demand at home as well as abroad. Call me an incorrigible optimist if you like, but it is at least possible that the two global environmental pariahs — China and the United States — could soon be leading the charge to a more climate-friendly future. And that would be a China syndrome worth nurturing.

New chinese environmentalist documentary

The Road Ahead: The First Green Long March. This new documentary, which screens at the Queens International Film Festival next Saturday, November 8th at 11am, is the hopeful story of a group of Chinese college students who mobilize to spark their own "Green" movement in rural China.

The 2008 Olympics have passed but curiosity and coverage regarding China’s environmental future have just begun. Following its festival run this year, Cinereach sees the film reaching a wide audience and making an impact on how other nations across the globe perceive environmentalism in China.

The attached press release goes into more detail about the project and its makers and please visit our web site www.the-road-ahead.com to download a press kit.

Thanks for your attention to this meaningful project. I hope to hear from you!

Best,

Reva Goldberg

Communications and Special Projects Manager

CINEREACH

27 W 24th Street, Suite 200

New York, NY 10010 USA

T 212.727.3224 Ext. 11

F 212.727.3282

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rgoldberg@cinereach.org

View our trailer here:

http://www.cinereach.org/trailer