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SHANGHAI—China, the world’s second-biggest energy
consumer, has “very serious” pollution problems and must
strengthen the enforcement of environmental regulations,
Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan told government officials.
The
nation has paid a “large environmental price” to
industrialize and urbanize, Zeng said, according to a
National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)
statement posted on its web site late Saturday. The
commission is China’s top economic planning agency.
The
government has stepped up efforts to reduce emissions as
China’s economy in the second quarter grew at the
fastest pace in 12 years and the nation last year became
the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide gas.
Pollution has fueled an increase in protests and
dissatisfaction in China, the official Xinhua News
Agency reported July 4.
“Pollution is a major, major problem in China,” said
Glenn Maguire, chief Asia economist at Societe Generale
in Hong Kong. “It’s clearly something they have to
address. The key question is who is going to wear the
burden of the high costs of addressing this problem.”
Zeng’s comments were made in
Beijing
Saturday at the kickoff of a new government
antipollution campaign and ahead of an Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation summit in
Sydney
this week that is likely to include climate change on
its agenda.
World
leaders, including China’s President Hu Jintao,
attending the meeting will be presented with a draft
communiqué, setting a goal of cutting so-called energy
intensity—a measure of an economy’s energy efficiency—by
25 percent by 2030 and planting 20 million hectares
(about 49.4 million acres) of trees to counter global
warming.
China
will encourage companies to implement more energy-saving
and pollution-reduction measures, the NDRC statement
cited Vice Premier Zeng as saying, without giving
details.
The
government has called on large state-owned companies to
meet targets to conserve energy and cut pollution a year
ahead of schedule, Xinhua reported late yesterday,
without saying where it got the information.
China
has set a goal of cutting the energy consumed for each
unit of gross domestic product by 20 percent in the five
years to 2010. The nation passed the US last year to
become the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide gas,
from burning fossil fuels and producing cement,
according to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment
Agency.
“The
economic costs of
China’s
pollution are escalating,” said Jing Ulrich, chairman of
China equities at JPMorgan Chase & Co. “To effectively
tackle these issues, China must change its macroeconomic
structure. Instead of relying on heavy industry, the
government should promote the service sector and private
consumption.”
China
said August 20 that share sales by power stations,
smelters and cement plants will need approval from the
nation’s environmental regulatory agency. The government
in July asked banks to curb lending to energy-intensive
industries in a bid to cut waste and pollution.
The
nation plans to spend 1.33 billion yuan ($175 million)
this year on pollution supervision and control projects,
the Ministry of Finance said August 23. China is also
spending $13 billion to clean the air to prepare for the
2008 Beijing Olympics, scheduled to start August 8 next
year.
“They
have to do something significant ahead of the Beijing
Olympics,” Societe Generale’s Maguire said. “We have to
give consideration for China shutting down production
before the Games.”
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge
has said concerns about air pollution in Beijing may
lead to some endurance events at next summer’s Olympic
Games in the Chinese capital, such as the marathon,
being postponed. The
US
plans to base its Olympic athletes in
South
Korea
during the games to avoid exposure to the city’s smog.
(Bloomberg) |
