Environment

PART TWO: “…and Prospects for the Future,” by Kenneth Lieberthal

***This post is a continuation of PART ONE: “China’s Environmental Crisis,” by Kenneth Lieberthal.***

Kenneth Lieberthal, visiting fellow at The Brookings Institution, spoke last night about “China’s Environmental Crisis and Prospects for the Future” at the The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

ACTION and OBSTACLES

Despite all the grim statistics about China’s environment, there have been efforts to ameliorate the problem.

“If you think the Chinese government is not concerned with the environment and sustainability, you are out-of-date,” Lieberthal says.

The country plans to spend $175 billion on environmental alleviation during its 11th Five-Year Plan period.

And the recent economic stimulus package also includes “11 billion [yuan] for environmental protection projects,” heard via the China Environmental Law blog, mostly likely involving water and solid waste treatment.

But none of this will be easy, Lieberthal says, pointing out the five biggest obstacles that all countries face in dealing with global environmental degradation and climate change:

• Scope and complexity - some problems are just too big and complicated to manage.

• Jurisdictions and mobility - the “impact” (i.e. acid rain) of an “insult” (i.e. smokestacks) are often in different political jurisdictions, making it hard to figure out who (or what) to blame.

• Time lag - there are often long delays before problems and remedies manifest. “The farther you get between the insult and the impact, the more complex the causal chain,” Lieberthal says. “It’s very hard to pin down responsibility.”

• Cost -  Fixing the problem requires lots of $$$. “It will boggle your mind,” Lieberthal says.

China, in particular, has some unique hurdles to jump.

“THE DEAL”

Lieberthal describes what he calls “the deal” to explain China’s five-level political system, which includes administrative powers at the “Center” (i.e. Beijing), branching out to the provincial, city, county, township and village levels.

Under this system, performance is predominantly measured by annual growth in GDP. So, local leaders, who are entrenched in the so-called “cadre reward system,” are motivated by the fact that if China’s GDP grows, then their own prospect for promotion and acquiring personal wealth improves.

While it’s easy to mobilize resources to build more stuff (”there is no place in the world that builds physical products better than China,” Lieberthal says), it’s difficult to enforce any laws or regulations that constrain short-term growth. Afterall, the logic goes, why stunt GDP growth if it means risking your own professional and personal success?

Even if an enterprise coughs up a fine to the municipal government for breaking some environmental regulation, the government will often “make up those funds” through subsidies or additional investments, in order to maintain production and spur more growth. In other words, “everyone’s doing what they’re supposed to do,” Lieberthal says,  and there’s no “real cost” of violating the law.

It’s like “putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop,” he adds.

But that’s not really helping anyone, is it?

ABSENCE OF POLITICALLY CONSEQUENTIAL  “GREEN” MOVEMENT

China’s legal system does not allow for a vigorous “green” NGO movement, because every time an organization gets political, it runs into trouble.

But “you can’t count on governments to change that much,” Lieberthal says. “It takes outside pressure to get it done.”

He puts forth the idea of creating a “Green Corps,” like the “Peace Corps,” but instead of, say, volunteering for AIDS education in rural Africa, you’d be retrofitting cars and building energy-efficient homes in urban China. Sign me up!

ONE-SIDED ENERGY MIX

China’s got a lot of coal but, in general, lacks other energy sources. Yes, there have been serious efforts to develop wind, solar, nuclear, and hydropower energy, Lieberthal says, but they are riddled with problems:

• China has built as much coal-fired power generation in the past five years that exists in U.S. overall, and these plants are going to be around for decades. “It’s going to be difficult to tear those down.”

• Hyrdopower is being developed in the southwest, but the industry is needed in the east.

• Nuclear is being built on a large scale, but it’s capital-intensive and carries safety risks. Considering China’s population density, “the results of an accident could be extraordinarily tragic.”

RAPID URBANIZATION

China is going to have to rebuild older, failing cities or change the way new cities are constructed, considering facts like this:

• China every year builds 50% of world’s floor space, totaling 2 billion square meters, and very little of it is energy efficient.

• Average urban dwellers spends 2.5 times as much energy as their rural counterparts.

WATER PROBLEM

To recap:

Severe water scarcity.

Dismal water quality.

Melting ice masses. Rising sea levels. Declining agricultural output. Unpredictable weather patterns. Vulnerable vegetation.

This is a crisis. (Read PART ONE for more info.)

SO WHAT?

In a Sino-U.S. relations context: “The issue of climate change is going to be one of the key issues shaping the U.S.-China relationship,” Lieberthal says.

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