DISCUSSION
GROUP
By EDWARD WONG
Published: March 21, 2013
As Pollution Worsens in China, Solutions Succumb to Infighting
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
Smog veiled the China Central Television Building in Beijing last week. Air pollution hit record levels in north China last month.
By EDWARD WONG
Published: March 21, 2013 17
BEIJING — China’s state leadership transition has taken place this month against an ominous backdrop. More than 16,000 dead pigshave been found floating in rivers that provide drinking water to Shanghai. A haze akin to volcanic fumes cloaked the capital, causing convulsive coughing and obscuring the portrait of Mao Zedong on the gate to the Forbidden City.So severe are China’s environmental woes, especially the noxious air, that top government officials have been forced to openly acknowledge them. Fu Ying, the spokeswoman for the National People’s Congress, said she checked for smog every morning after opening her curtains and kept at home face masks for her daughter and herself. Li Keqiang, the new prime minister, said the air pollution had made him “quite upset” and vowed to “show even greater resolve and make more vigorous efforts” to clean it up.
What the leaders neglect to say is that infighting within the government bureaucracy is one of the biggest obstacles to enacting stronger environmental policies. Even as some officials push for tighter restrictions on pollutants, state-owned enterprises — especially China’s oil and power companies — have been putting profits ahead of health in working to outflank new rules, according to government data and interviews with people involved in policy negotiations.
For instance, even though trucks and buses crisscrossing China are far worse for the environment than any other vehicles, the oil companies have delayed for years an improvement in the diesel fuel those vehicles burn. As a result, the sulfur levels of diesel in China are at least 23 times that of the United States. As for power companies, the three biggest ones in the country are all repeat violators of government restrictions on emissions from coal-burning plants; offending power plants are found across the country, from Inner Mongolia to the southwest metropolis of Chongqing.
The state-owned enterprises are given critical roles in policy-making on environmental standards. The committees that determine fuel standards, for example, are housed in the buildings of an oil company. Whether the enterprises can be forced to follow, rather than impede, environmental restrictions will be a critical test of the commitment of Mr. Li andXi Jinping, the new party chief and president, to curbing the influence of vested interests in the economy.
Last month, after deadly air pollution hit record levels in northern China, officials led byWen Jiabao, then the prime minister, put forward strict new fuel standards that the oil companies had blocked for years. But there are doubts about whether the oil companies will comply, especially since oil officials resisted a similar government order for higher-grade fuel four years ago. State-owned power companies have been similarly resistant. The companies regularly ignore government orders to upgrade coal-burning electricity plants, according to ministry data. And as with the oil companies, the power companies exert an outsize influence over environmental policy debates.
In 2011, during a round of discussions over stricter emissions standards, the China Electricity Council, which represents the companies, pushed back hard against the proposals, saying that the costs of upgrading the plants would be too high.
“During the procedure of setting the standard, the companies or the industry councils have a lot of influence,” said Zhou Rong, a campaign manager on energy issues for Greenpeace East Asia. “My personal opinion is even if we have the most stringent standards for every sector, the companies will violate those.”
On Feb. 28, Deutsche Bank released an analysts’ note saying that China’s current economic policies would result in an enormous surge in coal consumption and automobile sales over the next decade. “China’s air pollution will become a lot worse from the already unbearable level,” the analysts said, calling for drastic policy changes and “a strong government will to overcome the opposition from interest groups.”
For the most part, Chinese automakers have supported upgrading cars with cleaner technology, which makes them more marketable worldwide, environmental advocates say. But better technology cannot operate properly without high-quality fuel, and this is where the bottleneck occurs.
The system of forging fuel standards has led to fierce bureaucratic infighting.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection is the main government advocate for both higher fuel standards and better automobile technology. It has the power to force automakers to use new technology by issuing stricter tailpipe emissions standards, but it cannot unilaterally impose new fuel standards or enforce compliance from the oil companies. Instead, it can merely lobby other relevant ministries or agencies to take action.
When fuel standards do not keep pace with vehicle technology, the environmental ministry has to delay issuing new tailpipe emissions standards, and so cars do not get upgraded.
Fuel standards are issued by the Standardization Administration of China, which convenes a committee and a subcommittee to research standards.
They each have 30 to 40 members, almost all of whom are from oil companies, said Yue Xin, a scientist who sits on one of the groups on behalf of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
The members from the oil companies “will represent more of the company’s interests,” Mr. Yue said. Sinopec and PetroChina, two of the biggest oil companies, have insisted that consumers or the government pay to upgrade their refineries to produce cleaner fuel, and they have delayed approving higher standards unless there is consensus on who pays.
“Sinopec for years has never argued against the need to improve China’s standards,” said David Vance Wagner, a senior researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation who used to work under the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection. “They’ve just argued about the finance of it.”
In late January, Fu Chengyu, chairman of Sinopec, acknowledged that the oil companies bore some responsibility for air pollution, but he also argued that the government’s fuel standards were not high enough, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. What Mr. Fu failed to explain was that oil company representatives on the committees researching fuel standards have been the main impediment to pushing through better standards.
Mr. Yue and others say that because of constant haggling by the oil companies, the government for years delayed issuing upgraded China IV diesel standards that are on par with European standards. On Feb. 6, after the uproar over record-breaking air pollution, the State Council, China’s cabinet, smashed the gridlock by putting out guidelines that called for a nationwide adoption of the new China IV diesel standards by the end of 2014.
It also set deadlines on the issuing and phasing in of even cleaner China V standards. The next day, the Standardization Administration of China issued the upgraded China IV diesel standards that the oil companies had been trying to delay for years.
But the costs of upgrading could still lead the oil companies to ignore the new standards, which is what they did when the State Council in 2009 ordered a phase-in of the China III diesel standard.
In the Feb. 6 announcement, the State Council said the government needed to create a fiscal policy to support the refinery upgrades, but the Ministry of Finance has yet to make the policy.
Another big concern lies in the debate over the cleaner China V gasoline standard, which the State Council said must be issued by December and phased in by the end of 2017. In the committee debates, Sinopec argues that it is expensive to meet the requirements for sulfur levels.
Oil company representatives did not reply to requests for comment. In public, oil company executives are trying to shift the blame. Mr. Fu told reporters this month that “in fact the biggest killer is coal.”
Beijing officials have said that vehicle emissions account for 22 percent of the main deadly particulate matter in the air, known as PM 2.5, and another 40 percent is from coal-fired factories in Beijing and nearby provinces.
In February, the Ministry of Environmental Protection issued stricter factory emissions standards for six coal-burning industries. First on the list is the power industry, which accounts for about half the coal consumption in China.
But compliance by the state-owned enterprises could be a problem. The environmental ministry publishes annual lists of factories that have violated emissions regulations. A review shows that the factories are all run by the biggest power companies.
The annual lists represent only a fraction of the plants in violation, since installation by the factories of monitoring equipment is spotty, and the equipment readings can be manipulated, said Kevin Jianjun Tu, an energy scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Another problem is the low penalties: fines are generally capped around $16,000, not much of a deterrent, said Ms. Zhou, the Greenpeace representative. She said the violating factories “should be required to stop production temporarily — that would then force companies to take this seriously.”
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”
This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”
Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.
The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.
And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.
Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.
But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.
Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.
So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.
Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.
Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”
There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.
“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.
Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.
There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.
________________________________
A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.
Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.
Zhou Family Ties
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
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