China vs. Earth

article | posted April 19, 2007 (May 7, 2007 issue)

Elizabeth Economy


The message is clear: Shanghai under water, Tibetan glaciers disappearing, crop yields in precipitous decline, epidemics flaring. These are just some of the dire consequences that Chinese scientists predict for their country this century if current climate change is not addressed. Yet China's leaders pay about as much attention to the issue as does George W. Bush. In fact, a report issued last year by the Climate Action Network-Europe ranks China fifty-fourth out of fifty-six countries for its climate change response, just behind the United States and ahead only of Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

Beijing knows the costs of inaction: A recent major official study on climate change predicts up to a 37 percent decline in China's wheat, rice and corn yields in the second half of the century. Precipitation may decline by as much as 30 percent in three of China's seven major river regions: the Huai, Liao and Hai. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which support the richest agricultural regions of the country and derive much of their water from Tibetan glaciers, will initially experience floods and then drought as the glaciers melt.

Moreover, a one-meter rise in sea level will submerge an area the size of Portugal along China's eastern seaboard--home to more than half the country's population and 60 percent of its economic output. Already climate change-related extreme weather is taking its toll: In 2006 such disasters cost China more than $25 billion in damage. Finally, a study by Shanghai-based researcher Wen Jiahong suggests that the lethal H5N1 virus will spread as climate change shifts the habitats and migratory patterns of birds.

CONTINUED BELOW
Yet China's leaders show little inclination to move aggressively to forestall such calamities. As a result of China's reliance on coal to fuel its economy, its emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide have tripled over the past thirty years and are now second only to those of the United States. In late 2006 the International Energy Agency predicted that China would surpass the United States as the largest contributor of CO2 by 2009, a full decade earlier than anticipated. China already uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined and is the world's second-largest consumer of oil after the United States. (India, which lags well behind China in its overall consumption of coal, is nonetheless on track to become a major CO2 contributor over the next ten years and is already the fifth-largest contributor of greenhouse gases globally.)

China's development strategy suggests that little will change in the foreseeable future. With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts. And China's love affair with the private car is set to rival that of the United States. A conservative estimate by the Asian Development Bank predicts that the number of cars in China could increase by fifteen times present levels over the next thirty years, more than tripling CO2 emissions.

If China's development trajectory continues as planned, its increase in greenhouse gas emissions will likely exceed that of all industrialized countries combined over the next twenty-five years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol sought. In short, it's a nightmarishly bad picture.

It would be unfair, however, to characterize China as doing nothing to address climate change. The leadership's worries about both energy security and domestic air pollution--five of the world's ten most polluted cities are in China--are propelling them to set bold targets for reshaping their energy mix and enhancing energy efficiency.

The Chinese government has called for renewable energy to provide 10 percent of the nation's power by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020. Key state-owned enterprises and provincial governors must make 20 percent reductions in their energy intensity (that is, energy consumed per unit of GDP) over the next three years. On that front there is a lot of room for improvement: China's buildings consume 250 percent more energy than buildings in other countries with comparable climates. Beijing has responded with a raft of tough new building codes for energy efficiency. Much like the United States, cities and provinces are now taking matters into their own hands. Shenzhen, for example, has passed a regulation that solar power be used to supply hot water in all new residential buildings under twelve stories.

Already there is some success. With the assistance of the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), China built its first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified building. Fittingly, the building houses the Ministry of Science and Technology, in Beijing. Ten stories tall, it uses 70 percent less energy than similar buildings and saves 10,000 tons of water annually through rainwater collection. NRDC energy expert Robert Watson, one of the chief architects of the project, claims that if every new nonresidential building in China matched this one, the electricity savings would equal the amount of energy provided by the Three Gorges Dam.

But China is littered with well-intended demonstration projects that go nowhere. If these new regulations are to have an impact, Beijing's tough rhetoric must be matched by real enforcement, a task that has proved elusive in the past. In 2002 the Chinese government pledged to cut sulfur dioxide 10 percent by 2005. (SO2 is not a greenhouse gas but is a noxious byproduct of coal power that causes acid rain and urban smog; getting rid of it is a good idea.) But SO2 emissions have increased 27 percent. From all accounts, few if any of the coal-fired power plants that China is bringing online almost every week embrace state-of-the-art clean technology. Moreover, Beijing has already missed its first-year target for the 2006-10 plan to increase the energy efficiency of industry.

Why can't this supposed command economy impose solutions if its leadership sees a problem? There are several reasons behind China's consistent failure to meet environmental goals.

First, the central government in Beijing actually has little on-the-ground enforcement capability in the provinces. Local environmental protection officials report to and are beholden to local government officials, not to the State Environmental Protection Administration in Beijing. One of the West's great misconceptions is that what Beijing says goes. In fact, local officials are often in cahoots with factory managers and allow industry to pollute well above legal limits--either because the officials have a financial stake in the enterprise or because they are afraid that closing a factory, or making it more expensive to operate, will diminish local employment and lead to social unrest, which is now a very serious problem all across China.

In other cases, local officials want to do the right thing but are too weak in the face of powerful enterprise managers.

At root, however, China's lax environmental enforcement results from Beijing's failure to create a system of green-oriented incentives and penalties. Pricing of natural resources, pollution levies and promotion incentives for officials should all be geared toward environmental protection. Instead, growth at all costs is the guiding logic. Moreover, China's leaders are afraid to unleash civil society, in the form of the media, the legal system and NGOs, to help hold local officials accountable for wrongdoing. Already there are tens of thousands of mass demonstrations over environmental pollution every year. Officials fear that opposition demands will escalate out of control, unleashing a far more powerful push for broader political reform. So the government relies on its old methods, limiting transparency, accountability and free expression.

On the international stage, China faces pressure and incentives to become more environmentally responsible. Beijing's interest in promoting energy efficiency and the development of renewable energy resources--as well as a desire to be perceived as a constructive global actor--drove China's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. And China has become an active player in the Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), tapping into opportunities for technology transfer and international investment. China already has some seventy CDM projects under way--well over half of which supply foreign investment and/or technology for renewable energy projects. According to an Asian Development Bank expert, China could generate an annual revenue stream of more than $2 billion by participating in externally funded CDM projects.

But without more substantial commitment to meet real targets for radical emissions reductions, China's greenhouse contributions will overwhelm its best efforts.

If there is a meaningful Chinese discussion about tackling climate change, it takes place largely behind closed doors, well out of sight of foreigners. Perhaps recent natural disasters will motivate Chinese leaders: Over just the past year China has suffered floods in the east that have affected more than 10 million people, while drought this spring left 13 million people and 12 million farm animals without enough drinking water.

The Communist Party's argument over the past fifteen years has been: Since China came late to the industrialization game, the core economies, with their significantly greater historical greenhouse gas contributions, must pay for a global transformation away from fossil fuels. Now it is China's turn to develop, so deal with it.

"Development is the first urgent task," said Qin Dahe, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It's a firm principle and, moreover, we need good and fast development. Only then will we be able to step by step solve the problem" of climate change. Chinese officials are also quick to point out that on a per capita basis, China's greenhouse gas emissions are dwarfed by those of the developed countries: Per capita discharge is only 61 percent of the world's average and 21 percent of that of OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries.

A more subtle indication of how China's leaders understand the global climate change regime is revealed by the regulatory framework China has established for the Kyoto-related CDM projects. In essence, Beijing places a higher priority on projects that contribute to the development of the economy and transfer technology to China than on projects that make reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

When growth and green can be accomplished together, the Chinese government embraces environmentalism. For example, it actively discriminates in favor of CDM proposals that transfer technology and advance the country's capacity in renewables, energy efficiency and methane recovery. But reforestation projects or projects that propose to reduce emissions of HFC-23--a greenhouse gas with global warming potential more than 11,000 times that of CO2--are discouraged because they do not involve enough capital or provide technology transfer. Working within these confines, the Kyoto-related CDM framework offers important ways for OECD countries to nudge China away from fossil fuels.

Paradoxically, another reason climate change is not a bigger issue in China has to do with local pollution. Anyone who has visited an inland Chinese city knows how terrifyingly bad the air is. Chinese media are replete with horrifying statistics: An estimated 400,000 people die prematurely from respiratory diseases related to air pollution each year; one-quarter of China's land is desert, and the desert is advancing at the rate of 1,900 square miles per year, producing tens of thousands of environmental migrants; and in China's north and west, severe and growing water scarcity is impinging on economic growth, limiting agricultural and industrial output. As a result even the burgeoning environmental nongovernmental sector in China discusses climate change only as an afterthought. Strangely, few outside the scientific community make the connection that climate change may be exacerbating and exacerbated by these "domestic" problems.

The world's most industrialized countries started the climate crisis, but China might well finish the job. Not having China on board for a more stringent post-Kyoto accord is simply not an option.

In late April the Chinese government is expected to release a national plan on global climate change. From all accounts, the document will reinforce the government's commitment to energy efficiency and renewables while also setting forth prevention policies for natural disasters. What it will not do, unsurprisingly, is embrace any targets or timetables for greenhouse gas emission reductions. For that to happen, two things are necessary. First, the United States, preferably with Australia and India in tow, must agree to aggressive emission reductions, perhaps along the lines currently pursued by California. Without a strong US commitment, the international community has no credibility in pressuring the Chinese.

Second, OECD countries will have to be far more generous and comprehensive in compensating China in its struggle to enforce tougher energy efficiency and renewable standards. That can be done with both financial incentives and technology transfers. What finally brought the Chinese on board with Kyoto and previous international environmental agreements was the attraction of getting paid to do the right thing. If the United States joins the fight against climate change--and if the price is right--there is every reason to believe that China can commit to doing the right thing again.

China vs. Earth

Elizabeth Economy

The message is clear: Shanghai under water, Tibetan glaciers disappearing, crop yields in precipitous decline, epidemics flaring. These are just some of the dire consequences that Chinese scientists predict for their country this century if current climate change is not addressed. Yet China's leaders pay about as much attention to the issue as does George W. Bush. In fact, a report issued last year by the Climate Action Network-Europe ranks China fifty-fourth out of fifty-six countries for its climate change response, just behind the United States and ahead only of Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

Beijing knows the costs of inaction: A recent major official study on climate change predicts up to a 37 percent decline in China's wheat, rice and corn yields in the second half of the century. Precipitation may decline by as much as 30 percent in three of China's seven major river regions: the Huai, Liao and Hai. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which support the richest agricultural regions of the country and derive much of their water from Tibetan glaciers, will initially experience floods and then drought as the glaciers melt.

Moreover, a one-meter rise in sea level will submerge an area the size of Portugal along China's eastern seaboard--home to more than half the country's population and 60 percent of its economic output. Already climate change-related extreme weather is taking its toll: In 2006 such disasters cost China more than $25 billion in damage. Finally, a study by Shanghai-based researcher Wen Jiahong suggests that the lethal H5N1 virus will spread as climate change shifts the habitats and migratory patterns of birds.

Yet China's leaders show little inclination to move aggressively to forestall such calamities. As a result of China's reliance on coal to fuel its economy, its emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide have tripled over the past thirty years and are now second only to those of the United States. In late 2006 the International Energy Agency predicted that China would surpass the United States as the largest contributor of CO2 by 2009, a full decade earlier than anticipated. China already uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined and is the world's second-largest consumer of oil after the United States. (India, which lags well behind China in its overall consumption of coal, is nonetheless on track to become a major CO2 contributor over the next ten years and is already the fifth-largest contributor of greenhouse gases globally.)

China's development strategy suggests that little will change in the foreseeable future. With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts. And China's love affair with the private car is set to rival that of the United States. A conservative estimate by the Asian Development Bank predicts that the number of cars in China could increase by fifteen times present levels over the next thirty years, more than tripling CO2 emissions.

If China's development trajectory continues as planned, its increase in greenhouse gas emissions will likely exceed that of all industrialized countries combined over the next twenty-five years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol sought. In short, it's a nightmarishly bad picture.

It would be unfair, however, to characterize China as doing nothing to address climate change. The leadership's worries about both energy security and domestic air pollution--five of the world's ten most polluted cities are in China--are propelling them to set bold targets for reshaping their energy mix and enhancing energy efficiency.

The Chinese government has called for renewable energy to provide 10 percent of the nation's power by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020. Key state-owned enterprises and provincial governors must make 20 percent reductions in their energy intensity (that is, energy consumed per unit of GDP) over the next three years. On that front there is a lot of room for improvement: China's buildings consume 250 percent more energy than buildings in other countries with comparable climates. Beijing has responded with a raft of tough new building codes for energy efficiency. Much like the United States, cities and provinces are now taking matters into their own hands. Shenzhen, for example, has passed a regulation that solar power be used to supply hot water in all new residential buildings under twelve stories.

Already there is some success. With the assistance of the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), China built its first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified building. Fittingly, the building houses the Ministry of Science and Technology, in Beijing. Ten stories tall, it uses 70 percent less energy than similar buildings and saves 10,000 tons of water annually through rainwater collection. NRDC energy expert Robert Watson, one of the chief architects of the project, claims that if every new nonresidential building in China matched this one, the electricity savings would equal the amount of energy provided by the Three Gorges Dam.

But China is littered with well-intended demonstration projects that go nowhere. If these new regulations are to have an impact, Beijing's tough rhetoric must be matched by real enforcement, a task that has proved elusive in the past. In 2002 the Chinese government pledged to cut sulfur dioxide 10 percent by 2005. (SO2 is not a greenhouse gas but is a noxious byproduct of coal power that causes acid rain and urban smog; getting rid of it is a good idea.) But SO2 emissions have increased 27 percent. From all accounts, few if any of the coal-fired power plants that China is bringing online almost every week embrace state-of-the-art clean technology. Moreover, Beijing has already missed its first-year target for the 2006-10 plan to increase the energy efficiency of industry.

Why can't this supposed command economy impose solutions if its leadership sees a problem? There are several reasons behind China's consistent failure to meet environmental goals.

First, the central government in Beijing actually has little on-the-ground enforcement capability in the provinces. Local environmental protection officials report to and are beholden to local government officials, not to the State Environmental Protection Administration in Beijing. One of the West's great misconceptions is that what Beijing says goes. In fact, local officials are often in cahoots with factory managers and allow industry to pollute well above legal limits--either because the officials have a financial stake in the enterprise or because they are afraid that closing a factory, or making it more expensive to operate, will diminish local employment and lead to social unrest, which is now a very serious problem all across China.

In other cases, local officials want to do the right thing but are too weak in the face of powerful enterprise managers.

At root, however, China's lax environmental enforcement results from Beijing's failure to create a system of green-oriented incentives and penalties. Pricing of natural resources, pollution levies and promotion incentives for officials should all be geared toward environmental protection. Instead, growth at all costs is the guiding logic. Moreover, China's leaders are afraid to unleash civil society, in the form of the media, the legal system and NGOs, to help hold local officials accountable for wrongdoing. Already there are tens of thousands of mass demonstrations over environmental pollution every year. Officials fear that opposition demands will escalate out of control, unleashing a far more powerful push for broader political reform. So the government relies on its old methods, limiting transparency, accountability and free expression.

On the international stage, China faces pressure and incentives to become more environmentally responsible. Beijing's interest in promoting energy efficiency and the development of renewable energy resources--as well as a desire to be perceived as a constructive global actor--drove China's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. And China has become an active player in the Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), tapping into opportunities for technology transfer and international investment. China already has some seventy CDM projects under way--well over half of which supply foreign investment and/or technology for renewable energy projects. According to an Asian Development Bank expert, China could generate an annual revenue stream of more than $2 billion by participating in externally funded CDM projects.

But without more substantial commitment to meet real targets for radical emissions reductions, China's greenhouse contributions will overwhelm its best efforts.

If there is a meaningful Chinese discussion about tackling climate change, it takes place largely behind closed doors, well out of sight of foreigners. Perhaps recent natural disasters will motivate Chinese leaders: Over just the past year China has suffered floods in the east that have affected more than 10 million people, while drought this spring left 13 million people and 12 million farm animals without enough drinking water.

The Communist Party's argument over the past fifteen years has been: Since China came late to the industrialization game, the core economies, with their significantly greater historical greenhouse gas contributions, must pay for a global transformation away from fossil fuels. Now it is China's turn to develop, so deal with it.

"Development is the first urgent task," said Qin Dahe, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "It's a firm principle and, moreover, we need good and fast development. Only then will we be able to step by step solve the problem" of climate change. Chinese officials are also quick to point out that on a per capita basis, China's greenhouse gas emissions are dwarfed by those of the developed countries: Per capita discharge is only 61 percent of the world's average and 21 percent of that of OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries.

A more subtle indication of how China's leaders understand the global climate change regime is revealed by the regulatory framework China has established for the Kyoto-related CDM projects. In essence, Beijing places a higher priority on projects that contribute to the development of the economy and transfer technology to China than on projects that make reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

When growth and green can be accomplished together, the Chinese government embraces environmentalism. For example, it actively discriminates in favor of CDM proposals that transfer technology and advance the country's capacity in renewables, energy efficiency and methane recovery. But reforestation projects or projects that propose to reduce emissions of HFC-23--a greenhouse gas with global warming potential more than 11,000 times that of CO2--are discouraged because they do not involve enough capital or provide technology transfer. Working within these confines, the Kyoto-related CDM framework offers important ways for OECD countries to nudge China away from fossil fuels.

Paradoxically, another reason climate change is not a bigger issue in China has to do with local pollution. Anyone who has visited an inland Chinese city knows how terrifyingly bad the air is. Chinese media are replete with horrifying statistics: An estimated 400,000 people die prematurely from respiratory diseases related to air pollution each year; one-quarter of China's land is desert, and the desert is advancing at the rate of 1,900 square miles per year, producing tens of thousands of environmental migrants; and in China's north and west, severe and growing water scarcity is impinging on economic growth, limiting agricultural and industrial output. As a result even the burgeoning environmental nongovernmental sector in China discusses climate change only as an afterthought. Strangely, few outside the scientific community make the connection that climate change may be exacerbating and exacerbated by these "domestic" problems.

The world's most industrialized countries started the climate crisis, but China might well finish the job. Not having China on board for a more stringent post-Kyoto accord is simply not an option.

In late April the Chinese government is expected to release a national plan on global climate change. From all accounts, the document will reinforce the government's commitment to energy efficiency and renewables while also setting forth prevention policies for natural disasters. What it will not do, unsurprisingly, is embrace any targets or timetables for greenhouse gas emission reductions. For that to happen, two things are necessary. First, the United States, preferably with Australia and India in tow, must agree to aggressive emission reductions, perhaps along the lines currently pursued by California. Without a strong US commitment, the international community has no credibility in pressuring the Chinese.

Second, OECD countries will have to be far more generous and comprehensive in compensating China in its struggle to enforce tougher energy efficiency and renewable standards. That can be done with both financial incentives and technology transfers. What finally brought the Chinese on board with Kyoto and previous international environmental agreements was the attraction of getting paid to do the right thing. If the United States joins the fight against climate change--and if the price is right--there is every reason to believe that China can commit to doing the right thing again.

The truth about recycling

Jun 7th 2007
From The Economist print edition

IT IS an awful lot of rubbish. Since 1960 the amount of municipal waste being collected in America has nearly tripled, reaching 245m tonnes in 2005. According to European Union statistics, the amount of municipal waste produced in western Europe increased by 23% between 1995 and 2003, to reach 577kg per person. (So much for the plan to reduce waste per person to 300kg by 2000.) As the volume of waste has increased, so have recycling efforts. In 1980 America recycled only 9.6% of its municipal rubbish; today the rate stands at 32%. A similar trend can be seen in Europe, where some countries, such as Austria and the Netherlands, now recycle 60% or more of their municipal waste. Britain's recycling rate, at 27%, is low, but it is improving fast, having nearly doubled in the past three years.

Even so, when a city introduces a kerbside recycling programme, the sight of all those recycling lorries trundling around can raise doubts about whether the collection and transportation of waste materials requires more energy than it saves. “We are constantly being asked: Is recycling worth doing on environmental grounds?” says Julian Parfitt, principal analyst at Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a non-profit British company that encourages recycling and develops markets for recycled materials.

Studies that look at the entire life cycle of a particular material can shed light on this question in a particular case, but WRAP decided to take a broader look. It asked the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Topic Centre on Waste to conduct a review of 55 life-cycle analyses, all of which were selected because of their rigorous methodology. The researchers then looked at more than 200 scenarios, comparing the impact of recycling with that of burying or burning particular types of waste material. They found that in 83% of all scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the environment.

Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain's recycling efforts reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain's annual carbon-dioxide emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the roads.Similarly, America's Environmental Protection Agency estimates that recycling reduced the country's carbon emissions by 49m tonnes in 2005.

Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural resources. It also reduces the amount of waste that is buried or burnt, hardly ideal ways to get rid of the stuff. (Landfills take up valuable space and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and although incinerators are not as polluting as they once were, they still produce noxious emissions, so people dislike having them around.) But perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is the saving in energy and the reduction in greenhouse gases and pollution that result when scrap materials are substituted for virgin feedstock. “If you can use recycled materials, you don't have to mine ores, cut trees and drill for oil as much,” says Jeffrey Morris of Sound Resource Management, a consulting firm based in Olympia, Washington.

Extracting metals from ore, in particular, is extremely energy-intensive. Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass. Recycling also reduces emissions of pollutants that can cause smog, acid rain and the contamination of waterways.

The China question

But the practice of shipping recyclables to China is controversial. Especially in Britain, politicians have voiced the concern that some of those exports may end up in landfills. Many experts disagree. According to Pieter van Beukering, an economist who has studied the trade of waste paper to India and waste plastics to China: “as soon as somebody is paying for the material, you bet it will be recycled.”

In fact, Dr van Beukering argues that by importing waste materials, recycling firms in developing countries are able to build larger factories and achieve economies of scale, recycling materials more efficiently and at lower environmental cost. He has witnessed as much in India, he says, where dozens of inefficient, polluting paper mills near Mumbai were transformed into a smaller number of far more productive and environmentally friendly factories within a few years.

Still, compared with Western countries, factories in developing nations may be less tightly regulated, and the recycling industry is no exception. China especially has been plagued by countless illegal-waste imports, many of which are processed by poor migrants in China's coastal regions. They dismantle and recycle anything from plastic to electronic waste without any protection for themselves or the environment.

The Chinese government has banned such practices, but migrant workers have spawned a mobile cottage industry that is difficult to wipe out, says Aya Yoshida, a researcher at Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies who has studied Chinese waste imports and recycling practices. Because this type of industry operates largely under the radar, it is difficult to assess its overall impact. But it is clear that processing plastic and electronic waste in a crude manner releases toxic chemicals, harming people and the environment—the opposite of what recycling is supposed to achieve.

Under pressure from environmental groups, such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, some computer-makers have established rules to ensure that their products are recycled in a responsible way. Hewlett-Packard has been a leader in this and even operates its own recycling factories in California and Tennessee. Dell, which was once criticised for using prison labour to recycle its machines, now takes back its old computers for no charge. And last month Steve Jobs detailed Apple's plans to eliminate the use of toxic substances in its products.

Far less controversial is the recycling of glass—except, that is, in places where there is no market for it. Britain, for example, is struggling with a mountain of green glass. It is the largest importer of wine in the world, bringing in more than 1 billion litres every year, much of it in green glass bottles. But with only a tiny wine industry of its own, there is little demand for the resulting glass. Instead what is needed is clear glass, which is turned into bottles for spirits, and often exported to other countries. As a result, says Andy Dawe, WRAP's glass-technology manager, Britain is in the “peculiar situation” of having more green glass than it has production capacity for.

Britain's bottle-makers already use as much recycled green glass as they can in their furnaces to produce new bottles. So some of the surplus glass is down-cycled into construction aggregates or sand for filtration systems. But WRAP's own analysis reveals that the energy savings for both appear to be “marginal or even disadvantageous”. Working with industry, WRAP has started a new programme called GlassRite Wine, in an effort to right the imbalance. Instead of being bottled at source, some wine is now imported in 24,000-litre containers and then bottled in Britain. This may dismay some wine connoisseurs, but it solves two problems, says Mr Dawe: it reduces the amount of green glass that is imported and puts what is imported to good use. It can also cut shipping costs by up to 40%.

The future of recycling

This is an unusual case, however. More generally, one of the biggest barriers to more efficient recycling is that most products were not designed with recycling in mind. Remedying this problem may require a complete rethinking of industrial processes, says William McDonough, an architect and the co-author of a book published in 2002 called “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”. Along with Michael Braungart, his fellow author and a chemist, he lays out a vision for establishing “closed-loop” cycles where there is no waste. Recycling should be taken into account at the design stage, they argue, and all materials should either be able to return to the soil safely or be recycled indefinitely. This may sound like wishful thinking, but Mr McDonough has a good pedigree. Over the years he has worked with companies including Ford and Google.

An outgrowth of “Cradle to Cradle” is the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, a non-profit working group that has developed guidelines that look beyond the traditional benchmarks of packaging design to emphasise the use of renewable, recycled and non-toxic source materials, among other things. Founded in 2003 with just nine members, the group now boasts nearly 100 members, including Target, Starbucks and Estée Lauder, some of which have already begun to change the design of their packaging.

Sustainable packaging not only benefits the environment but can also cut costs. Last year Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, announced that it wanted to reduce the amount of packaging it uses by 5% by 2013, which could save the company as much as $3.4 billion and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 667,000 tonnes. As well as trying to reduce the amount of packaging, Wal-Mart also wants to recycle more of it. Two years ago the company began to use an unusual process, called the “sandwich bale”, to collect waste material at its stores and distribution centres for recycling. It involves putting a layer of cardboard at the bottom of a rubbish compactor before filling it with waste material, and then putting another layer of cardboard on top. The compactor then produces a “sandwich” which is easier to handle and transport, says Jeff Ashby of Rocky Mountain Recycling, who invented the process for Wal-Mart. As well as avoiding disposal costs for materials it previously sent to landfill, the company now makes money by selling waste at market prices.

EPAIt does get recycled, honest

Evidently there is plenty of scope for further innovation in recycling. New ideas and approaches will be needed, since many communities and organisations have set high targets for recycling. Europe's packaging directive requires member states to recycle 60% of their glass and paper, 50% of metals and 22.5% of plastic packaging by the end of 2008. Earlier this year the European Parliament voted to increase recycling rates by 2020 to 50% of municipal waste and 70% of industrial waste. Recycling rates can be boosted by charging households and businesses more if they produce more rubbish, and by reducing the frequency of rubbish collections while increasing that of recycling collections.

Meanwhile a number of cities and firms (including Wal-Mart, Toyota and Nike) have adopted zero-waste targets. This may be unrealistic but Matt Hale, director of the office of solid waste at America's Environmental Protection Agency, says it is a worthy goal and can help companies think about better ways to manage materials. It forces people to look at the entire life-cycle of a product, says Dr Hale, and ask questions: Can you reduce the amount of material to begin with? Can you design the product to make recycling easier?

If done right, there is no doubt that recycling saves energy and raw materials, and reduces pollution. But as well as trying to recycle more, it is also important to try to recycle better. As technologies and materials evolve, there is room for improvement and cause for optimism. In the end, says Ms Krebs, “waste is really a design flaw.”

Is China's Air Clean or What? - Mixed Messages in researches

There is Richard MacGregor's article titled 750,000 a year killed by Chinese pollution accompanied by a Financial Times editorial titled China must come clean about its poisonous environment. Here is Richard MacGregor's report:

Beijing engineered the removal of nearly a third of a World Bank report on pollution in China because of concerns that findings on premature deaths could provoke “social unrest”. The report, produced in co-operation with Chinese government ministries over several years, found about 750,000 people die prematurely in China each year, mainly from air pollution in large cities.

China’s State Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) and health ministry asked the World Bank to cut the calculations of premature deaths from the report when a draft was finished last year, according to Bank advisers and Chinese officials. Advisers to the research team said ministries told them this information, including a detailed map showing which parts of the country suffered the most deaths, was too sensitive.

“The World Bank was told that it could not publish this information. It was too sensitive and could cause social unrest,” one adviser to the study told the Financial Times. Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China, according to previous World Bank research.

Guo Xiaomin, a retired Sepa official who co-ordinated the Chinese research team, said some material was omitted from the pollution report because of concerns that the methodology was unreliable. But he also said such information on premature deaths “could cause misunderstanding”. “We did not announce these figures. We did not want to make this report too thick,” he said in an interview.

The pared-down report, “Cost of Pollution in China”, has yet to be officially launched but a version, which can be downloaded from the internet was released at a conference in Beijing in March.

Missing from this report are the research project’s findings that high air-pollution levels in Chinese cities is leading to the premature deaths of 350,000-400,000 people each year. A further 300,000 people die prematurely each year from exposure to poor air indoors, according to advisers, but little discussion of this issue survived in the report because it was outside the ambit of the Chinese ministries which sponsored the research. Another 60,000-odd premature deaths were attributable to poor-quality water, largely in the countryside, from severe diarrhoea, and stomach, liver and bladder cancers.

The mortality information was “reluctantly” excised by the World Bank from the published report, according to advisers to the research project.

Sepa and the health ministry declined to comment. The World Bank said that the findings of the report were still being discussed with the government. A spokesperson said: “The conference version of the report did not include some of the issues still under discussion.” She said the findings of the report were due to be released as a series of papers soon.

I look at this sentence: "Sepa and the health ministry declined to comment" and I think these people must be brain dead. Silence is likely to be taken to be admission of guilt that will generate a wave of criticisms. Why not deal with the issue head on?

First, consider the World Bank study. Actually, I have no information about this study itself, but I take it to be a top-quality study like similar studies on the same subject. The problem here is that it is hard to estimate the number of pre-mature deaths due to pollution. If you want to estimate the number of excess deaths due to the war in Iraq, you compare the mortality rates before and after the invasion and you get the number of excess deaths (e.g. the Lancet study). If you want to estimate the number of pre-mature deaths due to tobacco, you can compare the age-specific-adjusted mortality rates among smokers and non-smokers (e.g. American Medical Association study). In these cases, you always qualify your results by stating that there can be unaccounted for causes (and that was how the tobacco lobby managed to stall anti-tobacco legislation in the United States for several decades).

But if you want to estimate the number of pre-mature deaths due to pollution, you do what? You cannot compare the mortality rates of the present China against a China without pollution. The latter does not exist objectively. Therefore, you have to make some assumptions (e.g. compare mortality rates in high pollution cities versus low pollution ones), but these assumptions are tenuous. For example, the high pollution cities are the economically developed urban agglomerations while the lower pollution cities are economically undeveloped cities in the backlands. Are you sure that they would have the same mortality rates if pollution does not exist? Have you thought about the impact due to differences in income, diet, nutrition, health care services, etc? The technical explanations may elude most readers, and that may be the reason why Sepa and health ministry do not want to comment as it may only make matters worse. But their silence is making things worse now.

For illustration about why the technical description is hard, here is a statement made at a US Congressional hearing:

There are two ways of studying the health effects of particulate matter: time-series studies and cohort studies. Time series studies track people over short pollution episodes, correlating morbidity (illness) and mortality with daily pollution levels. As of 1997, numerous time-series studies had reported associations between PM and daily mortality and morbidity. Landmark studies include Dockery and Pope (1994), Schwartz (1994), Katsouyanni, et al. (1997). These studies were criticized because they were largely conducted in single locations chosen for unspecified reasons and were analyzed with different statistical approaches.

In 2000, a Health Effects Institute study used explicit criteria to select cities from a well-defined sampling frame and analyzed them in a consistent fashion. The results from this 90-city study corroborated previous results, including the Katsouyanni 15-city study and a recent meta-analysis of 29 studies in 23 locations in Europe and North and South America (Levy, et al. 2000).

Cohort studies follow initially healthy people over longer periods to see how they develop disease or die. Landmark cohort studies include the Harvard Six Cities Study (Dockery, et al. 1993) and the American Cancer Society Study (Pope, et al. 1995). These studies followed large numbers of individuals over many years and observed their rates of mortality. They found that long-term average mortality rates were 17 percent to 26 percent higher in those living in communities with higher levels of PM2E even after accounting for the effects of other risk factors. The results have been used to demonstrate lifespan reduction attributable to exposure to PM2E pollution. Other researchers have independently confirmed the findings of both of these studies.

A recent study reanalyzed the American Cancer Society (ACS) data (Pope, Thurston and Krewski 2002). This study tracked people over a longer time and controlled more extensively for individual risk factors. They compared data on particulate and gaseous air pollution with data on the cause of death among 500,000 people followed for 16 years by the ACS. After compensating for risk factors, as well as possible regional differences, the researchers found that every 10-microgram increase in fine particles per cubic meter of air produces a 6 percent increase in the risk of death by cardiopulmonary disease, and 8 percent for lung cancer. This is similar to the risk faced by those with long-term exposure to second-hand smoke.

What is the general public going to think about this type of description? They don't know and they only want a count of the number of dead people due to air pollution

Secondly, how would you interpret the figure 750,000? If you line the corpses in a row down the road, then it is a horrible sight. You would like it to be zero, but that is not happening anywhere in the world. So what is a realistic goal for China to aim for? Or to be even simpler, what is the number if China were just to meet the global average? Here is a global estimate from BBC:

The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel. Most are in poor countries.

So 3.0 + 1.6 million = 4.6 million people were killed worldwide by air pollution. China has about 20% of the population of the world. 20% of 4.6 million people is 920,000. This is for indoor/outdoor air pollution only. The World Bank estimate of 750,000 is for all pre-mature deaths in China, most of which are due to air pollution. Now what? It would seem that China has even fewer pollution-related deaths compared to the rest of the world!

Administration Proposes Expanded Energy Drilling

The Bush administration proposed on Monday leasing out millions of acres along the coasts of Alaska and Virginia to oil and gas drillers, a move that would end a longstanding ban on drilling in those environmentally sensitive areas.
Both areas have been closed to new drilling for many years. The areas off Virginia are still covered by laws that prohibit new drilling in all areas along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. But Congress lifted the prohibition on Bristol Bay off Alaska in 2003, and President Bush lifted an executive order in January that had blocked drilling there through 2012.
In the case of Virginia, administration officials are hoping to capitalize on interest in drilling expressed by the state legislature, which passed a bill last year asking the federal government to allow exploration for natural gas in waters 50 miles or farther from the state coastline.
Both proposals are part of a broader five-year plan to open up 48 million acres along the outer continental shelf to oil and gas drilling. Unless Congress objects within 60 days, most of the five-year plan will go into effect, though resistance has been voiced. Starting this year, the Interior Department plans to offer leases on about 8.3 million acres in the central region of the Gulf of Mexico, which Congress specifically approved for offshore drilling late last year.
But the department hopes to open up far more than that. It would offer leases on 37 million acres off Alaska, starting as early as 2008, in vast new areas in the Beaufort Sea, the Chukchi Sea and the Cook Inlet. None of those areas have been subject to a drilling ban, but none have been tapped before.
Starting in 2011, the Interior Department would also lease out 5.6 million acres in Bristol Bay along the Alaska Peninsula, an area that Congress closed off after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. If the plan can get approval from Congress, it would offer up three million acres off the coast of Virginia, starting in 2012.
“The outer continental shelf is a vital source of domestic oil and natural gas for America, especially in light of sharply rising energy prices,” said Dirk Kempthorne, secretary of the interior.
But Democrats in Congress criticized the plans for Alaska and Virginia, and they are likely to extend the current ban on drilling off Virginia. Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat, said he supported limited drilling for exploration but has refused to endorse production.
“Whatever pressing energy issue comes before the American people, the Bush administration always responds with the same oil answer: more oil,” said Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.
The proposal includes measures to protect against damage to coastal areas from oil spills and other accidents. It would not allow drilling within 50 miles of the Virginia shore and would wall off an additional “obstruction zone” near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
Some environmental advocates said, however, that the proposed protections would be inadequate and could jeopardize fishing areas.
“The Bush administration is zeroing in on the most environmentally sensitive areas for offshore drilling,” said Richard Charter, a lobbyist for Defenders of Wildlife and co-chairman of the National Outer Continental Shelf Coalition. “These areas that they are characterizing as buffer zones are woefully inadequate when you consider that the Exxon Valdez oil spill traveled hundreds of miles in a matter of weeks.”
It is not clear how much fuel lies in the areas that would be made available. Interior Department officials estimated that the entire plan could produce 10 billion barrels of additional oil and 45 trillion cubic feet of additional natural gas over the next 40 years. That would be equal to about 16 months of the United States’ current oil consumption and about two years of its current consumption of natural gas.
The oil industry’s two big trade associations, the American Petroleum Institute and the Independent Petroleum Association of America, both praised the administration plan and urged Congress to open even more areas to drilling.
Royal Dutch Shell has been particularly eager to explore and develop the areas in Alaska, and has hired a number of former state and federal officials to help build popular support in communities near the proposed drilling areas.
If the administration does lease out areas in Alaska, companies may be entitled to a special reprieve from paying royalties to the government. In passing the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress extended what is known as “royalty relief” for deepwater drillers to cover oil and gas produced in “frontier areas” that are far from transportation centers.
The administration plan could encounter heavy resistance. New Jersey’s two senators, Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, both Democrats, warned in a joint statement that the plan to allow drilling near Virginia was unacceptable because it “starts us down the slippery slope that could lead us to drilling off New Jersey’s coast.”
Congress has extended an annual moratorium on leasing along the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts for more than 20 years. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, has been a staunch supporter of the drilling bans and has protested Mr. Bush’s decision in January to lift the prohibition for Bristol Bay.

Climate Change Adds Twist to Debate Over Dams

The power company that owns four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River says the dams provide a crucial source of so-called clean energy at a time when carbon emissions have become one of the world’s foremost environmental concerns.

But the American Indians, fishermen and environmentalists who want the dams removed point to what has happened since the first one was built nearly 90 years ago: endangered salmon have been blocked from migrating, Indian livelihoods have been threatened, and, more recently, the commercial fishing industry off the Oregon and California coasts has been devastated. They say the dams are anything but clean. They say the river is a mess.

“Should we have to sacrifice water quality for air quality?” said Craig Tucker, who is coordinating efforts by the Karuk tribe of Northern California to take down the dams. “Should Indians and family fisherman be the ones who have to sacrifice to address this problem?”

Whether the power company, PacifiCorp, wants to keep the dams because they improve air quality or simply because they are inexpensive to operate is not clear. But emphasizing an environmental argument that touches on climate change has added a new wrinkle to the longstanding debate over dam removal in the Pacific Northwest. In a region where plenty of residents measured their “carbon footprints” long before green became the new black, PacifiCorp is suggesting that righting one environmental wrong could lead to another, one that could affect people more than fish.

The Klamath dams provide enough power to serve about 70,000 homes, a small fraction of PacifiCorp’s 1.6 million customers, which span six Western states. But the company says only coal or natural gas are likely to be reliable enough to replace the river, which hits hydroelectric turbines four times on its way to the sea from east of the snow-capped Cascade Range.

Those who support removing the dams largely dismiss the clean-energy argument, saying the benefits outweigh losing a relatively small source of hydropower. They note that PacifiCorp’s increased interest in the environment comes as recent rulings by judges and federal fisheries agencies have given new momentum for removal. The company’s federal license to run the dams expired last year, and the government has said PacifiCorp must build fish ladders over the four dams to get a new license, a proposition that could cost $300 million and reduce the power the dams generate, potentially making removal a less costly choice.

Yet whatever is spent to restore salmon, and whether the solution is fish ladders or dam removal, the company has said that its customers will bear the cost, and the carbon.

“It’s a conundrum in many ways,” said Dave Kvamme, a spokesman for PacifiCorp. “Taking away a very useful resource like the Klamath puts more pressure on us to build something else or buy it on the market.”

The Klamath runs more than 250 miles from southwest Oregon to the California coast, connecting two states where power and water supply have long been contentious issues. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski of Oregon are helping lead the push for clean fuel sources. Last year, California passed a law requiring a 25 percent reduction in the state’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. Oregon is also pushing to increase the amount of renewable energy it uses.

Both governors have said removing the Klamath dams should be an option, but they have not taken firm positions. Earlier this year, Mr. Schwarzenegger proposed spending about $4 billion to build two dams on the San Joaquin River for water storage, an idea environmentalists have long opposed.

The Northwest, where more than 80 percent of the power generated comes from hydroelectricity, has long had some of the lowest electricity rates in the nation. It has also been the setting for epic environmental fights that reflect the tension across the region’s topographic and demographic divides.

“We think of ourselves as ahead of the curve, as eco-topia, when it comes to saving endangered species, like the spotted owl,” said John M. Findlay, a history professor at the University of Washington. “But these things are much more complicated when we try to actually solve them.”

Mr. Findlay said the region’s identity as an environmental leader was rooted in cities like Portland and Seattle, not in the areas where rivers provide power and water for farms.

“They’re the most sympathetic to taking down the dams,” he said of big-city residents. “But they’re also the people who are kind of taking cheap power for granted. If you’re in a city and you have the power just piped in over wires it’s too easy to not recognize where that comes from, and not to realize that people and economies are all connected to that.”

The Klamath dams are among the most controversial in a much broader dam removal effort led by environmentalists, American Indians and commercial fishermen.

In the next several years, dams on the Elwha and White Salmon Rivers in Washington and the Sandy River in Oregon are scheduled to be removed. But in many ways, they are only steppingstones to larger targets, including the dams on the Klamath and four on the Lower Snake River.

More fish could be saved by removing the bigger dams, but more power would be lost, too.

Supporters of removal say conservation measures and new sources of energy like wind and sun can replace lost hydroelectric power. Some also say the fact that snowpack is decreasing could reduce the amount of electricity dams generate. Dam owners in the region, including private utilities and the federal government, say the new sources of clean energy cannot replace dams. The use of wind power is expanding quickly, but its effectiveness depends in part on having dams or another steady energy source during lulls in the breeze.

In a written statement last month, Bill Fehrman, the president of PacifiCorp, said replacing power from the Klamath would “cost our customers more money, and potentially a lot more money” and “could result in adding combustion emissions to the environment.”

PacifiCorp has said it is not opposed to removal, but it would need approval from regulating commissions in six states before it could pass on costs of dam removal to its customers. Blending the cost and climate change arguments could strengthen its case.

“We have to demonstrate to our commissions that we’ve done what we can to protect their interest,” said Mr. Kvamme, the spokesman.

Salmon and air quality are not all that is at risk. The river and its dams support an elaborate irrigation system started by the federal government more than a century ago. Water from the river provides for about 240,000 acres of cattle pastures, alfalfa fields and other farming. It also flows through a wildlife preserve.

When Edward Bartell and his family moved to southwest Oregon from California to raise beef cattle 30 years ago, land, water and power were inexpensive. Now, the water supply is at the mercy of an ever denser maze of environmental regulations intended to protect fish. And the price of power, delivered wholesale thanks to the Klamath dams, went through the roof when PacifiCorp said it could no longer justify the discounted rate in the current market.

Mr. Bartell shook his head when asked if families who moved here to farm because of the available irrigation knew such a knot could one day develop, that the dams might not last forever.

“It was unthinkable,” Mr. Bartell said. “Obviously, nobody would have come.”

Challenge to Emissions Rule Is Set to Start

The fight over cars and carbon dioxide moves today from the Supreme Court to a federal courtroom in Burlington, Vt., in a case that automakers say could reshape vehicles sold on the East and West Coasts.
The industry is suing to block a 2004 California regulation on global warming from taking effect. The rule would require a 30 percent cut in emissions of greenhouse gases from cars and trucks sold in Vermont and New York, which follow California’s air quality rules, to be fully phased in by the 2016 model year.
In court filings, automakers have argued that regulating the emissions will increase pollution, cause more traffic deaths and lead domestic automakers to stop selling most of their passenger models in states that adopt such regulations.
The companies have disputed that global warming is a problem, even though they have acknowledged it in different forums as a serious problem. And they tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to close much of this case to the public.
“This is a huge issue to consumers, because it may well determine what vehicles are available for them to purchase,” said Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which includes General Motors, Toyota and most other large automakers. “If it’s a big issue for consumers, it’s a big issue to us.”
Environmental groups and the offices of the attorneys general in Vermont and New York, which is a party to the case, say the automakers are overstating the complexity and hardship of such a regulation.
“It’s that sky-is-falling approach, but the sky didn’t fall with catalytic converters,” Attorney General William H. Sorrell of Vermont said, referring to the antipollution technology forced on the industry in the 1970s.
Last week, in a 5-to-4 decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court ruled that the agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobiles. The Bush administration has long opposed that.
Instead, more than 12 states, including California, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont, have already or are in the process of moving to regulate such emissions.
California has the authority to set air-quality rules, and Northeastern states have long chosen to follow those rules instead of Washington’s. The Supreme Court victory was important for the states, because the approval of the environmental agency is needed before California can regulate emissions involving global warming.
Automakers have sued to block the California regulation in federal courts in California, Rhode Island and Vermont, though just the Vermont case has gone forward. That case is scheduled to enter the trial phase today.
The battle has exposed fault lines among automakers. Two trade groups representing the major manufacturers are involved in the suit, one dominated by domestic producers and one by foreign.
They have clashed in their legal strategies, and just G.M. and DaimlerChrysler, two of the more outspoken companies opposing the new regulation, are directly listed as plaintiffs. The trade groups had initially sued separately but are now plaintiffs in a consolidated suit.
The main legal argument uniting the industry is their contention that states cannot regulate carbon dioxide emissions because that would be little different from regulating fuel economy, and Washington has the sole authority to set mileage standards. The recent Supreme Court ruling, however, appeared to undermine that argument.
The industry estimates that the new regulation would impose a 50 percent increase in fuel economy for passenger cars and small sport-utility vehicles but a more modest increase for large trucks, effectively making it harder for a company like G.M. to bring smaller vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu into compliance than its Hummers.
An expert hired by automakers said, according to court filings, that DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor and G.M. “will need largely to exit” from the passenger car and small truck markets.
Environmental groups say the industry is ignoring the potential effects of its move to bolster alternative fuels like ethanol, as well as the advent of hybrid electric technology and other technologies.
Automakers argued in a court filing in January that “defendants make unsubstantiated predictions that global climate change is having a number of alarming adverse effects.”
Michael J. Stanton, the president of the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, a plaintiff group, said in an interview the position did not represent the views of the mostly Asian automakers who are his constituents, some of whom are trying to create “eco-friendly” reputations.
“We believe that there is enough information out there to address climate change and we know that cars — passenger cars and light trucks — contribute, and we want to be part of the solution,” Mr. Stanton said.
The regulation California adopted in 2004 was to begin taking effect with 2009 models and to be phased in over eight years. President Bush and Congress more recently discussed fuel economy rules that could potentially accomplish similar reductions for gases tied to global warming, though no firm plan is in place.
Among other points, the industry says more fuel efficient cars could be dangerous, because they will be cheaper to drive and lead people to drive more and potentially have more accidents.
“Everybody’s getting a good laugh out of the safety claim,” said David Bookbinder, a lawyer for the Sierra Club, which is a party to the case. “Detroit is saying it’s a bad idea for everybody to drive more.”

Hot and Cold

Last week began with a Supreme Court decision declaring that the federal government had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and all but ordering the Bush administration to do so. It ended with a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s authoritative voice on global warming — warning that failure to contain these emissions will have disastrous environmental effects, especially in poorer countries, which are least able to defend themselves and their people against the consequences of climate change.
One would hope that these events would shake President Bush out of his state of denial and add his authority to the chorus of governors, legislators and business leaders calling for an aggressive regulatory and technological response to the dangers of global warming. They haven’t. When asked about the Supreme Court decision, the president said he thought he was already doing enough.
He argued further that there was little point in the United States’ doing any more unless other polluters like China acted as well. That ignores the reality that no developing country is going to move unless the United States — which produces one-fourth of the world’s emissions with only 5 percent of its population — takes the lead.
The report from the intergovernmental panel was the second of three due this year. The first concluded with “90 percent certainty” that humans had caused the rise in atmospheric temperatures over the last half-century. The most recent focused on the consequences, few of them positive.
The northern latitudes will have longer growing seasons. But elsewhere climate change will lead to more severe storms, the flooding of tropical islands and coastlines inhabited by hundreds of millions of people, the likely extinction of at least one-fourth of the world’s species and, in poorer countries in Asia and Africa, drought and hunger.
Some of these changes have begun. “We’re no longer arm-waving with models,” said Martin Parry, the co-chairman of the team that wrote the report. But the report also makes clear that while emissions already accumulated in the atmosphere make some damage inevitable, the worst can be avoided if the world’s nations take swift action to stabilize and then reverse emissions.
What must be avoided, the report said, is a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, the point at which truly devastating effects will begin to kick in. But such a rise is almost inevitable over the next century if the world continues to do business as usual.
The panel’s next paper will discuss alternatives to business as usual. These policies will almost certainly require a major shift in the way energy is produced and used, as well as massive investments in new technologies. They will also be expensive. But what the world’s scientists are telling us, with increasing confidence, is that the costs of doing nothing will be far greater than the costs of acting now.

Air pressure

America's Supreme Court rules on the environment
THROUGHOUT George Bush’s presidency, the federal government has refused to countenance any regulation of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Whenever the subject comes up, officials tend to mumble about uncertainties. But on Monday April 2nd, in its most important environmental decision for many years, the Supreme Court at last settled one of the biggest outstanding questions: whether the government has the authority to curb emissions in the first place.
The court ruled, by the slenderest of margins, that the Clean Air Act—a law from the 1960s designed to combat smog and acid rain-gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to regulate carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. It also said the EPA would need an excuse grounded in the original law if it decided not to use this power. It dismissed the justifications the EPA had provided for inaction—that emissions from American cars were insignificant in the grand scheme of things and that unilateral action by America would undermine efforts to achieve international consensus on global warming—as inadequate. Strictly speaking, the decision applies only to emissions from vehicles, but another, similar case involving coal-fired power plants is pending in a lower court. The EPA says it is now examining the ruling.
It might examine it for some time, of course. Any regulations it comes up with in response might still defer action into the distant future, since the law allows the EPA to delay implementation until appropriate technology can be acquired at a reasonable cost. Even if it proceeds quite swiftly, a new president and Congress with globe-cooling ideas of their own will be in place long before any new rules come into effect.
That suits the environmental lobby just fine. They hope the ruling will spur Congress to address global warming with proper legislation. After all, it makes little sense for such an important issue to be tackled tangentially through a 40-year-old law. At the very least, they can use the ruling to rally the faithful and shame climate-change sceptics in next year’s elections. And if 2009 sees the inauguration of a greener president, he or she will now have the power to dictate stricter fuel efficiency, in the form of lower CO2 emissions, without reference to Congress. If the lawsuit involving power plants goes the same way, the new president will be able to enforce across-the-board cuts in emissions by fiat. As Barbara Boxer, an environmentally-minded senator from California, stated gleefully, “This decision puts the wind at our back.”
That is true of California in particular. In 2002, the state assembly passed a law regulating emissions of CO2 from vehicles, based on a provision of the Clean Air Act that allows California to adopt stricter pollution standards than the federal government (other states can then choose to follow the Californian standards if they wish). Carmakers have challenged the law, in part on the ground that CO2 was not an air pollutant—a notion the Supreme Court has now comprehensively quashed.
California still needs a waiver from the EPA in order to enforce its own emissions standards. The EPA will presumably hesitate to withhold its permission after its setback in court. But it might argue that California does not face the “compelling and extraordinary conditions” the law requires before stricter standards can be imposed. That would prompt another protracted legal battle. On the one hand, global warming is, as its name suggests, a global problem. On the other, a big share of California’s water supply is threatened by decreasing snowfalls in the Sierra Nevada mountains-a change attributed to global warming.
The car industry, at any rate, seems rattled by the ruling. Its trade group quickly declared that the issue of global warming is best handled by at the federal level by Congress. Thanks to the Supreme Court, that now seems more likely.

All washed up

WE WERE right, all along. That is the thrust of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body set up to pronounce authoritatively on the science of global warming. In 2001 it predicted that global warming would lead to many ills, including greater numbers of extinctions, growing shortages of water, higher incidence of tropical diseases, and lower yields from agriculture, fishing and forestry in some places. Now the scientists who write the reports say they have much stronger evidence that such calamities are indeed occurring—faster, in many cases, than they originally thought.
The previous IPCC report, in February, examined the evidence that the globe was actually warming. It called the trend “unequivocal”, and expressed “very high confidence” that it was largely man-made. The new report assesses the likely impact of global warming. It was released on April 6th, after a week of negotiations between scientists and governments over the wording. Representatives of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and America in partiuclar were said to have tried to water down the report, prompting a last-ditch all-night haggle.
The resulting document predicts the same sorts of consequences as its predecessor did in 2001, but with much greater confidence and precision, says Camille Parmesan, a professor at the University of Texas who vetted part of it. By her count, the chapter on current impacts alone rests on a review of over 1,000 academic studies, most of them already published—compared with about 100 last time around.
In a paper published in 2003, Professor Parmesan concluded that half of all species were already altering their behaviour or shifting their range in response to global warming. Others have found that some 26% of coral reefs have already died as a result of warming waters, and that the remainder will probably disappear if average water temperatures rise by another degree—along with the fisheries and tourism they sustain. In a synthesis of such studies, the report concluded that 30% of species face an increased risk of extinction if temperatures rise by 2ºC (3.6ºF).
This sort of finding suggests that the effects of global warming will be “non-linear”, says Paul Epstein, a Harvard University professor who has reviewed the entire report. For one thing, most projections of the impact derive from estimates of changes in average temperature. But many of the ill effects hinge on changes in the minimum temperature, which has been rising twice as fast. This trend is particularly strong near the poles, where the climate is changing fastest. Winters no longer get cold enough in many places to kill off different pests and diseases. So noxious species of ants and bees are marching northwards across America, ticks carrying Lyme disease are proliferating in Scandinavia and tropical highlands around the world are witnessing an invasion of mosquitoes carrying malaria, dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis. “The winter is the most wonderful thing that was ever invented for public health,” Dr Epstein says, “and we're losing it.”
Multiple factors will amplify the effects of global warming on agriculture and forestry. Warmer and drier conditions in many places will reduce yields. Meanwhile, pests such as tree-killing beetles and crop-killing fungi will both increase their range and breed more rapidly. And an increasing incidence of extreme weather, be it floods or droughts, will both damage crops directly and nurture species that prey on them. The poor, especially in tropical climes, will be hardest hit by all this, since they have little means of adapting to such changes.
The report is supposed only to inform policymaking, not to direct it. But the point of the frightening statistics about impending water shortages, epidemics and crop failures, says one of the authors, is to jolt politicians into preparing for the coming afflictions. In other words, the report intends to end the debate between those who think mankind's main effort should be trying to reverse climate change and those who would prefer to concentrate on adapting to its effects. Both strategies, it implies, are urgently needed.

Bush Splits With Congress and States on Emissions

By FELICITY BARRINGER and WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: April 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 3 — A day after the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases, President Bush said he thought that the measures he had taken so far were sufficient.

But the court’s ruling was being welcomed by Congress and the states, which are already using the decision to speed their own efforts to regulate the gases that contribute to global climate change. As a result, Congress and state legislatures are almost certain to be the arenas for far-reaching and bruising lobbying battles.

Mr. Bush made it clear in remarks on Tuesday that he thought his proposal to increase automobile fuel efficiency was sufficient for the moment; he gave no indication he would ask the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions of heat-trapping gases.

“Whatever we do,” he said, “must be in concert with what happens internationally.” He added, “Unless there is an accord with China, China will produce greenhouse gases that will offset anything we do in a brief period of time.”

But with Congress and the states more determined than ever to act, some of the nation’s largest industries — including automobile manufacturers and the oil companies that make their gasoline, and electric utilities and the coal companies that fire many of their boilers — now face the increasingly certain prospect of expensive controls on emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common heat-trapping gas associated with climate change.

At least 300 bills have been filed in 40 states that address heat-trapping gases and climate change in some form, said Adela Flores-Brennan, a policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Washington, Congress has already begun a process that would eventually apportion both the responsibility for cuts in emissions that could cost tens of billions of dollars and the benefits and incentives that could mean billions of dollars of new income.

“Obviously, nobody wants to bear a disproportionate share of the burden,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the newly created House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. “It’s now going to be a multidimensional chess game with the planet’s future in the balance.”

The way legislation apportions emissions cuts among industries — and, as important, how the credits earned by companies that reduce emissions are allocated — will be the focus of the lobbying, said Mr. Markey and lobbyists for environmental groups and industry.

“It’s incumbent on everyone to roll their sleeves up, if they haven’t already, to deal seriously with this problem,” said Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association, the trade group for the coal mine operators who will be at the center of the lobbying. “If pain concentrates the mind, there will be more concentration on the issue now.”

Coal is the major source of electricity in more than half the states, and coal is the fuel most closely associated with high levels of emissions of carbon dioxide. And coal interests have a bipartisan audience. The United Mine Workers is a natural Democratic constituency, while the National Mining Association has been a reliable supporter of the Bush administration.

“There are differences within the industry,” Mr. Popovich said, “but we are allied in favor of a solution that preserves coal’s growth in the United States.”

Next to the electric-utility sector, which is responsible for about 40 percent of emissions of heat-trapping gases, Mr. Markey said, comes the transportation sector, which contributes roughly 30 percent.

The auto industry has long opposed increases in fuel-efficiency standards, which automatically mean a reduction in heat-trapping gases. The oil industry has resisted controls on carbon dioxide emissions. Until recently, the two industries, while occasionally sniping at each other, had avoided explicit endorsement of the regulation that was most feared by the other.

But, with the likelihood of Congressional action increasing, that informal nonaggression pact has ended. Executives of the Big Three auto companies testifying in the House last month explicitly supported regulation of carbon dioxide. And a senior oil industry executive earlier this year gave a speech advocating increases in fuel economy.

The Supreme Court found Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency had erred in justifying its decision not to regulate carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. The court said that by providing nothing more than a “laundry list of reasons not to regulate,” the agency had defied the Clean Air Act’s “clear statutory command.” The ruling also said that the agency could not sidestep its authority to regulate heat-trapping gases unless it could provide a scientific basis for its refusal to do so.

In Congress, controls on automobile emissions remain a work in progress. In more than a dozen states, beginning with California in 2002, they have become a fact — although these laws have been stayed pending legal challenges. Those challenges were greatly weakened, however, by the Supreme Court ruling.

“States are not going to wait,” said Dennis McLerran, executive director of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, created by Washington State. “States are going to continue to act on this. If there is some confusion from this or if it creates greater pressure on Congress, then that’s all to the good.”

Washington is among more than a dozen states that have followed California’s lead in setting goals to restrict carbon dioxide emissions, and it is one of five Western states that have formed an alliance to combat climate change. States in the Northeast have formed a similar alliance.

Several environmental leaders said the court decision could persuade still other states to pass climate-change legislation.

California has been in the vanguard, first with its bill to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicle tailpipes in 2002, and then with its landmark 2006 law requiring a 25 percent reduction in the state’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2020.

Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington have joined California to pursue a regional plan to cut emissions. The idea is to make it profitable for industries to pursue pollution reduction through cap-and-trade plans that would allow companies with emissions lower than the allowed caps to sell credits to companies that exceed them.

Most of the legislation in Congress follows the cap-and-trade model.

Outside the West and the Northeast, states are still finding their way. In North Carolina, government commissions are weighing measures like restricting auto emissions and establishing so-called renewable portfolios, which many states are proposing as a way to balance their energy supply between carbon-producing fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, and clean, renewable fuel sources like wind and solar power.

In Illinois, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich has proposed restricting carbon emissions to 60 percent of 1990 levels by the year 2050, said Steve Frenkel, an aide to the governor.

“You’ve seen a lot of leadership coming out of the coasts,” Mr. Frenkel said. “Looking in the Midwest, where there’s a lot of coal and industrial pollution, how we handle this here is important for how we handle this nationally.”

With about half the states getting at least 50 percent of their electric power from coal, Congress will have to wrestle with the disproportionate impact that climate change legislation could have around the country.

“You’ve got 35 senators reliably for a pretty strong program,” said David Doniger, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “How do you get that to 50 or 60? You have to get senators who come from states where coal is important, autos are important and agriculture is important.”

Taking Aim at All Those Plastic Bags

By a 10-1 Board of Supervisors’ vote, San Francisco became the first major American city to ban the use of non-biodegradable plastic bags by supermarkets, drug stores and other large retailers.
The paper-or-plastic question has long been a vexing one. Paper bags, of course, are biodegradable and recyclable, and are made from trees, a renewable resource. But the production of paper bags generates significantly more air and water pollution; manufacturing and recycling them requires more energy than their plastic cousins do, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Paper bags also take up comparatively more space in landfills, where they are slow to degrade, like most everything in a landfill. A study for the American Forest and Paper Association estimated that about seven billion paper bags were used in the United States in 2003.
On the other hand, plastic bags made of polyethylene, which dominate the market, are non-biodegradable and are made from crude oil and natural gas, both nonrenewable resources. They can be recycled, but are mostly discarded.
The E.P.A. estimated that only 5.2 percent of the plastic bags and sacks in the municipal waste stream in 2005 were recycled, compared with 21 percent of paper bags and sacks. And there are also horror stories about animals swallowing them and starving to death.
Plastic bags have virtually taken over the grocery market since they were first put at check-out stands in 1977. Ninety percent of all grocery bags are now plastic, according to the Progressive Bag Alliance, an industry group of plastic bag manufacturers. Estimates of the number of plastic bags used around the world each year vary wildly — from 100 billion to as many as one trillion.
Whatever the number, it’s a lot. And that has made for a lot of plastic bag litter — which, the E.P.A. says, can take 1,000 years to decompose.
One reason for the abundance of plastic bags is economic. A standard plastic grocery bag costs about a penny to produce, according to the plastics industry, compared with 4 cents to 5 cents for a paper bag. Compostable plastic bags would cost from 8 cents to a dime, the industry says, although supporters of the San Francisco action say the cost would drop as more local governments require them.
Because of a tax, Ireland has cut the use of plastic bags by 90 percent, according to the Irish government.
Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings and accessories chain, has just begun charging customers 5 cents per plastic bag in the United States, which it donates to American Forests, a conservation group. On average, its United States stores have gone through about 70 million a year. In Britain, Ikea says, it has seen a 95 percent drop in plastic bag use since it began charging for them there last spring.
Yet another alternative is to sell consumers reusable bags.
“The paper versus plastics question takes us off the issue, which is consumption,” says Vincent Cobb, who offers reusable bags and containers on the Internet. He admits to using plastic bags, which he calls a “fantastic product,” but not as many as in the past.
“Getting into the habit of bringing your own shopping bag,” he says, “can slash this problem across the board.”

Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms

The world’s richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas.
In its fourth assessment of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used its strongest language yet in drawing a link between human activity and recent warming.
Do rich nations have an obligation to help poorer ones prepare for potential changes caused by global warming?
But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.
Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according to scientists involved in writing it — with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but also better able to withstand them.
Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries.
In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments.
Scientists say it has become increasingly clear that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles. That will nourish crops in warming regions like Canada and Siberia while parching countries — like Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa — which are already prone to drought.
Many other experts insist this is not an either-or situation. They say that cutting the vulnerability of poor regions needs much more attention, but add that unless emissions are curbed, there will be centuries of warming and rising seas that will threaten ecosystems, water supplies, and resources from the poles to the equator, harming rich and poor.
There are some hints that wealthier countries are beginning to shift their focus toward fostering adaptation to warming outside their own borders. Relief organizations including Oxfam and the International Red Cross, foreseeing a world of worsening climate-driven disasters, are turning some of their attention toward projects like expanding mangrove forests as a buffer against storm surges, planting trees on slopes to prevent landslides, or building shelters on high ground.
Some officials from the United States, Britain and Japan say foreign-aid spending can be directed at easing the risks from climate change.
Industrialized countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact rejected by the Bush administration, project that hundreds of millions of dollars will soon flow via that treaty into a climate adaptation fund.
The lack of climate aid persists even though nearly all the world’s industrialized nations, including the United States under the first President Bush, pledged to help when they signed the first global warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in 1992.
A $3 billion Global Environmental Facility fund maintained by contributions from developed countries has nearly $1 billion set aside for projects in poorer countries that limit emissions of greenhouse gases. But critics say those projects often do not have direct local benefits, and many are happening in the large fast-industrializing developing countries — not the poorest ones.
Technology also aids farmers in the north.
Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale focused on climate, said that in the face of warming, it might be necessary to abandon the longstanding notion that all places might someday feed themselves. Poor regions reliant on unpredictable rainfall, he said, should be encouraged to shift people out of farming and into urban areas and import their food from northern countries.
Another option, experts say, is helping poor regions do a better job of forecasting weather. In parts of India, farmers still rely more on astrologers for monsoon predictions than government meteorologists.