Financial Times
Lucy Hornby in Beijing and Amy Kazmin in New Delhi
November 30, 2015
Pedestrians wait at an intersection on a polluted day in Beijing on November 30, 2015. Beijing choked under the worst smog of the year on November 30, with dangerous particulates nearly 20 times healthy levels, as China’s president joined other leaders in Paris for key climate change talks. AFP PHOTO / GREG BAKER / AFP / GREG BAKER (Photo credit should read GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images)
©AFP
China and India have greeted the start of climate change talks in Paris with their capitals enshrouded in thick brown smog, a product of runaway economic growth.
In Beijing and New Delhi, both plagued by smog for much of the past month, children have been kept indoors at schools and sales of air filter and face masks have boomed
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email [email protected] to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/de580860-9741-11e5-95c7-d47aa298f769.html#ixzz3t9vB9qKH
High levels of vehicle and industrial emissions have combined with smoke from heating in north China, and in northern India with agricultural waste burning.
The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, which has completed a study on Delhi’s air pollution, has called for urgent measures to upgrade fuel standards. The government, however, appears reluctant to confront India’s powerful automotive industry. Low-grade diesel and poor emissions standards among the country’s growing truck fleet are leading causes of smog in India.
In Beijing, the smog worsened after the environment ministry announced that it had achieved its five-year pollution targets six months early. Research from one government-backed institute suggests the ministry has instead undercounted emissions of sulphur dioxide by about half.
The research highlights the difficulty China faces even quantifying its pollution problem, given the challenge of obtaining accurate statistics. Beijing has pledged to rein in its carbon emissions so that they stop growing by 2030, despite not having published an official estimate of emissions since 2005.
A study by the China Environment Chamber of Commerce shows that China emitted about 30m tonnes of SO2 last year, up from 25m tonnes in 2005, based on calculations of coal use by non-power generators such as metals smelters and factories. That contrasts with official figures that SO2 emissions fell to 19m tonnes last year.
“If you really want to control smog, you need to keep SO2 under 13m tonnes,” said Luo Jianhua, the chamber’s secretary-general. “If we are at 20m tonnes now we are not so far off but if we are closer to 30m tonnes then there’s a long way to go.”
The chamber’s calculations take into account a 1.1bn tonne increase in the use of coal by the non-power sector over the past 10 years.
China’s official statistics often undercount sectors that are dominated by private industry (including coal mining, manufacturing and smelting) because of their reliance on reporting by state-owned enterprises. This year, China revised up by about 14 per cent the amount of coal it had consumed between 2000 and 2013.
China has invested in scrubbers to clean emissions at its power generation plants and big steel mills. Complex plans to curb carbon emissions include shutting industrial boilers at factories and moving heavy industry away from eastern population centers to poorer regions, where there is “room to pollute” according to central planners’ spreadsheets.
But the calculations that emissions will peak around 2030 rely heavily on politically sensitive projections of GDP growth, leaving the plans vulnerable should the economy not perform according to plan.
For most of this year, northern China enjoyed relatively blue skies, giving rise to reports that emissions-control measures such as moving heavy industry out to the hinterland were responsible for the improvement. Sceptics pointed instead to a drop in power generation, particularly coal-fired, thanks to a slowing economy, collapsing margins for steel producers, relatively mild weather and an onset of new hydropower generation.
In November, the coal-burning boilers that provide city heating fired up across the north China plain, burying the northeastern city of Shenyang in among the worst pollution recorded in China and blocking out the sun across much of the northern plain.
Many Chinese compared the murk to the blue skies that grace Beijing during international conferences when the government orders factories and power plants offline and cars off the roads. “Quick, apply another international event,” one commentator, named ‘xiaomin2012’, quipped on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
Additional reporting by Luna Lin
