Is China really going green?

Camels still plod the arid plains outside the ancient Silk Road city of Urumqi, their heads bowed into the gritty winds that funnel down the through the valleys of China's Tian Shan, or 'celestial' mountains.

By Peter Foster in Urumqi Last Updated: 11:06PM BST 03 May 2009

But today the same winds that struck fear into the traders of the Silk Road, swallowing whole caravans in blinding storms of dust, are being used to power plans for a new, green revolution for China's energy-hungry economy.
At Dabancheng, a few miles outside the city, great forests of windmills stretch to the horizon, their blades beating out a lazy rhythm that belies the sudden urgency with which China's rulers are now investing in renewable energy.

The speed with which China is now ramping up its commitment to alternative energies has caught even the most optimistic analysts by surprise, with new green edicts being issued from Beijing on an almost weekly basis.
Last week officials pledged to generate 100 gigawatts of electricity from wind power by 2020, more than tripling the original target of 30GW laid down in a national energy strategy published just 18 months ago.
"The pace of change is unimaginable from just three or four years ago," shouts Yan Weijiang, a director of the Xinjiang Wind Energy Company over the roar of the wind. "If you had talked to me in 2003 or 2004 I would not have believed this was possible."
Mr Yan, who started his career working in coal-fired electricity generation with the state giant PetroChina, said the introduction of a Renewable Energy Law in 2006 offering state subsidies for wind power had been the initial "game-changer" after years of slow growth.
Public attitudes in China towards the environment have also started to change. In the wind-fields of Dabancheng the first 13 windmills, bought from Denmark and erected in 1989, are now used primarily as a tourist attraction.
On the dusty road into Urumqi Chinese families stop to have their pictures taken in front of giant white propellers, and some newly married couples even come to the wind farms for their official wedding photographs.
"They're beautiful and they are also a sign of China's great progress and development," said Tang Qinghui, a tourist who had stopped to picture his wife and child with the turbines, "these windmills show a commitment to a new, cleaner future for our country."
Nuclear, solar and hydroelectricity are also being lined up for massive new investment through China's £400bn stimulus package, with 2020 targets for nuclear power raised from 40 gigawatts to 60 gigawatts, with some officials even talking of aiming for 70GW.
Investment is also being poured into China's electricity grid to enable more renewable sources to be connected, while planners say they want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 50 per cent by 2020.
After years in which China put economic growth before almost all environmental considerations, analysts now see a step-change in attitudes from the central government backed by hard cash and the raw political muscle of China's command economy.
"The old belief that China could follow the model of Western industrial nations by making a mess today and paying for the clean-up tomorrow now appears to be dead," said Yang Ailun, director of Greenpeace's climate and energy campaign in China.
"China's leaders now realise that for long-term growth to be sustainable they will have to both reduce power usage by finding greater efficiencies and boost the amount of renewable energy entering the national grid."
The desire to take a greener path is not confined to China's all-powerful government.
Activists say there is growing grass-roots support for change among the Chinese public, spurred by a growing realisation that ordinary people are paying a heavy price for China's old "dirty" development model.
Information is filtering into the wider public consciousness, as recently when the China Daily newspaper published research from the government's National Population and Family estimating that 10 per cent of birth defects in China were caused by pollution – or one million deformed babies every year.
"The public is now waking up to these problems," says Ma Jun, an environmental activist who runs a website naming and shaming companies and provincial governments that allow pollution, "and public pressure will be one of the most important drivers of change".
In Beijing he cites the efforts to clean up the air pollution ahead of last year's Olympic Games as just one example of how the Chinese public's mindset is rapidly changing.
After the games there were several popular campaigns by residents who had enjoyed clean air for the first time in a decade to keep polluting factories closed and retain traffic restrictions.
"People had come to accept that it was impossible to have blue skies over Beijing, but during the Olympics they suddenly saw that wasn't true. Now they don't want to go back to the old polluted ways," said Mr Ma.
Elsewhere in Beijing the government has installed solar panels to power street lights and, along the rooftops of the city's remaining courtyard houses can be seen the winding pipes of solar water heaters, yet further evidence of change.
The sheer size and speed of China's new green investment has provoked some soul-searching in America, the world's second largest polluter after China, where a series of reports have highlighted the discrepancies in spending.
According to a report by the Centre for American Progress, in 2009 and 2010 China will now spend more than six times America's green stimulus spending as a percentage of their respective economies – or £8.6m an hour.
However for all the headline-grabbing targets, sceptics argue that China best efforts will still not be enough to make a meaningful dent in absolute emissions.
Even if China achieves its target of 15 per cent renewable energy by 2020, projections show that energy demand will double in the same period leaving China still more than 70 per cent reliant on dirty coal-fired power stations.
Sceptics also point out that since China's provincial leaders are still assessed on the basis of economic rather than environmental criteria, leaving little incentive for them to embrace the new green orders of central government.
However, many international climate change analysts see new reasons for optimism. A report by the independent lobbyists The Climate Group says it believes that China could now achieve a "second, green miracle" to match the "economic miracle" of the last 20 years.
The key will be the power of China's government to force through green measures and absorb the financial losses of early investment in green technologies – wind power is currently twice as expensive as coal power – in a way that Western governments cannot.
The "litmus test", the report says, will be how soon after 2020 China can start to reduce absolute emissions and hit the global target of emitting two tons of CO2 per capita by 2050 – compared with 5.1 tons in China today, 8.6 tons in Europe and 19.4 tons in the US.
It will be a massive challenge, but this week further optimism was generated by reports that China's was, for the first time, actively considering setting emissions targets ahead of negotiations for a successor to the Kyoto treaty in Copenhagen later this year.
Although decisions have not been taken, analysts saw the reports as yet further evidence that China, after years of arguing that the West should clean up its own act before it took steps of its own, was preparing to take an unprecedented lead at Copenhagen.
"The fact that the country's leadership is now putting a focus on climate change... gives us great hope that China could achieve a second miracle 30 years from now by moving to a low carbon economy," wrote Steve Howard, CEO of The Climate Group.
"But this time, we believe that China will no longer be a developing country following where others have led, but a pioneer leading the way."