Hope of cleaner skies as Beijing residents switch from coal to electricity

Jane Macartney in Beijing

The brick walls are grey, the sky is leaden, the alley is choked with dust and rubble as workmen fill in a long channel running along Tanggong Hutong, in the heart of old Beijing (Jane Macartney writes). The men have just finished laying an electricity cable as part of the sweeping campaign by China to clean up its act.
Residents of this alley will no longer have to rely on filling their squat iron stoves with coal briquettes. Now their homes are equipped with electric heaters.
Li Yunjie is 74 and has lived in this lane all his life. He is delighted. “I chose to go for the Government scheme because they pay for two thirds — and without that I could never afford this. It’s much safer because I don’t have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning, and it’s cleaner.”
Another neighbour rails at a worker to move the rubble out of the alley — but Mr Li says that he is satisfied, after hearing accounts from families who have already made the switch. “They say it may be a little more expensive overall than coal but it’s a price I don’t mind paying to get our blue skies back.”

Beijing has already swapped about 94,000 coal stoves for electric heaters, but that does not even scratch the surface of China's coal pollution — and the Government knows it.
Since 2007 China has been listed as the largest carbon emitter in the world, overtaking the United States. While officials insist that its emissions remain tiny compared with the United States on a per capita basis — at 5.8 tonnes compared with 25 tonnes for the average American — they are nevertheless accelerating projects to reduce that reliance.
It is a task that will take decades. About 70 per cent of all China’s energy needs are fuelled by coal and experts say that that figure will decline very slowly. However, leaders of the country’s Communist Party appear determined to show the world that they are aware of the cost of climate change to their nation.
President Hu and President Obama spoke by telephone this week about the issues that will dominate their summit in Beijing next month. Climate change was near the top. Neither leader gave any public hint of a significant shift in position but both made the right noises and voiced hopes for some kind of a deal being struck in Copenhagen.
Beijing continues to stress that it remains a developing country and should not be asked to make promises that will hinder its efforts to lift millions of its people out of poverty. It wants developed nations to give it more hi-tech, clean technologies, but there are many in Washington who are wary of making commitments, fearing that this could give China an economic edge.
China and the United States together account for about 40 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 2008, fast-growing China’s emissions of carbon dioxide reached 6.8 billion tonnes, an increase of 178 per cent over 1990 levels, according to the IWR, a German energy institute. US emissions rose 17 per cent, to 6.4 billion tonnes. Midweek China and India signed a deal agreeing to stand together on climate change.
Both are among developing countries that argue they should not be required to set binding targets to reduce greenhouse gases because richer nations shoulder the greater responsibility for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and are already several steps ahead in terms of economic growth. They want the developed nations to lead the way with much bigger cuts.
China’s efforts, however, are not limited to the ancient, centuries-old alleys of Beijing. On the steppes of Inner Mongolia, the deserts of its far west and along its coast, China is racing to build wind farms. Capacity has doubled in each of the past four years and with 12.2 gigawatts of generating capacity it now ranks fourth in the world. Wind energy accounts for only 0.4 per cent of total electricity supply.
There are still plenty of coal-fired electricity plants coming online, although the pace has slowed slightly from the jaw-dropping one a week notched up in the past two to three years. Experts say that the increase has slowed from adding 100 gigawatts of coal power a year to about 80 gigawatts this year.
Yang Fuqiang, a climate change campaigner for the WWF, said: “This is better. But we have to change this trend and push the share of coal down. We must increase renewables.”
Global warming
In 2001 Beijing launched the Great Green Wall of China — a row of trees 2,800 miles (4,500km) long. The 35 billion trees are intended to stem the flow of sand from the Gobi Desert. Increasing droughts mean the deserts could reach the outskirts of the city by 2040, putting it at risk of becoming the world’s first capital to be swamped by sand
Source: Times database