“China’s Environmental Challenges” Book Release

2 October 2012

Judith Shapiro, a professor at American University’s School for International Service, has just published a great new textbook called China’s Environmental Challenges. She hopes for this new text to bring together scholars of China and scholars of environmental science, so that people from both disciplines will start to understand each others’ work. I had the great pleasure of attending the release party on Tuesday, and I want to share a few of the book’s main points:

-China’s governmental system complicated! The CPC has passed many ambitious environmental protection laws, however the tiao-kuai (referring to the often uncoordinated horizontal and vertical lines of authority) makes it difficult for these laws to be implemented effectively.
-however, there has been increased participation at the civil society level in China. NGOs are playing bigger and bigger roles! Ordinary citizens are launching more protests against environmentally-harmful businesses.
-The Chinese government must also get past cultural values that work against environmentalism: conspicuous consumptions and global economic recognition.
-Ethnic minorities are also suffering. The Chinese government has a track record of building polluting power plants in minority areas.

There was also a very interesting question from the audience:

What can China learn from the U.S., and vice-versa?
    -According to Professor Shapiro, China needs to learn more about our civil society and NGOs, and try to emulate our system. They can also take lessons from our information transparency, which they are already improving in China. As for the U.S., we must learn empathy. Too many Americans are quick to blame China for its pollution and energy consumption without realizing that the Chinese just want a country as developed as ours, with our high level of living standards.

You can get Professor Shapiro’s new book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Environmental-Challenges-China-Today/dp/0745660916

The New Great Game: Potential Impact of Mongolia’s Mineral Development on China, Russia, Japan and Korea

18 September 2012
East-West Center
Dr. Alicia Campi

    Last week, noted Mongolist Dr. Alicia Campi gave a lecture on her research into Mongolia’s new mineral development and its effects on surrounding north Asian countries. For this post, I will focus only on her discussion of China:

    China’s neighbor to the north, Mongolia, is in the midst of a very exciting time: the country’s economy is growing by leaps and bounds, and most of this growth is directly attributable to Mongolia’s extensive mineral reserves. Mongolia is home to vast deposits of coal, gold, uranium, copper and rare earth minerals. In 2011 alone, coal mining increased 23%!

    What does this mean for China?
   
    China is currently Mongolia’s largest trading partner and foreign investor. As both a geographically enormous country and a coal-based economy, China has the onerous task of transporting coal all over the nation to fuel industry. This ties up the railways! So naturally, China is very interested in Mongolian copper and coal for its factories in the north, closer to the border.
   
    However, China could have other motives for buying Mongolian coal. According to a Peking University professor, China only invests in Mongolia for “political reasons.” He was referring to China’s national security goal of encouraging the Mongolian government not to support Inner Mongolian “terrorists.” Given that the Chinese government has forwarded huge sums of money to Mongolia in exchange for minerals it won't receive for years, this claim seems legitimate.

    As I was listening to Dr. Campi’s lecture, two things struck me as significant:
        1. Mongolia’s plan for the future is to diversify their foreign investors (meaning, not let China invest so much more than any other country)
        2. Russia is interested in monopolizing Mongolian coal in order to keep it out of China’s hands

        These two points indicate that it might be more difficult for China to obtain Mongolian coal in the near future. Could this cause China to make more of an effort to shift its economy towards a renewable energy base? Or will China just find other ways to keep fueling its growth using coal? Only time will tell!

-Hannah Chen

Empower and Thrive: Creating New Pathways for Development and Conservation

Hello everyone! My name is Hannah, and I am the new intern at IFCE. I’ve been here for a couple of weeks now, and I am enjoying every minute of it. I was especially excited to have the opportunity to attend a summit last Tuesday called "Empower and Thrive: Creating New Pathways for Development and Conservation," which was jointly hosted by the World Wildlife Foundation and Care.

What an amazing group of speakers! Twelve experts were divided into three panels, and each lecture had its own distinct approach to global development and environmental conservation.

The discussions from the first and third panels varied widely in topic, everything from the green economy to environmental policies in Mozambique. The second panel was more focused on a single issue: food security. Here are a few main points from the lectures:

    -Green Growth is the way of the future! If businesses integrate the idea of the value of natural capital into their models and work towards putting a price on carbon, they can save money and have more environmentally-friendly business practices!

    -Women are still at the bottom of the financial food chain, but they can play a large role in combating climate change. It is essential to promote education, job training, and reproductive health services for women, and to include women in decision-making processes at local government levels

    -Global food security is a major concern for the future. We will have to double the world food supply by 2050, but if we can maximize the yield of cropland and slow deforestation, we might be able to do it! We must also breed food that delivers better nutrition and uses less water and fewer chemicals

    The above are just a few examples of the topics we learned about, but I felt that there was an overall theme included (either explicitly or implicitly) in each of the lectures: partnership. Whether the speakers advocated partnership between state and local governments, between the public and private sector, between women and men, or between the World Wildlife Foundation and Care (two organizations with seemingly very different goals), the message was clear: climate change and environmental problems are everybody’s problems, and we must work together to solve them--even where we do not agree.

The Role of Renewables in the U.S. and World Energy Mix

July 10, 2012 – 3:00 p.m.
Atlantic Council, Washington, D.C.

Speakers:
Katrina Landis
Chief Executive Officer, BP Alternative Energy Ltd.
John Lyman
Director, Energy and Environment Program, Atlantic Council
Katrina Landis - British Petroleum’s (BP) Alternative Energy (AE) Ltd. division was launched in 2005 with global assets in the United States, Brazil and Europe. BP AE’s aim is to create new businesses, which will facilitate BP’s transition to a low-carbon future. With four core businesses in biofuels, US wind, solar and hydrogen power & carbon capture and storage, BP AE has invested about $7 billion, where $4 billion of that has been invested in the US. BP AE has invested approximately $4 billion in U.S. biofuels, including wind, solar and hydrogen power, as well as carbon capture and storage. Ms. Landis spoke about two of the businesses within BP AE--biofuels and wind energy-- and mentioned that BP AE plans to let go of their solar business due to competition. Unfortunately, BP AE’s carbon capture and storage business is at a standstill, as the progress is not moving at the expected pace.

In terms of biofuels, BP AE reexamined their strategy. It was decided that there were four criteria that needed to be satisfied in order to create a viable business. First, biofuels have to be low cost. They have to be capable of competing with hydrocarbon fuel over the short to medium term, with absolutely no form of subsidization. Second, biofuels must be low-carbon from a full cycle greenhouse gas basis. Sugar cane ethanol in Brazil, for example, has 90% less impact on the greenhouse gas basis than does gasoline. Third, biofuels have to be scalable. BP AE is not interested in niche opportunities; they are looking at developing very material businesses. Finally, they must be sustainable from an environmental, social and economic perspective. In an effort to fulfill these criteria, BP AE decided to focus on sugar fermentation as their core conversion methodology. BP AE believes that is the most viable and economic way of producing biofuels across a wide spectrum. Although the three businesses within biofuels act mostly independent, ultimately, the division expects to see the joining of the technologies they are developing with the advantaged businesses that they have on the feedstock basis. Today, they can produce sugar cane ethanol on a volume basis that will compete with hydrocarbons at $50 per barrel and on an energy basis that will compete with hydrocarbons at $60 per barrel, with no subsidization required whatsoever to put ethanol onto the market.

Within the wind business of BP AE, there are 13 operating wind farms with 1000 turbines and nearly 2000 MW of production. Furthermore, there are three facilities being developed this year in Kansas with 470 MW under development, Pennsylvania and Hawaii, which will the first wind facility in that state. In Hawaii, the use of battery storage is required in case the sun is not out or the wind is absent, which makes it the first wind farm to make use of batteries. What is driving BP AE to invest in wind power in the US is the production tax credit (PTC). Essentially, this piece of legislation says that the US government will financially support the development of wind energy. To date, this has meant $3.5 billion of support, which has driven $16 billion of capital investment from the industry. The cost of wind energy between the years of 1990-2010 has come down 55% and in the last three years alone, the cost of wind energy fell 25%. As the prices have come down, the size of wind turbines has increased seven times and the power output has increased fifteen times. Over the next 2-4 years, depending on the price of gas, wind energy will be able to compete with gas without any additional form of subsidization.

Since the year 2007, 35% of the new generation for power has come from wind energy, and BP AE anticipates that biofuels will make up 30% of the gasoline gene pool by 2030.

-by Amy Kuehnert

Chinese Environmental Wire Nov. 9

哎哟呢么多！就是今天的环保新闻：

Quenching China's Thirst via ChinaDaily

Under Immense Pressure, Beijing Opens its Air Quality Ctrl Center to the Public via Xinhua

and... the Pressure Itself via China Daily

Hong Kong's Air, well.. Not Doing So Great via HK CAN

China's Energy Demands Are Destroying Farmland Other than their Own via Vancouver Sun

China and... Climate Blackmail?! via The Guardian

Global Warming Evaporating China's Hydropower Production.. ouch. via Consul Clima

Climate Change + Chinese Grain Crop Yields via China Daily

Enjoy!

Chinese Environmental Wire Nov. 8

Excuse the day-lateness! Lots going on as usual! Check it out.

Microbloggers Pressure for More Air Quality Monitoring via China RealTime Report

China's Water Plan for the Next Decade via State of the Planet

The Chinese Solar Industry Runs into Anti-Dumping Concerns via Want China Times

Chinese Government Buildings, and their Special Air Quality via HK CAN

China Produces Finally Phasing Out Incandescent Bulbs via The Guardian

Cigarette Smoking and Air Pollution via China Daily

Beijing: US Embassy and 'Pollution Hype' via Yahoo

Why China Needs a Stronger Clean Air Act via NRDC

more to come!

@ifce_dc

Celebrating 50 Years of USAID

On Friday, October 28, 2011, the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted an event to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of USAID, the United States’ most prominent development agency. The event brought together four former administrators of USAID as well as the current administrator, Rajiv Shah, to discuss the agency’s accomplishments over the last 50 years, its current trajectory, and the issues that it will face in the future.

CSIS president and C.E.O. John Hamre opened the discussion by recalling the year 1962, the starting point for USAID. During the Cold War, the realization began to proliferate that the outcome of this conflict would not be decided by military action but rather through ideas. Innovation was necessary to demonstrate superiority, and the United States needed to act as a progressive world leader, especially in developing countries, to spread their innovations, and, subsequently, their political philosophy.

Daniel Runde, the co-director of the Project on U.S. Leadership in Development for CSIS, moderated the discussion, which featured Peter McPherson, Brian Atwood, Andrew Natasios, Henrietta Fore, and Shah.

Throughout the discussion, Shah emphasized his admiration of and appreciation for his predecessors, with whom he shared the stage. He noted that his administration would not have been able to achieve the results that they have without the extensive groundwork laid down by previous administrators. The beginning of the discussion focused on the many advancements made under the direction of the administrators in attendance, the most significant of which identified a need and strove to meet it in spite of the global atmosphere at the time. In particular, famine relief efforts in the 1980s, led by McPherson, in Ethiopia and Mozambique marked a defining moment in humanitarian efforts, with both countries representing Communist regimes. These relief efforts raised the question how to approach aid in the face of a fundamentally different system of governance.

As USAIS has matured, this question has been expanded to how to approach aid despite elementary differences in ways of life. Under Natsios, the answer lay in looking for overlap between the problems which developing countries faced—for example, combating food insecurity through improving the use of family planning. Fore built upon this principle by creating the Development Leadership Initiative, which seeks to establish a team of intellectual leaders focused on a results-based approach to international aid. Today, under Shah’s directorship, emphasis has been placed on empowering individuals—focusing less on a doctor or hospital’s ability to save a child’s life and instead putting the capability to do so into the mother’s hands—and thereby expanding the number of people that can be affected.

One of the major challenges facing the agency today is the issue of fragmentation. Although international development has risen on the agenda and the number of agencies involved in development work has increased substantially, this growth raises problems of how to coordinate all of these actors in the most efficient way possible. The administrators emphasized that any institution that has value to offer should be fully engaged and included. However, USAID should act a coordination point for all of these agencies, with approval necessary for any money spent. The event concluded with a discussion of the agency’s evolving relationship with the United States military and the need for a balance between security and development. As Shah reminded the audience, though, it is less expensive to do development work than to send soldiers, reinforcing the importance of USAID’s work over the past 50 years and their continued efforts to advance international development.

Colleen