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Marco Werman: Getting the entire Japanese economy back to full power maybe much more of a challenge following a big reversal there this week on energy policy. The world’s environment editor Peter Thompson joins us now. Peter i understand that japans prime minister has pulled the plug on the countries plans to expand nuclear power.

Peter Thompson: That’s right Marco, ever since the disaster at the Fukushima plant began two months ago today. Prime Minister Naoto Khan has stuck by Japans plan to build fourteen new nuclear reactors over the next twenty years. That would of given nuclear a fifty percent share of the country’s electricity supply. But yesterday Khan had abruptly changed course and declared that his government would scrap the plan and as he put it start from scratch. Khan didn’t provide a lot of details on what would replace that generating capacity. But he did say that the country will pour more of its efforts into what he called the dual pillars of renewable energy and energy conservation.

Werman:  So does that mean Japan is putting the kibosh on nuclear altogether?

Thompson: No it certainly does not signal a complete repudiation of nuclear power. Khan does seem to have left the door open to still building some new plants and his own status is pretty uncertain since he is the fifth prime minister in five years. Also the nuclear industry is extremely powerful in Japan so there’s no guarantee this new policy shift will stick. And any case Japans likely to be dependent on nuclear for a long time to come. Although Khan did admit that the country needs to put a much greater emphasis on the safety of its nuclear plants.

Werman:  And give us a reality check here Peter is it really feasible that renewables and efficiency alone can become a sufficient part of Japans energy mix.

Thompson: Well that remains to be seen of course. The country has lagged behind other big players on renewables so far but it’s ahead of much of the rest of the world when it comes to using energy efficiently. Of course globally Marco renewables are really taking off and a new report this week from the intergovernmental panel on climate change said that renewables could provide almost eighty percent of global energy demand by the middle of the century if governments implement the right policies. So turns out that one of the interesting things to come out of this terrible disaster in Japan is that the country could become a lab for those kinds of energy policies and technologies.

Werman: We will be watching the world’s environment editor Peter Thompson thanks very much.

Thompson:  Thanks Marco.

Werman: Peters also got a new blog post up on our website today on the latest science on natural gas fracking. A new report has found that fracking can contaminate groundwater with high levels of flammable methane. That’s at the world.org/blogs.

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Domestic coal delivery (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Ask a middle-class person in China what it means to be middle class – and you might get a very familiar answer: “Well, in Beijing you certainly need to have property, and own a car,” says Zhong Ling, a college professor. And then there’s all the other stuff – computers, flat screen TVs, air conditioning all summer – pretty much what a middle-class American might say.

That American lifestyle has great appeal. Chinese have seen it on TV and in movies, and an ever-growing number of the country’s 1.4 billion people want it too. The problem is, it has a huge energy footprint. The average American consumes more than twice as much energy as the average person in China.

But it’s China, with four times as many people and a much dirtier energy infrastructure, that’s now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Most of those emissions come from burning coal. That’s left many in the United States saying that China urgently needs to cut its emissions to fight climate change.

But Xu Yinlong, a professor of climate change at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, invokes fundamental American values to turn the argument around. “Your Declaration of Independence, and your Constitution, say everyone should be equal,” he says. “So why do Americans think they deserve more emissions per capita than Chinese?”

Xu points out that most of the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere was put there over the past 150 years by the United States and other Western countries. They say China’s already doing better than those countries did at the same stage of development – and when China has reached the same level of prosperity, it will cut emissions more.

Jonathan Watts, an environmental correspondent in China for the British newspaper The Guardian, and author of the book When a Billion Chinese Jump, says they’ve got a point. “In terms of fairness, China should have the space to emit more and more and more and more,” Watts says. “That would be completely equitable, but totally calamitous. So you have to balance, what’s fair, and what will preserve you and us. And that’s the key question.”

Fairness aside, Watts says the Chinese leadership faces a dilemma. They know that climate change is real, and already affecting China, and that carbon emissions from coal are a big part of the problem. They also recognize the severity of local environmental and public health problems from burning so much coal. But at the same time, the government is committed to spurring rapid economic growth and improving the material lives of Chinese people and coal, for now, is the cheapest available fuel with which to do it. With Communism all but dead as an ideology in China, the Communist Party’s legitimacy is seen to rest on that pledge.

Watts says he sometimes hears a defense of coal from Chinese scientists and policy-makers that straddles these two concerns. “What they say is, ‘look, we know coal is bad. Nobody likes coal. But we don’t think we have any choice,’” Watts says. “If we want to keep growing at the speed we’ve been growing, if we want to remain competitive then we need to keep using coal.”

Under current projections, China’s use of coal will continue to grow well into the middle of the century. And increasingly, that includes importing coal – the transportation of which uses even more energy, which creates even more emissions. China has plenty of coal at home, but its mining industry can’t keep up with demand, as cities expand and infrastructure projects demand ever more cement and steel, the making of which is fueled by coal.

But all this begs a few questions. Is China’s current speed of development necessary? And does the model of growth have to keep favoring heavy industry – which favors state enterprises, which the government tries to protect, but is bad for the environment? Or, with the right political will, could China move more quickly to a less coal-dependent, more environmentally sustainable model of growth? The government has talked about restructuring the economy, to make it more reliant on domestic consumption and less reliant on export. But Michael Pettis, a Peking University finance professor, says even that transformation isn’t going to happen until there’s a shift from over-investment in heavy industry and infrastructure.

“Some of the infrastructure investment is certainly necessary, and will create more value than it costs, so it will cause future consumption to grow more quickly than it otherwise would have,” Pettis says. “But certain types of infrastructure investments, if they’re not economically viable, reduce economic wealth, and therefore they have to be paid for. And they’re always paid for by households – in the United States, in the form of taxes, in China, in the form of indirect taxes, like very, very low interest rates on their savings deposits. And if you force households to pay for non-economic investment, you are going to reduce future consumption, and that will slow GDP growth down considerably.”

That suggests that, even if environmental concerns are set aside, the Chinese government has ample motivation to accelerate a transformation of the economy, away from a heavy industry model that’s quite so reliant on coal.

Some Chinese officials say, this is a phase a developing economy has to go through, and the best thing that could happen is not that China change the way it’s developing its economy, but that the technology improves.

“Personally, I’m very concerned about climate change,” says Kang Qing, who heads the Development and Reform Commission in the city of Baoding, about 90 miles south of Beijing. I’m especially worried for my children, and grandchildren. But – the thing is, climate change has been caused by improving living standards with the technology available. So it’s the technology that needs to improve, so we can develop with less environmental impact.”

Baoding has long been a smoggy industrial city. But pull in to town on the high speed train these days, and you might actually see blue sky . In the last few years, the local government has replaced almost 500 dirty coal-fired boilers with cleaner natural gas. It’s also experimenting with energy-efficient buildings, putting up solar pilot projects, and shifting public transportation to natural gas.

Baoding is trying to become a low-carbon city. The transformation began through political will – and a shrewd business sense. Ma Xuelu was a local city official a dozen years ago, when he got sold on the potential for solar energy to give Baoding a new lease on life.

“Developing a low carbon economy is an opportunity for Baoding,” Ma says. “We don’t have the resources to support traditional industries. So we have to explore in a new way – a way that includes technological innovation and renewable energy.”

Ma persuaded the Baoding government to open a hi-tech industrial development zone – and he became its director. He also became co-founder of Yingli Solar, one of the world’s biggest photovoltaic companies, and China’s first. Now, Ma says, with obvious satisfaction, the manufacturing of solar and wind energy equipment accounts for a quarter of Baoding’s GDP, and Baoding’s air quality has steadily improved.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature has been helping Baoding with its transformation. Lei Hongpeng, of the group’s Beijing office, says since the project started, officials from more than a dozen other Chinese cities have also asked for assistance in becoming low-carbon cities themselves.

“Maybe five years ago more local governments paid attention to steel, auto industry, because these industries could create bigger GDP,” Lei says. “But recently they see the future, is the renewable or low carbon clean energy industry.”

It’s a future the central government wants to encourage. It has named Baoding one of eight low-carbon city pilot projects. The central government has also started evaluating local officials around the country not just on how well their local economy performs, but also on how well they protect the environment. That includes minimizing the impacts of coal.

Wind turbine factory in Xinjiang

“I do think China is sincerely trying to change,” says Watts, author of When a Billion Chinese Jump. “And it’s not doing it because it wants to save the world. It’s doing it because it wants to save itself, and because it wants more energy security, to be less reliant on fossil fuels, which are dirty or need to be imported. And because it’s a power play. If you control the energy of the future, if you are the leader in solar and the leader in wind, and if the world 30 or 40 years from now is all supposed to be using that technology, that puts you in an incredibly strong position.”

But the Chinese paradox, Watts says, is that China is going ‘green’ and at the same time staying ‘black’ – increasing coal use, while trying to increase efficiency and reduce emissions along the way. For now, China continues to chase its own version of the “American Dream” – big cities built for cars, an impressive new highway system, a growing middle class with a growing hunger for all the accoutrements of the ‘good life’ it has seen on TV, in movies, and on trips abroad.

But the ‘stuff’ the middle class craves takes energy to produce, and much of that energy comes from coal. The idea of scaling back the middle class lifestyle to cut emissions and save the environment is something Americans have barely begun to embrace. And the Chinese government is only starting to structure new cities and set incentives to encourage a lower-carbon lifestyle, as ever more Chinese reach for a more-energy intensive middle class life.

“The American lifestyle is the American dream to us. And it’s comfortable. We like it,” says Chang Hong, a 45-year-old electronics entrepreneur, on his way out of an upscale Beijing department store. “But if everyone lives in such a way, I don’t think the environment can take it.’

Chang’s 17-year-old daughter, Chang Yi Fen, agrees. “China’s history is very long, and throughout it, Chinese people have been making compromises due to this big population,” she says. “And I think it’s a trend that’s going to continue. Each generation will have to make compromises for the population, and for the finite resources.”

Chang Yi Fen thinks many people her age get that, and will be willing to make changes and conserve energy if it means helping the environment, and breathing cleaner air. And for those who don’t get it yet? They will, she says. By the time her generation takes the helm, there won’t be another choice. Download MP3

Reporter’s notebook: the air in China

China’s coal habit series page

The city “by reason of the excessive coldness of the air, hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so filled with the fuliginous steam of…coal, that hardly can one see across the street, and this filling the lungs with its gross particles exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one would scarcely breathe.”

The description could fit many a modern northern Chinese city on a coal-heated winter day. It happens that the author, diarist John Evelyn, was writing about London in the 17th century – a good reminder that choking on growth is nothing new. Indeed, Monet captured London’s haze when painting there in the late 19th century:

Claude Monet's 'Houses of Parliament, London, Sun Covered by Clouds' c. 1904

But for those of us doing the choking today, it’s still a favorite topic of conversation. We are survivors together. We are amazed we, along with millions of other Chinese city-dwellers, can breathe this stuff and live to tell the tale. Some of us avidly check the US embassy in Beijing’s Twitter page, which relays real-time readings from two air quality monitors kept on embassy grounds, in eastern Beijing – just a mile or so from my home. Today (Dec. 3, 2010), a relatively clear day, my view from my kitchen window looked like this:

View from Mary Kay's window on a smog free day

The air quality reading at the time was 175 – or “unhealthy” on the international scale for particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers. That’s the stuff so small it can only be seen with an electron microscope, so small it can lodge in your lungs and other organs, and cause serious long-term health problems. In cities, such pollution comes mainly from vehicle exhaust and coal-fired power plants.

On that same international scale, 300 is considered hazardous – as in, close the schools, stay home, and try not to breathe too much, hazardous. The international scale goes up to 500. In mid-November, the reading on the US embassy monitors was 520, and the same view out my kitchen window looked like this:

View from Mary Kay's apartment on days with heavy smog

It would be comforting to think of this as fog, and some Chinese do. The Chinese weather forecasts certainly like to call it that. But this is really more like the Victorian “fog” that gave a hint of romanticism to Sherlock Holmes, striding in his cape, sucking on his pipe, or a cover for Jack the Ripper, or set the scene for Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, in which at one point he talks about November smoke from coal that seemed to cause “the death of the sun.”

There was talk, over time, in 19th and early 20th century London, of taking steps to clean up the factories and reduce emissions. But economic growth came first, and coal was the fuel driving it. Dramatic and lasting change didn’t come until after the “fog” of all “fogs.” Here’s a glimpse of what it looked like:

Five days of intensive smog in December 1952 caused 4,000 deaths more than would have regularly occurred during that period, with another 8,000 deaths above the normal level over the next two months. Four years later, Britain passed its Clean Air Act, and the famous and seemingly permanent “London fog” of the industrial age retreated into memory.

China now has the same kind of economic ambition and has made many of the same choices as Britain did more than a century ago – grow first, use coal, worry about the environment later. The example of Britain – and of the United States after its own Clean Air Act helped save lives and reduce health care costs – shows what political will, with the regulations and enforcement to back it up – can do, and how quickly it can work.

To the credit of Chinese policy-makers, they’re not waiting as many decades as both Britain and the United States did to start trying to clean up their act. Although still at a much lower level of GDP per capita – they’ve set a goal for China to use 45 percent less energy per unit of GDP by 2020, compared to 2005 levels.

China’s leaders have also introduced a ladder system of electric fees, so consumers pay more per unit as they use more. They’ve been experimenting with clean(er) coal technologies, doubling wind energy use every year for the past five years, and ramping up solar energy – although, consumer subsidies and a standard feed-in tariff would ramp it up even faster. They’re also building nuclear power plants and ever more dams – both of which have significant environmental issues of their own, but at least don’t increase the emissions that take lives early and contribute to climate change.

These are all positive steps, and by any measure, a significant change for the better. The nagging question is whether they’re enough.

Although China aims to reduce emissions per unit of GDP, its overall emissions are expected to continue to grow, along with its economy, until at least 2030, and possibly until 2050. Much of that growth is centered on heavy industry, dominated by the large state enterprises the Communist Party tries to protect. In addition, some 350 million Chinese are expected to move from rural areas to cities, where, on average, urban dwellers use 2.5 times more energy per capita than rural dwellers. Current projections say that means a huge amount of new climate changing CO2 emissions – and that’s not even counting what a growing India, might contribute to emissions, or Brazil, or Russia, or Africa, whenever more countries there gain economic traction.

The official Chinese response to this is, “look, we’re being a lot more responsible than you Western countries were, when you were developing. We’ve just come a little late to the table. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get to eat.”

But those same Chinese policy-makers are, every day, breathing the kind of air you see in the Beijing photos above. So are their kids, and grandkids. Whatever they say in public, in forums like the climate change talks in Cancun, their actions show that they’ve already begun to rethink how much economic growth is worth the long-term cost to the environment and human health. By some calculations, including by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, those costs almost wipe out China’s GDP growth.

Much comes down to political will. Giving the right incentives to improve energy efficiency and use cleaner energy, and sufficient penalties to those who don’t, could yet help China clean up long before 2050. If it does, the world – and especially residents of China, whose lungs will no longer be quite so inflamed – will have reason to breathe a deep sigh of relief.

China’s coal habit series

Rooftop solar panels in Dezhou (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Dezhou is trying to reinvent itself as a solar city. One trishaw driver says his solar water heater saves him money, and he’d love to get solar electric panels for his house.

“If the price is right, of course I’d use them! A lot of people would,” he says. “It’s just hard to find them in the market.”

Despite the fact that Dezhou has more than 100 solar energy-related companies, almost all the solar panels produced here, and throughout China, are exported abroad. The current system of government subsidies is set up to encourage export rather than domestic use – to the point that the US government has filed an unfair trade practices case against China through the World Trade Organization. The Chinese have in turn protested that they’re just doing what makes sense at the moment.

“Some people may think you produce solar panels and you sell to other people, and you take advantage,” says Li Zheng, director of Tsinghua University’s Clean Energy Research Center in Beijing. “But actually, we don’t think so. Because this industry is very energy-intensive, and there are pollutant emissions. So I think other countries are very smart, to use the solar panels for cleaner air there, but let the solar panels be produced here, to pollute our air.”

But what about China reaping the advantage of using a little more clean solar energy itself? Li Zheng says the view among Chinese policy-makers is that the cost of photovoltaic energy is still too expensive compared to other sources of energy available – even after prices have dropped by 70 percent over the past five years. Once international research and development leads to further cost reductions, better methods of storage and of moving solar energy onto the grid, he says, the government will likely do more to encourage the widespread use of solar panels within China.

Meanwhile, other forms of renewable energy are already taking off. More than 30 million Chinese households use rooftop solar water heaters – more than in any other country in the world. And wind energy capacity within China is now 35 times what it was five years ago.

At the same time, China has, in a few short years, become the world’s top producer of both wind turbines and solar panels. Dezhou’s biggest solar company, Huangming, best known for its solar water heaters but ramping up photovoltaics – sees a bright future for these technologies within China, and around the world.

“We at the company have our goal,” says Chen Quanmin, an energetic young manager at Huangming. “We want to see 25 percent of the world’s energy come from renewable sources by 2025, and 90 percent by 2050. ‘That’s what we hope to do, and everyone is working very hard on it.”

That’s an ambitious goal – far beyond the Chinese government’s own targets, or what’s considered realistically possible. But the government is at least moving in that direction. It has set a goal of getting 15 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020 – that’s about twice what it gets from renewables now — and at least 30 percent by 2050. Most of that energy will be hydropower from dams, which are plentiful in China and have their own environmental issues. But wind energy is increasing fast – with white turbines spinning against windswept blue skies in open stretches of western China – in places like Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.

“The electricity produced by our wind farm is delivered to the grid and distributed to households and industrial customers in Xinjiang,” says Lu Feng, manager of the Tianfeng wind energy company in Xinjiang. “It’s like any public power plant.”

Wind turbines in Xinjiang (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

All this shows what can be done when the political will is there to do it. Solar energy, by comparison, has not yet been given the same kinds of subsidies within China, nor has a standard feed-in tariff been set. It comes back to the concern that solar energy is still too expensive compared to coal. But when you add up all the costs of using coal – to the environment, to human health, and the sheer cost of getting it out of the ground and transporting it – the numbers change.

Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the standing committee of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, has worked with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to research the real cost of energy in China, focusing as an example on the environmental cost of energy use in 2005.

“We found the environmental cost from low energy efficiency, environmental pollution and also the damage of ecological system equaled 13.5% of our GDP,” Cheng told a World Economic Forum gathering in Tianjin this autumn. “And that year, our GDP only increased by 10.4%. That means we leave an environmental debt to our children and grandchildren.”

Cheng had a receptive audience at the World Economic Forum for his call to look past the immediate bottom line cost of energy, And at least a few deals were done on the side– including one between China and Iceland for a geothermal energy project – one of several promising renewable technologies, along with solar thermal, that have barely been tapped in China.

Huangming’s 'Utopia Garden' (photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

A sales rep shows off solar electric panels on the roof, a solar thermal heating system, energy efficient windows and other green features. She says most of the apartments here have already sold, even at about twice the price of other apartments of comparable size in town. But even this utopian complex can’t yet generate enough of its own solar electricity to run all the computers, TVs, gadgets and air conditioners of its residents.

And that’s China’s problem, writ large, as it quickly urbanizes and grows wealthier, says Jonathan Watts, the Beijing-based environmental correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian, and author of the new book on China’s environment, When a Billion Chinese Jump. He says China outspent the US almost two to one on renewable energy last year. And it’s also making big investments in nuclear power, cleaner-burning natural gas power plants, and energy efficiency.

“But even with that, they’re saying the dependency on coal will probably go down from 70 percent today to 64 or 65 percent by 2015,” Watts says. “So if you carry on at that pace, it’s still going to take 30 or 40 years, at the very quickest, to wean yourself off coal.”

Watts says solar energy could yet come from behind, and become an affordable clean energy option for China.

“Many of China’s leading scientists say, in the long term, China’s energy demands can be best solved by solar,” he says. “China is cursed, in a sense, that it has so many deserts in the north, but when it comes to solar power it could be a blessing. You have these huge areas where you can put solar panels. It can be done. People want it to be done. But they don’t want to move too quickly.”

All that said, China is expected to more than double its solar capacity this year. It’s one of many signs that China’s leaders are serious about at least taking the edge off of China’s coal habit.
Download MP3

China’s coal habit series page

Could jatropha solve India's energy problems? (All pictures copyright D1 Oils plc)

The next gold rush is gearing up: renewable energy is hot. You can find solar panels everywhere these days, from the Mojave Desert to to roofs of Midieval castles.

Nuclear energy may be entering a renaissance. And scientists are looking for nearly any type of plant to power our cars: from sugarcane, to corn, to jatropha.

In this podcast we look at the future of renewable energy in Europe, North Africa, and the USA.