Asian pollution delays inevitable warming

... some irony here ...

Asian pollution delays inevitable warming
Dirty power plants exert temporary protective effect.

By Jeff Tollefson
Published online 17 February 2010 | Nature 463, 860-861 (2010)

The grey, sulphur-laden skies overlying parts of Asia have a bright side — they reflect sunlight back into space, moderating temperatures on the ground. Scientists are now exploring how and where pollution from power plants could offset, for a time, the greenhouse warmingThe grey, sulphur-laden skies overlying parts of Asia have a bright side — they reflect sunlight back into space, moderating temperatures on the ground. Scientists are now exploring how and where pollution from power plants could offset, for a time, the greenhouse warming of the carbon dioxide they emit.

A new modelling study doubles as a thought experiment in how pollution controls and global warming could interact in China and India, which are projected to account for 80% of new coal-fired power in the coming years. If new power plants were to operate without controlling pollution such as sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX), the study finds, the resulting haze would reflect enough sunlight to overpower the warming effect of CO2 and exert local cooling.

But this effect would not be felt uniformly across the globe and would last only a few decades. In the long run, CO2 would always prevail, and the world could experience a rapid warming effect if the skies were cleaned up decades down the road.

...

How quickly China and India will move to clean up their coal emissions is unclear. In the past few years China has been aggressively installing SO2 scrubbers on many of its power plants in an attempt to improve air quality and protect public health. But some experts have questioned whether those scrubbers are being used properly — or even turned on.

Full article here: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100217/full/463860b.html

New Chinese Pollution Census Data Released - NY Times

Very glad that there's a more comprehensive survey of pollution out there. Unfortunately, it shows a lot more work is needed -- and that past statistics (especially on water pollution) could be problematic.

P.S. At the end of January, Ministry of Environmental Protection announced that two new pollution indicators, NOx ("discharged from vehicles and power plants and causes acid rain") and ammonia nitrogen ("another major measure of water quality") were introduced into the emission control list for the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15).

Currently, the pollutants they are focusing on are SO2 for air, and chemical oxygen demand (COD) for water. China is apparently on track to meet its target of reducing 10% of emissions below 2005 levels, by 2010. (Not including this new census data, which takes into account agricultural pollution).

China Report Shows More Pollution in Waterways
By JONATHAN ANSFIELD and KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times / February 10, 2010

BEIJING — China’s government on Tuesday unveiled its most detailed survey ever of the pollution plaguing the country, revealing that water pollution in 2007 was more than twice as severe as official figures that had long omitted agricultural waste.

The first-ever national pollution census, environmentalists said, represented a small step forward for China in terms of transparency. But the results also raised serious questions about the shortcomings of China’s previous pollution data and suggested that even with limited progress in some areas, the country still had a long way to go to clean its waterways and air.

The pollution census, scheduled to be repeated in 2020, took more than two years to complete. It involved 570,000 people, and included 1.1 billion pieces of data from nearly 6 million sources of pollution, including factories, farms, homes and pollution-treatment facilities, the government announced at a news conference.

But the comprehensiveness of the survey also resulted in stark discrepancies between some of the calculations and annual figures that the government has published in the past. By far the biggest of these involved China’s total discharge of chemical oxygen demand — the main gauge of water pollution. These discharges totaled 30.3 million tons in 2007, the census showed.

In recent years the Ministry of Environmental Protection has done a much narrower calculation of these discharges, excluding agricultural effluents like fertilizers and pesticides as well as fluids leaking from landfills. By that narrower measure, discharges came to only 13.8 million tons in 2007, which officials described at the time as a decline of more than 3 percent from 2006 and a “turning point.”

Friedman: China Awakens

NY Times columnist Tom Friedman has a new piece on China's entry into the technological/national transformation race of the 21st century, what he dubs the "Energy Technology Revolution." Friedman says he has been "stunned to learn about the sheer volume of wind, solar, mass transit, nuclear and more efficient coal-burning projects that have sprouted in China in just the last year."

As an example, he quotes Bill Gross of eSolar, "a promising California solar-thermal start-up":

On Saturday, in Beijing ... Gross announced “the biggest solar-thermal deal ever. It’s a 2 gigawatt, $5 billion deal to build plants in China using our California-based technology. China is being even more aggressive than the U.S. We applied for a [U.S. Department of Energy] loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico, and in less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review, China signs, approves, and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!”

What it boils down to for China is this:

Yes, climate change is a concern for Beijing, but more immediately China’s leaders know that their country is in the midst of the biggest migration of people from the countryside to urban centers in the history of mankind. This is creating a surge in energy demand, which China is determined to meet with cleaner, homegrown sources so that its future economy will be less vulnerable to supply shocks and so it doesn’t pollute itself to death."

Despite the competitive nature of this Green Technology Revolution, there's still an important role for bilateral cooperation:

In the process, China is going to make clean power technologies cheaper for itself and everyone else. But even Chinese experts will tell you that it will all happen faster and more effectively if China and America work together — with the U.S. specializing in energy research and innovation, at which China is still weak, as well as in venture investing and servicing of new clean technologies, and with China specializing in mass production."

Friedman sums it up nicely: "It is clear that if we, America, care about our energy security, economic strength and environmental quality we need to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation. We can’t afford to be asleep with an invigorated China wide awake."

Article URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10friedman.html (1/10/10)

I suppose my only quip is that, yes, China seems dedicated to acting on this. The question is how projects are executed, whether quality and performance can be assured, and whether local actors are empowered and incentivized to act. These would all be factors in determining the long-term success of this transformation.