Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

6. Britain produced 292 million tons in 1913, the peak year of production (Ian Jack, “Every Story Looks Different from the End,” Guardian, September 5, 2009). In 2009, Shanxi’s output was forecast at 650 million tons (Bloomberg, “Shanxi’s Coal Production to Rise in Second Half, Huadian Says,” August 13, 2009).

7. Zhao Jianping and David Creedy, “Economically, Socially and Environmentally Sustainable Coal Mining Sector in China” (World Bank, China Coal Information Institute, Energy Sector Management Assistance Program, December 2008).

8. Institute of Energy Economy, Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences, October 26, 2007. The breakdown is as follows: damage to aquifers and other water resources 7.2 billion yuan, subsidence 2.6 billion, disposal of coal waste 2.9 billion, air pollution 4.1 billion, water pollution 1.8 billion, erosion and other ecological damage 11 billion.

9. This is a conservative estimate. A figure of three plants per week is suggested by Edward Steinfeld, “MIT Report Debunks China Energy Myth,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 7, 2008. China has added some 170 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity in the past two years alone—more than double Britain’s entire electricity-generating capacity—and has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases (Jeff Tollefson, “Stoking the Fire,” Nature, July 24, 2008).

10. Coal accounts for about 80 percent of China’s carbon dioxide emissions (Mao Yushi et al., “True Cost of Coal,” October 27, 2008).

11. Vaclav Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years (MIT Press, 2008), p. 217. In 2007, authorities in Xinjiang put out a blaze that had burned for fifty years and consumed more than 12 megatons of coal.

12. Coal industry statistical yearbooks and figures from former ministry of coal industry (now State Bureau of Coal Industry) and State Administration of Work Safety.

13. This was before January 2007. Since then correspondents have been theoretically free to travel where they wish, but local authorities often ignore the new rules to block coverage of sensitive stories. Tibet remains off-limits apart from rare tours organized by the ministry of foreign affairs.

14. It has subsequently gone to Panzhihua and others.

15. Under the government’s definition, a “blue sky” day is when PM10 particulate matter falls below 100 parts per million. This is still double the minimum standard of the World Health Organization.

16. The disaster occurred on September 14, 2008, at the Tashan mine in Linfen.

17. Mao Yushi et al., “True Cost of Coal.” Coal is also responsible for 67 percent of China’s nitrogen dioxide emissions.

18. Acid rain falls mostly in the south, where the sulfur content of coal can be five times higher than in the north.

19. World Bank and China’s Environmental Protection Agency, “The Cost of Pollution in China,” 2007.

20. According to the World Bank and China’s Environmental Protection Agency, “Cost of Pollution in China,” the economic burden of premature mortality and morbidity associated with air pollution in China is between 1.16 and 3.8 percent of the country’s GDP. Burning coal releases large quantities of mercury and other hazardous chemicals into the atmosphere. In an enclosed environment, this can have dire health consequences. In Guizhou, cancerous lesions, arsenic poisoning, deformities, and fluorosis—a disfiguring of teeth and bones—have been traced to locally dug coal, which contains a particularly nasty combination of toxins. Nationwide, the sharp rise in lung cancer cases over the past ten years is attributed as much to the use of coal heating in badly ventilated homes as to cigarettes.

21. But when they find out, they are furious, as the spate of riots connected to the lead poisoning of thousands of children in Shaanxi and Hunan showed in 2009 (Jonathan Watts, “Further Anti-Pollution Riots Break Out in China,” Guardian, September 2, 2009).

22. Mark Elvin, “The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China,” in Richard Louis Edmonds (ed.), Managing the Chinese Environment (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 112.

23. Ibid., p. 441.

24. China has 14 percent of the world’s known coal reserves, the third-largest share by country.

25. Water is also a factor in the dry north as old gasification and electricity-generating technology used water as a coolant (Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby [eds.], The Chinese Dream: A Society Under Construction [010 Publishers, 2008]). But in recent years, the development of fan-cooled technology has made this less of a bottleneck.

26. Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends, p. 218.

27. The estimated cost was 1.7 trillion yuan in 2007(Mao Yusi et al., “True Cost of Coal”).

28. As Premier Wen noted: “This kind of huge consumption of energy, especially nonrenewable fossil fuel, will not be sustainable” (Bruce Alberts, “Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao Sees Science as a Key to Development,” Science, November 2008).

29. Zhao and Creedy, “Economically, Socially and Environmentally Sustainable Coal Mining Sector in China.” They argue that demand management alone is not enough. Without sustainable mining practices, they believe, the environmental fabric of China will be “irreparably damaged.”

30. As at the end of 2007, China had commissioned 226 large supercritical units and nine of the very modern and efficient ultra-supercritical units. These supercritical units operate at higher pressures and temperatures than the normal pulverized fuel coal plants which are in standard use elsewhere in the world, including the U.S. and Europe. Relatively few supercritical units are operating outside China, despite the fact the technology was developed in the advanced countries (Dave Feickert, China Coal and Energy Update 2009: Cleaner Coal [Interfax, 2009]).

31. The groundbreaking Chinese firm ENN had a demonstration center outside Beijing in which captured carbon was being fed to algae. The room full of huge pipes of bright green gunk resembled the set of a science-fiction film (Jonathan Watts, “China Recruits Algae to Combat Climate Change,” Guardian, June 29, 2009).

1. Ma Jun, China’s Water Crisis (Eastbridge, 2004).

2. China has 1.67 million square kilometers of deserts and desertified land. More than a third is desert, a third is gravel gobi, the rest is mostly Aeolian desertified land (interview with Wang Tao, director of the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute).

3. Elvin notes that the temperature during the golden age of the Tang dynasty was about 1°C higher than today, while the economic and demographic expansion of the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century came as the planet emerged from the “little Ice Age” (Mark Elvin, “The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China,” in Richard Louis Edmonds [ed.], Managing the Chinese Environment , Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 9).

4. Chinese scholars estimate that the sections of wall left standing are now around 2,400 kilometers long, down from a high of 6,400 kilometers during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

5. William Lindesay, Alone on the Great Wall (Fulcrum, 1991), p. 64.

6. Guo and Wei received no financial assistance for relocation, but the authorities gave them 4 mu (2,700 square meters) of former wasteland and piped water from the Yellow River at 2.42 jiao per cubic meter (1 yuan = 10 jiao). They grew wheat and other vegetables and had twenty sheep that they often took up to their old land—10 kilometers away—to feed. Now that life was “better,” their nine descendants could earn on average 6,000 yuan per year—about $2.00 per day.