China links for the first full week of 2015:
Damien Ma, writing for the Paulson Institute, provides an overview of China’s energy policy. It’s a lengthy read, but well worth it for anyone wondering how China plans to actually implement its “energy revolution” in the coming years. The take-away: Beijing recognizes the urgency of rethinking its energy usage (and at the same time its general environmental impact), and is moving slowly away from an insistence on the “growth-at-all-costs” mindset. At the same time, however, China remains a developing country with a low per-capita GDP, meaning continued growth (and a corresponding rise in energy use) is a political necessity for Beijing. Ma examines in detail the energy strategies China plans to use to strike a balance between growth and environmental protection.
Providing a real-world example of this conundrum, Xinhua reports that stricter air pollution controls were partially responsible for Hebei province’s GDP growth for 2014 coming in 1.5 percentage points below its target. Hebei, which has a high concentration of heavy industry, is a major contributor to air pollution in neighboring Beijing. Hebei’s GDP grew by 6.5 percent in 2014, according to provincial officials, far slower than the 7.7 percent growth rate of 2013. Yet the environmental controls are already having some beneficial effects — Hebei Governor Zhang Qingwei reported a 12 percent reduction in the average density of PM2.5 pollution in 11 cities in the province. That sort of trade-off — less growth, better air — is the dilemma facing China at both the national and local levels.
Read Full Article HERE