Sinobyte: China and technology

In a rare independent study of China's energy sector, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that the problem with China's coal power generation is not that its power plants lack cleaner technology.

The emissions are definitely higher than they could be, the report found, but the culprit is usually low-quality coal rather than low-tech plants. As an MIT statement explains:

Lower-grade coal, which produces high levels of sulfur emissions, can be obtained locally, whereas the highest-grade anthracite comes mostly from China's northwest and must travel long distances to the plants, adding greatly to its cost.

The researchers gathered their own data instead of relying on Chinese government statistics, which can be unreliable. This may not sound like a big deal, but even large international organizations often, or even primarily, depend on government numbers.

"The kinds of technology currently being adopted in China are not cheap," lead researcher Edward S. Steinfeld said in the statement. "They're not buying junk, and in some cases, the plants are employing state-of-the-art technology."

There could be room for improvement in technology, however. A pilot power plant capable of using carbon-capture technology opened in China in July, and widespread efforts on energy continue. But this MIT report underlines the challenge of cleaning up power generation when the fuel is dirtier than usual.

The full report is available in PDF.

Much has been made of Beijing's decision to keep a lighter version of its Olympics traffic restrictions, not least because whatever the city did to clean the air seemed to have worked in August. But the renewed measures are weaker and the probable effect is unclear.

Alex Pasternack at Treehugger points out that the sustained restrictions, which took effect October 1, will be weaker than during the Games. Only one fifth of cars will be pulled from the road on weekdays, versus half under the Olympics rules.

According to The Beijinger (also via Alex), the city's other restrictions include:

• Restricting the number of car license plates issued for the city every year to 100,000--one fourth of the current rate of new car registration. This may in the long run be the most powerful measure, because it will reduce the extent to which increased wealth leads many people to obtain cars.
• Raising parking prices. If it costs more to park, maybe people will take the...
• Growing public transportation network. Lines five, ten, eight, and the airport express opened in the year leading up to the Olympics. Expansions of existing lines and other new lines are planned in the next two to three years.

But it's hard to tell whether the automobile and transportation efforts were really the core of Beijing's cleaner skies during the Olympics. For one thing, it's useful to remember that before a series of rainstorms, many people didn't feel the skies were particularly clear. Afterward, opinion among those used to standard Beijing air was uniformly laudatory. The rain may have helped clean things up.

It is difficult to assess, too, how important the other measures taken around the Olympics were. Manufacturing was slowed or stopped all over the region. Some of the dirtier power plants were shut. (Some may still be shut, but reports indicate that much of the industry has reopened.)

And significantly, dust from construction, a major fact of life in contemporary Beijing, was halted, because construction was halted. Though the surge of building that led up to the Olympics will probably not be matched in the near future in that city, some construction will restart.

So, to the extent that the sustained restrictions on driving decrease people's emitting behavior, that's great, but only time (and reliable measurements of air quality over time) will give a fair estimate of the effect.

So-called "short-lived" gasses and black particle pollution from power plants in Asia and transport in the United States could have a greater influence than previously predicted on temperature changes in North America and elsewhere on Earth, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week. But is the headline the whole story?

While the general press and blog coverage of the report emphasizes Asia as a cause of warming in the United States, scientists also emphasized that better practices in energy-intensive economies with less-than-clean power plants could be an equally large opportunity for stabilizing the climate. Especially in the case of these short-lived pollutants.

The particles being discussed are considered short-lived because their effect is shorter than that of CO2. Much shorter. While CO2 is a global warming agent until it is chemically changed into something else or sequestered, these particulates and gases affect temperatures on Earth's surface by either absorbing more heat or reflecting more than regular air, but they only do so for days or weeks at a time. Since the NOAA predictions estimate short-lived pollutants will be responsible for approximately 20 percent of global warming by 2050, this is both a great opportunity for improvement and a reminder that the largest culprits still need to be dealt with.

The key advantage to reducing these pollutants may be that the benefits will be seen immediately and previous emissions are not compounded. At least, once the production of these pollutants reduces, that 20 percent of warming could cease very quickly.

Certainly air pollution created in Asia is a significant factor in the global climate. But in the case of this non-CO2-related report, I find the press accounts unnecessarily and perhaps unfairly paint Asia (and yes, it's "Asia" rather than anything more precise) as a culprit.

Without having read the entire report, the NOAA scientists seem to have been more careful. They note that U.S. transport, i.e. automobiles and perhaps airplanes, as well as power generation a hemisphere away are likely to contribute to hot, dry summers in the United States.

What's key to remember, however, when media reports talk about Asian pollution, is that manufacturing-related pollution is not completely Asia's fault. Much of the manufacturing going on in China and other countries in East and South Asia is for export, and the United States is a top market for many countries. When I went to the store recently and bought a bunch of housewares, many items were made in China, and I have no idea under what environmental conditions they were produced. I share responsibility for related pollution. I likewise don't know the environmental pedigrees of many non-Asian products in this room.

This disconnect between our purchase and the emissions it causes is a challenge even for green consumers far more diligent than myself. For consumer pressure, we'll need more life-cycle data about products at the point of the purchase, and meanwhile we'll have to work on some far-reaching strategies to clean up the global manufacturing system. Meanwhile, here's hoping we can get rid of most of this short-term gunk.

Thomas Friedman visited a wind farm near the East Asian gambling capital, Macao. But his rhetoric outsizes his quantitative skills in setting up another "dichotomy" in a "flat" world.

The column is a dizzying and logically disjointed ramble through some well-worn tropes on China's economy that have developed during the media's concurrent green awakening and Olympic China craze in recent months.

This is not so surprising from a columnist specialists love to lambaste, but this opening left me more confused than usual:

[T]he Chinese engineers showed me their control room, which has a giant glass window that looks out onto their 21 wind turbines that crown the peaks of a nearby mountain. ...

But as my eye drifted just to the left of that mountain, I saw Macau, with its rising skyline of casino skyscrapers. The Venetian Hotel in Macau alone has some 870 gaming tables and 3,400 slot machines. So, I did a quick calculation and figured that those 21 wind turbines together might power the Venetian's army of one-armed bandits for a few hours of green gambling.

The problem? Read closely. Mr. Friedman did a "calculation" that 21 wind turbines "might" power some slot machines for "a few hours." But how long would the turbines need to be in operation to supply a few hours of gaming? How much electricity does a slot machine use? Is it more if it's one of those LCD ones, or does the spring-loaded wheel type turn out to be more efficient?

It's hard to blame a columnist charged with being interesting and insightful at a length of roughly 800 words twice a week for having some off days, but when you're staking your recent work on a concept of green innovation, and you're the international affairs columnist for The New York Times, I wish it would come out more neatly.

Am I a sucker for linking to this?

The key railway artery in Japan, the Shinkansen or "bullet train" line between Tokyo and Osaka, will introduce Wi-Fi by March 2009, Japan Railways announced.

These trains are already incredibly comfortable, primarily because they are clean and quiet, and they usually deliver you to a key central location in each city. Another perk is the on-platform food vendors who sell totally passable box lunches, sometimes including sushi, without much of a mark-up.

The main drawback to these trains is they're not cheap. And while the JR announcement (in Japanese) doesn't mention whether there will be a charge, I'm guessing they'd brag if it were free, and free Wi-Fi is pretty rare in Japan, at least compared to Chinese and U.S. cities, where coffee shops rarely have the infrastructure for paid connections.

The service is to offer up to 2 megabit connections, and will be built in cooperation with NTT, Japan's massive, partially government-owned telecom.

I can't wait to be in Japan and rich enough to tick off the minutes at high speeds online. Until then, riders will have to search for ambient signals at station stops to send and receive e-mails, something I've found works pretty well on downtown Tokyo JR trains, but can be much harder on the Shinkansen.

Via Ajiajin, and thanks Hose.

Despite advertised measures to decrease pollution, as the one-month countdown to the Beijing Olympics approaches, the government's numbers rank Beijing as having the dirtiest air in China.

With a rating of 98, officially a "blue sky day" but only by two points, Beijing yesterday had the dirtiest air among monitored cities according to the Chinese government Web site that releases daily pollution figures.

Only four other cities, including the capitals of Sichuan, Qinghai, and Liaoning Provinces, ranked above 90 on the scale.

This does not mean that the air will not get cleaner this month. Large numbers of personal vehicles, as well as cargo trucks that do not have Beijing license plates, will be taken off the roads in efforts to reduce car pollution. Additionally, the hyperactive construction with huge numbers of buildings scheduled for completion or undergoing rushed renovation before the Games will stop completely late this month when a citywide construction freeze goes into effect.

The government is planning drastic measures. I hope for the sake of the athletes, visitors, and Beijing residents that they have clear, clean skies. But let's not kid ourselves: the pollution problem in Beijing is not going to go away any time soon. Cleaning up for two weeks may be a nice show, but the city really needs drastic measures. My favorite option: even bigger car taxes than exist now, and get that subway going.

Shanghai's transit system is already admired as a model in China, with its expanding metro map, the maglev super-express train to the Pudong airport, and high ridership in the bus network. Next comes a proposal to open a subway between Shanghai and neighboring Taicang, a Yangzi River port city in Jiangsu Province.

Construction began on No 11 line, which connects the financial center Pudong and the Formula 1 racing court in the rural district of Jiading, in March last year and will be completed before the 2010 World Expo.

The line will be extended 13.5 km and ultimately terminate in the town of Ludu at Taicang if the extension goes ahead.

If the expansion of a subway line seems uncontroversial, that has not been true for the maglev line and its expansion. Instead of running from downtown Shanghai to the airport, the existing maglev stops at a distant subway stop, where passengers switch to the metro. Although it's not a terribly long ride out to the transfer point, the sense of teleportation that you get when accelerating to 268 mph on your way to the airport is considerably dampened by getting on a regular old subway for the rest of your journey.

A plan to extend the maglev through neighborhoods to reach Hongqiao, Shanghai's older airport, met stiff opposition with unusually high-profile demonstrations early this year. Some demonstrators were concerned about the radiation from the massive system of electromagnets that suspends and propels the train. Others were worried that having an aviation-speed train cruising by would depress property values. After all, if you don't get to ride it, no one really wants a big loud train next to their home.

Shanghaiist posted a lot of material on this, including this video from a demonstration in January:

It so happens I am in Shanghai right now, with plans to visit the urban planning museum as an escape from work and the rain today. Perhaps I will have more to add.

Chinese authorities in January announced they would ban ultrathin plastic bags, and make customers pay for reusable canvas grocery bags, in an effort to reduce waste.

Are reusable shopping bags a thing of the future?

(Credit: Paper Nor Plastic)

A Beijing Review article quotes a Hangzhou supermarket manager on the old days, when shopping didn't produce billions of bags worth of waste that will biodegrade only after 200 years, if at all.

"When I was a child, my mother always took me to the vegetable market with a bamboo basket. She put a bowl in the basket for holding bean curd. When we bought sugar powder or salt, the sellers would wrap them with a piece of paper. I miss those days very much," Jin said.

The main purpose of promoting the (canvas) bags is to encourage the consumers to reuse the materials, he added. Some old living habits should not be thrown away, no matter how fast the economy has developed.

I would worry a little bit about my ability to move tofu in a bowl on my bike in Beijing, but I'm more or less onboard with the initiative. It's sometimes hard to convince cashiers that I'd like to put my food in the canvas bag with my books and computer. I've never thought of bringing an old jar when buying grains, but that wouldn't be a bad idea at all!

On the train in Japan, "green" does not refer to the environment. Nor to the color of money, as the extreme amounts necessary to buy "green" tickets there are colored in the generally neutral tones of 10,000 yen bills. Soon there will be "super-green" to take even more of your hard-earned gray.

East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) will introduce super-first class cars on a new extension to its bullet train routes in 2010. The luxuries, according to the Japanese paper Mainichi Shimbun, are to exceed the already comfy-looking green cars on the tracks.

The newer trains will also have a new maximum speed of 320kph (199mph). After a two-week trip enjoying the all-country JR train pass (which cost me, but was worth it), I wonder who could possibly need a more luxurious train than the already clean, orderly, and quiet cars I had on even the less expensive Hikari trains.

Then again, who pays for first class on Virgin Air?