I have not seen this covered, but it'sd really bad news:
China delays climate change plan indefinitely
China has delayed indefinitely its national “action plan” on climate change, which was due to be released on Monday after exhaustive consultations among ministries in Beijing and provincial and local governments.
No explanation was given for the move, although global warming is causing increasing international concern about the country’s high-speed economic growth model.
China is responsible for only a small portion of greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere but is likely to become the largest emitter in the world as early as this year, according to the International Energy Agency.
The country is facing a potentially devastating impact from climate change, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on China and Asia, part of which was released in Beijing on Monday.
China has long held the position that it should not be punished for the earlier sins of the West (which spewed carbon and other pollutants with abandon during its own industrialisation phase), and that its own growth should not be penalised unfairly, especially as its per capita emissions remain relatively low.
The problem, of course, is that Chinese population is quite large, and thus its total emissions are already very high - the second largest in the word after the US, and now set to overtake that in a year or so in view of its staggering growth.
What makes this decision all the more tragic is that China not only contirbutes to global climate change, but is likely to be one of the main victims of it - in addition to the more immediate threat of choking on its own pollution.
More than 10% of arable land polluted
About 12.3 million hectares, or more than 10 percent of China's arable land, is contaminated by pollution and the situation is getting worse, the Ministry of Land and Resources said. Contaminated land suffered from polluted water, excessive fertilizer, heavy metals and solid wastes, the official said.
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"China's economy keeps growing at a rapid rate and demand for resources is also mounting," he said. "Thus, there has been more damage done to the environment from unsuitable resource exploration and development. This not only is related to the social and economic development, but also vital for the long-term interests of the country," he said.
And yet it resolutely moves forward on its current model, concentrating the problem ever more:
Coal imports become China's burning issue
China's rapidly growing economy is placing unprecedented pressure on supplies of coal, prompting a debate on whether the country is poised to become a permanent net importer of its -staple fuel.
High local prices and transport bottlenecks resulted in China becoming a net importer of coal for the first time ever in the first quarter. Politics is also putting pressure on supplies, with ambitious provincial bosses forcing mines to enforce laws - often ignored in China's "coal rush" - on safety and the environment.
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China is the world's largest producer and consumer of the fuel, mining about 2.38bn tonnes in 2006, about double the total in the US, the second highest producer. Exports have been declining since reaching a high of 70m tonnes in 2003 and are now being outpaced by imports, mainly from Indonesia and Australia.
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Barlow Jonker, the Australian energy consultancy, has identified more than 800m tonnes of new capacity that could be on line by the end of 2011, bringing annual production to nearly 3bn tonnes.
China is currently building one coal-fired plant every 4 days. Last year it installed more than 100 GW of coal-fired power plants - that's the (carbon-spewing) equivalent of the whole fleet of US nuclear power plants, added in one year. And this year is likely to once again beat records.
Something's got to give. Something's going to break. And we're all going to pay it at some point. Them first, but us too. And let's never forget that all that "cheap" electricity is used to manufacture all the cheap crap we consume - we're driving this evolution to a large extent, with our insane focus on owning ever more stuff, and our system's focus on doing it "cheap."
It's not cheap. Payment is just delayed.