TIANJIN, China—This industrious nation’s allegiance to massive-scale construction projects is as familiar to the world as the 2,500-year-old, 5,500-mile Great Wall of China, and as imposing as the wide moats and towering red stone walls of the 600-year-old Forbidden City at the heart of Beijing.
Even still, international visitors attending China’s first U.N. climate change conference in Tiajin, which ended on Saturday, were struck by the immensity of the brand new polished marble and glass Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center, the site of the meeting, and the intensity of the retail, commercial and infrastructure construction occurring outside its hangar-like entry. The meeting, marked by bickering between China and the United States as well as modest gains toward a global climate agreement, was the last before the annual year-end climate summit commences in Mexico late next month.
Spanning 2.47 million square feet and soaring to interior heights of 10 stories, the exhibition center, which resembles the Trade Federation’s shining headquarters in the Star Wars films, is easily large enough to house a small fleet of transoceanic jetliners. It opened in September, following just eight months of construction. The building was so quickly constructed that the center does not appear on the city’s newest maps, which, instead, memorialize the small lakes and wetlands wrecked by its presence.
Meanwhile, flanking the brand new 10-lane boulevard in front of the building are dozens of construction cranes, sprouting like dandelions atop the steel skeletons of residential and commercial towers being built.
The speed and scope of the development here, and in dozens of other Chinese cities, embodies the breathtaking economic expansion that, in a generation, has pulled 400 million Chinese from poverty into the middle class. At all times of the day and night, Tianjin’s restaurants are full, while its noisy streets are a tangle of walkers, bikers and drivers. China’s economic development ministries consistently state that they anticipate growth to continue apace, and the economy will be 60 percent larger by 2020.
Last week, in a number of side events, several of China’s leading environmental scientists and technical specialists described the effects that reaching those financial ambitions will have on the country’s plans to tame a warming climate. But there are other effects of China's off-the-charts economic expansion on China’s natural resources, particularly on the already scarce reserves of fresh water. In almost every instance, the conclusions are enormously troubling.
A Future Built on Coal
At the other end of China’s surging growth is a powerful engine fueled principally by coal. This nation, the world’s largest coal producer and consumer, will mine 3.15 billion tons of coal this year, according to the International Energy Agency, which implements a global energy cooperation program among 28 member countries. As a result, China will add 6.3 billion tons of climate changing carbon emissions to the atmosphere in 2010, the most of any country, according to the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Moreover China has already built 4,000 miles of high-speed rail, including the 205 mph bullet train between Tianjin and Beijing, and plans to build 6,000 more miles. It has developed policies to improve buildings, construct eco-cities, and save energy. And China, in many instances in collaboration with Ameerican companies and the U.S. government, is developing advanced coal-fired power stations that burn coal more efficiently, use less water, and dispose of carbon emissions deep underground.
Yet, according to a range of estimates by authorities in and outside China, coal production and consumption by the end of the decade will reach between 3.5 billion and 4.5 billion tons. China announced last year at the Copenhagen climate summit that it would cut the “carbon intensity” of its emissions 40 to 45 percent by 2020, meaning it would reduce the amount of carbon needed to generate a dollar of growth. Chinese officials at the Tianjin conference say they are projected to meet the goal
But the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a new report that looks at various scenarios of economic growth and China’s ability to diversify its energy sources, still projects that China’s carbon emissions will continue to rise, and could essentially double by the end of the decade.
When asked about this in an interview, Jiang Kejun, a director of research at the Energy Research Institute, a unit of the National Development and Reform Commission, said, “There’s disagreement about how much coal will be produced. We project that coal production will peak by 2020 at 3.4 billion tons.”
The effect of China’s surging growth in coal production has even more dire consequences for the nation’s water supply.
“People outside China talk about emissions,” said Fuqiang Yang, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Solutions project in Beijing. “Inside China, water is the highest priority.”
Can China Escape Looming Water-Energy Collision?
Little reported is the fact that China’s rising energy demand, the fastest in the world, is colliding with its rapidly declining supply of fresh water. Over the last 10 weeks Circle of Blue, an independent online news and science organization based in Michigan, has reported the dimensions of the same confrontation in the United States in its path-breaking Choke Point: U.S. project.
China, the world’s third driest country, has roughly 163 trillion gallons of water available for all uses, according to a study released in December 2009 by McKinsey’s 2030 Water Resources Group. About 63 percent is used by farmers, down from 85 percent in 1980, according to China’s Water Ministry. Municipal and domestic use has been stable at around 12 percent, and industry uses 23 percent; 80 percent of that is used to operate and cool China’s 10,000 coal-burning generating units at 550 power plants.
But by 2030, according to the McKinsey study, the demand for water in China’s rapidly growing economy will reach 215 trillion gallons, 52 trillion gallons more than is available. The increase in coal production and consumption accounts for most of the increase. The amount of water consumed by China’s energy sector will reach 70 trillion gallons or 32 percent, while agriculture’s share will fall to 51 percent, according to McKinsey.
The China Water Ministry described the situation in a report earlier this year: “Rising water consumption associated with socio-economic development increasingly strains China’s freshwater ecosystems, challenging traditional water resource management.”
In effect, the most critical economic and environmental question in China today, said Yang and Kejun, is whether there is enough water for China to continue its stunning modernization.
“We’re putting a lot of time to understand that challenge,” said Yang.
Last year, amid one of the most severe droughts in China’s modern history, the Ministry of Water announced a new “water intensity” goal to reduce water consumption 60 percent for every dollar of economic activity. The new policy is encouraging work on water recycling, cleaning up China’s polluted waters to make them suitable for industrial use, and conservation. China also is developing new coal-fired generating technology that will increase the fuel efficiency of its generating stations, while lowering water consumption by half, Kejun said.
Yang added that more investments in wind power and solar photovoltaics, which do not use water, will help. And the country has passed new building standards, appliance standards and other efficiency measures that will conserve energy, thus reducing water demand.
“Innovation and new technology is the answer,” Yang said.
Both experts acknowledged, however, that the unyielding economic trend numbers still point upwards at a steep angle, meaning rapidly rising energy demand. Similarly, the angle of the downward trend for water supply, made sharper by the effect climate change is having on precipitation, point to an unavoidable collision.
This post originally appeared at Circle of Blue.
