NEWSCHINA

Recently, Washington's Gov. Gregoire formalized plans to phase out the state's only remaining coal-fired power plant by 2025.  Joining Oregon in its vision of a future without coal, the agreement sets the Pacific Northwest on the path to become the first coal-free region in the country.

This is great news for those concerned about clean air, healthy lungs, and the stability of the global climate system. But what if Washington is just exporting the world's coal problem to China?

This could be what happens if Peabody Coal gets it way. The largest coal company in the world is proposing to send coal through Washington and across the Pacific to booming markets in China and India. Its proposed giant export facility, the Gateway Pacific Terminal, would be built along Washington's scenic coastline and transport by rail 24 million tons/year of coal mined from Wyoming's Powder River Basin to the port.

The clean air in Longview, Washington will remain that way, at least for now.  Millennium Bulk Terminals, a subsidiary of Australian coal company Ambre Energy, withdrew its permit application to build the United States’ first West Coast coal export terminal last week.

More than 300 Change.org activists signed a petition to complement the efforts of environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and concerned local citizens to fight the project.  EarthJustice represented those groups in a legal appeal of the terminal’s project permit.

Even as advertised, the proposed project was a bad deal for Longview residents, but it turns out that Millennium Bulk Terminals had more sinister intentions than they we willing to let on.

Time and again, Millennium assured residents and government officials that the facility would export to China only 5.7 million tons of coal per year – approximately as much coal as the entire state of Washington burns.  That was already enough to raise serious concerns about the health risks of coal dust and significant traffic while waiting for coal trains to traverse the area.

When looking for excuses for its failure to lead on climate change, the United States has often pulled the China Card. You know, the one that says "you can’t expect us to do much considering all the carbon the Chinese are pumping into the atmosphere?"

It’s been played by Republicans and Democrats alike, as the Obama Administration’s top climate negotiator Todd Stern reminded us before last year’s pivotal Copenhagen conference when he said “no deal will be possible if we don't find a way forward with China.”

So, given this apparent eagerness to see China getting to work on climate solutions, why is the Obama Administration now flirting with the possibility of starting a squabble with China over its subsidies for clean energy industries?

Well, the short answer is because it’s election season and because President Obama is naturally trying to do everything he can to maintain the support of key allies like the United Steelworkers. Last week, the powerful union filed a complaint with the administration asking it to investigate whether those Chinese clean energy subsidies violate World Trade Organization trade rules. Acting on the complaint allows the administration yet another opportunity to look tough on China, and to defend American jobs just before an election that’s all about jobs.

When world leaders went to Copenhagen last year, the media typically summarized the purpose of their meeting as "negotiating a successor to the expiring Kyoto Protocol." But what optimistic advocates were hoping for was far more. Where Kyoto was a modest agreement that had little buy-in from major polluters, some thought Copenhagen could result in a grand climate bargain that would save us all.

Of course, no climate watcher truly believed Copenhagen would produce a break-through. The parties were simply too far apart on important issues. When President Barack Obama flew in and famously barged into a meeting of the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China), the media detected a climax. Of course, no breakthrough was reached. Some one had to be blamed. The United States and the United Kingdom generally blamed China. China generally blamed the United States and other rich countries.

As representatives meet in Tianjin, China, ahead of November's COP-16 meeting in Cancun, Mexico, the naive optimism of Copenhagen has faded into cold realism. As John Broder writes in The New York Times, observers such as the Natural Resources Defense Council's Jake Schmidt have begun to question whether a grand bargain among hundreds of nations is possible. Perhaps, some say, it's time to negotiate a bargain among the top polluters.

Instead of a successor to the expiring Kyoto Protocol, last year's climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen ended in finger-pointing among China, the United States, Europe, and others. Since then, the world has been waiting to see whether this year's climate negotiations can really deliver. As China hosts its first round of talks this week in the northern port city of Tianjin, it's time to recognize cooperation is not optional, but essential for our survival.

It was more than a year before the 2008 election that Senator Barack Obama made one of his first statements about China. Hillary Clinton was already on record, as were many Democrats and Republicans including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, taking a hard line on China. Since the end of the Cold War, candidates in general talked a big game, but as presidents were more pragmatic.

The ozone hole is so last century. Didn't we solve that one already?

Actually, it's still here...on September 24, 2006, the ozone hole was, in fact, the largest it's ever been. Gladly, however, by banning those dreaded CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals, the missing patch of our upper atmosphere is well on its way to healing. Just like a dude with a bad hangover, it simply takes awhile for the atmosphere to purge the chemicals from its system.

That's the good news a large team of scientists reported yesterday, on the 23rd anniversary of the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty now frequently billed as the most successful example of global cooperation on an environmental threat to date. The team said the ozone hole has finally stopped getting worse and should be patched up between 2045 and 2060—"slightly earlier" than expected.

But as environmental problems often seem to go, here too, it's one step forward and two steps back. The report also notes that global warming is aggravating the ozone hole; and—conversely—the hole, which is located over the South Pole, could be helping accelerate surface warming of the ice.

What's most interesting to me is how the Montreal Protocol—a living breathing meeting of nations, not just a piece of paper–itself has the potential to help heal the climate crisis. It turns out that both the chemicals that deplete the ozone layer (CFCs and its cousins) and their more ozone-friendly replacements (called HFCs) are both some of the most potent greenhouse gases in existence.

Once molecule of an HFC—which today is used in many refrigeration and air conditioning systems—warms the planet up to 11,000 times more than one molecule of CO2. And in the future, as developing nations switch to HFCs (they had more time than rich countries to phase out dangerous CFCs) and also generally acquire more "luxuries" such as refrigerators, the use of these chemicals is expected to skyrocket in coming decades (by leaps and bounds in China alone).

So what we have is this: the Montreal Protocol is patching the ozone hole, but if "progress" continues on the same path, these actions could drastically add to global greenhouse gas emissions. That's the pessimistic view.

There is a more optimistic view. While bickering and mistrust plague the U.N. climate talks every year, the Montreal Protocol negotiators actually like each other and, believe it or not, are fairly decent at compromise. What's more, there happen to be chemicals that can replace both HFCs and CFCs and do no harm to either the climate and the ozone layer. Companies like Coca-Cola, Ben & Jerry's, and General Motors are already using them.

In recent years, there's been a huge push from tiny island nations—you know,

The landslide in China's Gansu Province that killed more than 1,200 people was one of the worst episodes during a summer of catastrophic flooding in the nation. But while triggered by rains, the landslide was also partly a man-made disaster, the result of careless deforestation of the land and one that researchers had long warned could occur.

And it's not just China's construction boom that's causing forests to be cleared. Folks are also eating their way through the trees: Disposable wooden chopsticks are a huge, avoidable tax on the world's forests.

In China alone, people go through about 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year, writes Smith College Professor Daniel K. Gardner in the Los Angeles Times. According to one estimate, that demand translates into the cutting of about 100 acres of trees per day.

The alternatives to disposable chopsticks aren't always perfect either, however. Some restaurants favor offering reusable wooden chopsticks wrapped in paper sleeves touting environmental awareness. Others use slick plastic chopsticks that can be cleaned in sterilizers either in-house or at off-site cleaning facilities. But sterilization still takes energy, and as in the case of the paper "protect the environment" sleeves, packaging presents a new burden on the environment.

Was the U.S. Senate's climate bill dead on arrival? Is it about to die? Is it nearly dead? Speculation ran rampant for awhile, but by now, everyone's pretty sure this year's verdict on climate legislation in the United States is "R.I.P."

In China, deliberations happen behind closed doors and are wrapped in study groups and committees of officials. So does its environmental tax bill exist? What does it look like? When might it emerge? It's hard to tell.

This is why it's big news when an official who studies taxation for the government says that a comprehensive system of environmental taxes is likely to be a part of China's next five-year plan, a document that will take effect in 2011 and will set the official five-year agenda for the country.

And you thought you had a bad morning commute.

For 11 days, reporters and bloggers stood agog at the news of a 60-mile traffic jam on a major highway from China's Inner Mongolia province to Beijing. Now that it's apparently been cleared up, the real story is what was inside that horizon-spanning column of heavy trucks: coal, really dirty coal, from China's frontier with Mongolia.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that authorities blamed road construction and accidents for the back-up. But, as the article notes, some of the problem lies in the road's use to transport cut-rate coal mined illegally in Inner Mongolia.

Damien Ma at The Atlantic adds that "much of the coal in China is now loaded onto trucks rather than freight trains because China's rail system has numerous bottlenecks and is often over-taxed, which ends up creating supply shortages to the coast." This equates to a situation in which trucks are inefficiently burning more fuel to move an already dirty fuel.

Graham Webster is a journalist who holds a master's degree in East Asian studies. He is blogging from China this summer.

Flipping through the channels of Chinese news today yielded a flurry of coverage of the disastrous landslide in the northwestern province of Gansu, which has killed more than 100 people. What the televised reports don't mention is that many netizens believe the tragedy may be the direct result of human activities.

The web site Global Voices has collected a bevy of material from an ongoing citizens' investigation that presents a very different narrative from the orchestrated television coverage, which features Chinese soldiers rescuing stranded residents and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao yelling instructions to a victim trapped under rubble. While displaying rescue efforts is important, the media's portrayal of the landslide as a natural disaster ignores the careless exploitation of the land at its root.