China Looks to the U.S. to Learn From the Clean Air Act, Even as Some in the U.S. Seek to Dismantle It.

It is remarkable that the U.S. Clean Air Act is under attack these days.  Have we come to take the blue skies in the U.S. so for granted that magazines are running columns with titles like “Clean Air Act: Defend or Dismantle?”  I have worked for NRDC in Beijing for the last five years, and no one in this great city takes a blue sky day for granted.  They are too precious and rare a commodity.  

Let us not forget, as Peter Lehner recently pointed out, that the Clean Air Act is what prevents the air in the U.S. from looking like Beijing’s.  If you need a reminder of what bad air pollution looks like, here is a picture I took a few years ago that gives a sense of the challenge.

This is why NRDC is engaging in an all-out effort to defend the U.S. Clean Air Act from attack.  And it is also why we are working in China to strengthen the environmental laws and enforcement mechanisms needed to tackle China’s serious air pollution.

So, it is ironic that, even as we battle to defend the Clean Air Act, China is seeking help from the U.S. EPA to learn about the very air regulation techniques that most Republicans and some coal-state Democrats are trying to dismantle.  Last week, I attended the 6th Annual Regional Air Quality Management Conference in Beijing, organized by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) and the EPA.  The event marked the renewal of a memorandum of understanding between MEP and EPA on air pollution, toxics, enforcement, water pollution, and waste.  China’s environmental minister Zhou Shengxian and U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson spoke at the meeting.

Notably, the conference also provided some insight into the direction China will take on air pollution in its upcoming 12th Five-Year Plan.  China will focus its air pollution efforts in four areas [N.B.: the following is a rough translation from Zhou’s remarks; it’s dense, but worth reading to get a picture of where China wants to go on air pollution regulation]:

1.      Enhance the level of main pollutants total emission control:

• Continue to reduce SO2 and COD (the current two “pollution reduction” five-year plan targets);
• Add NOx and ammonia to the total emission target program that has been the core of China’s pollution reduction effort in the 11th Five-Year Plan period;
• Increase SO2 reduction in coal-fired power generation, steel, petrochemical, non-ferrous metals, and other industries; completing the pollution levy program for SO2 emissions; and strengthening power plant denitrification;
• Improve motor vehicle pollution control, strictly implementing national motor vehicle emissions standards, and accelerating the development of cleaner motor vehicle fuel.

2.      Accelerate progress in building regional joint prevention and control:

• Combine local governance and regional control; coordinating pilot efforts and comprehensive system reform; seeking breakthroughs in key regions first;
• Focus on the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei key regions, establish regional air quality prevention and control programs with integrated planning, monitoring, supervision, assessment, and coordination.

3.      Reinforce comprehensive air pollution control:

• Improve regional industrial structure and distribution; implementing special emissions limits for key industry; tightening the environmental threshold for project approvals;
• Promote use of clean energy; improving the structure of municipal energy consumption; and increasing the proportion of clean energy used;
• Develop integrated multi-pollutant control approaches for PM, VOC, mercury emission, ozone, etc.

4.      Improve regional air quality monitoring and supervision:

• Strengthen air quality monitoring in key regions; develop monitoring of acid rain, PM2.5, ozone, and air quality along urban roadways;
• Improve the air quality indicator system; establish air quality evaluation methodologies for ozone and PM2.5;
• Build regional environmental enforcement and supervision, increase rectification of illegal corporate polluters;
• Strengthen urban air quality rating, to assure to meet the air quality improvement goals in time.

Our team in Beijing has been working with MEP and other Chinese government entities to find ways to strengthen air pollution regulation in China.  The Chinese experts are serious people working on important problems under difficult circumstances.  Chinese officials are looking to the U.S. experience, more than that of any other country, in search of the best regulatory and governance “technologies” to solve their air pollution problems.  It is a shame that some in the U.S. are seeking to discard what the rest of the world views as state-of-the-art approaches to a cleaner, more sustainable model of development.  Let’s make sure that they do not succeed.