The Yellow Dragon can use Stinking Cloud at will
Today it was 26C in Tokyo, and we had our first taste of this year’s yellow dust, the strange and nasty pollution that tends to drift over Japan from China during spring and summer. Today’s was the worst I have ever seen in 5 years in Japan – the above photograph, taken from my ground floor balcony, shows the sky at about 3pm today, just after the cloud reached us. Apparently in Matsue, in Western Japan, visibility was down to 5 km. In case this seems like a strange thing to care about, let me assure you this “weather” is not pleasant: it causes sneezing, eye irritation, headaches and drowsiness in many people when it is at its worst, and I think some towns in Kyushu issued alerts that would cause some people to stay inside (especially those with respiratory problems). The US army monitors this phenomenon in Korea and issues regular warnings. Of particular recent concern is the increasing concentration of what the Japanese call “PM2.5,” very small particles of pollutants of size less than 2.5 microns, which seem to arise from industrial pollution and smog, and have specific associated health concerns. According to the Global Burden of Disease 2010, Ambient PM Pollution is the 4th biggest cause of lost disability-adjusted life years in China, and ranks much higher as a cause of years of life lost than of years of disability. By way of comparison it is ranked 16 in Australia and 10 in the USA.
Some part of the yellow dust problem is natural, due to sandstorms in the interior of China, but in the past 10 years the problem has become worse and its health effects more significant. No doubt part of the concern about its health effects arises from greater awareness, but there is also a confluence of factors at work in China that create the problem: desertification, soil erosion and pollution, and industrial pollution due primarily to coal power and transport. It’s becoming increasingly clear that as China develops, it needs to make a shift away from coal power and personal transportation, and it needs to do it soon. No matter how bad the yellow dust is in Japan, it has become very bad in China, and concern is growing about the seriousness of its health and economic effects.
This puts China on the horns of a dilemma. Development is essential to the improvement of human health, but the path China has taken to development, and the rapidity of its industrial and economic growth, are seriously affecting environmental quality. It’s possible that China is the canary in the coalmine of western development, and may be the first country to find its economic goals running up against its environmental constraints – and this despite a rapid slowing in population growth. China is going to have to start finding ways to reverse desertification, soil erosion, and particulate pollution, because it cannot afford to continue losing marginal farmland, degrading the quality of its farmland, and basing its industrial and urban growth on highly-polluting fossil fuels.
This raises the possibility that China needs to introduce a carbon tax (or better still, a carbon-pricing system) for reasons largely unrelated to global warming. A carbon pricing system with options for purchasing offsets, linked into the EU market, would potentially encourage reforestation and reductions/reversals in the rate of desertification; it would also provide economic incentives for investments in non-fossil fuel-based energy sources, probably nuclear for the long term and renewables for the short term. The government, by selling off permits, would be able to raise money to help manage the infrastructure and health needs of the poorest rural areas most in need of immediate development. These effects are important even without considering the potential huge benefits for the world from China slowing its CO2 emissions. I notice I’m not alone in this idea; Rabett Run has a post outlining the same environmental issues, and suggesting that there are many direct economic and social benefits of such a system.
This is not just of practical importance to China, but it’s rhetorically a very useful thing to note: that a lot of carbon sources (and most especially coal) have huge negative health and social consequences in their own right; raising the cost of using them and finding financial incentives to prevent or reverse deforestation is of huge benefit for a lot more reasons than just preventing runaway climate change. It would be cute indeed if China’s immediate economic and environmental problems became the cause of strong action to prevent climate change; on the other hand, it would be very sad if the focus on the AGW aspects of carbon pricing – which are a shared international burden rather than a national responsibility – led China’s decision makers to miss the other vital environmental problems it can address. Especially if failure to address those other environmental problems caused China’s economic growth and social liberalization to stall or fall backwards.
If any country is going to run up against environmental limits to growth, it is China; and if China can avoid that challenge, and the social and health problems it will cause, then there is great hope for the future of the planet. So let’s hope the Chinese can come to terms with their growing environmental challenges as adroitly as they have dealt with some of their others … and if their efforts to tackle those problems will benefit the rest of the world too.
Compromise and Conceit 
March 10, 2013 at 8:22 pm
“Is a Carbon Tax Justified Purely on Health Grounds?”
and
“China is going to have to start finding ways to reverse desertification, soil erosion, and particulate pollution, because it cannot afford to continue losing marginal farmland, degrading the quality of its farmland, and basing its industrial and urban growth on highly-polluting fossil fuels.”
The core problem with your argument is your using carbon as a proxy for overall environmental damage.
Carbon has little to do with the fact that Chinese industry pumps out huge numbers of pollutants, including PM2.5 and similar particulates. These problems are primarily related to the fact that China has shit emissions and pollution standards, not the fact they burn shitloads of coal.
Obviously there is some relationship, as (without bothering to check) I’ll bet that coal contains stacks of particulates that I’d prefer to not have in my lungs [1]. So carbon pricing would have a marginal effect on the core problem. [2]
The bigger issue is that at some points government steps in forbids stuff [5]. For murder, we don’t try to impose a market mechanism (like were geld [6]) we just ban it. While the fine degree of how the air is (i.e. exactly how polluted) is something a market mechanism can do (i.e. does the populace want to lose a year of lifespan and have good daytime TV, or half a year and watch endless reality TV?). But it’s a needless complication when making broad brush decisions.
This is why China simply slapping down a bunch of emission standards unilaterally would be the best possible outcome, for both it’s people and the nations around it.
” it would be very sad if the focus on the AGW aspects of carbon pricing – which are a shared international burden rather than a national responsibility – led China’s decision makers to miss the other vital environmental problems it can address. “
The link your proposing via carbon pricing to address it maximises the chance they’ll fail to address it. Better to say “China, you need to setup carbon pricing to avoid AGW. Also, if you want to stop chewing your air you should put in emission control processes like we did 50 years ago.”
On a separate note:
” The government, by selling off permits, would be able to raise money to help manage the infrastructure and health needs of the poorest rural areas most in need of immediate development.”
The idea of channeling money from environment taxes towards poverty reduction schemes is a tempting one. But it falls into the trap that Monbiot keeps throwing himself into. He argues that we should do a bunch of environmentally sound stuff and then also reduce inequality. These are two separate goals.
If Monbiot really wanted to argue an environmental line, he’d argue that we should reduce carbon emissions (or whatever issue is at hand) and that the equity impacts were irrelevant. For example, if carbon pricing leads to bankers making a fortune off the permits and also averts global warming then it’s achieved it’s environmental goal. The process of linking secondary outcomes that he likes to primary outcomes (i.e. preventing global warming) is part of why Monbiot is least convincing, namely he’s frequently advocating socialism (or similar) in order to address climate change instead of just addressing climate change!
[1] I’m comfortable not checking as last I considered it there was stuff all in coal that I actually wanted in my body without it first being rendered down to solitary atoms.
[2] While still being a valid solution to a much larger issue [3] It would help with desertification driven by climate change. But not yellow dust caused by industrial outputs.
[3] If this generation dies choking on it’s own airborne shite at 40 that’s a problem, but if sea levels rise or climates so that future generations simply aren’t possible then that’s a vastly more important issue. [4]
[4] I’m not in favour of people dying now, but I’m even more strongly against species-icide.
[5] Bet you never thought you’d see me argue that, did you?
[6] Clearly it has been tried as we have a term for it. And it’s a useful mechanism to keep PCs out of gaol in games.
March 10, 2013 at 9:21 pm
Actually, I’m assuming that a large part of the cause of PM pollution is fossil fuels: coal, diesel and dirty petroleum. But that’s why the title of the post ends with a question mark … because if the PM pollution is primarily driven by other industrial processes, then as you say a carbon pricing system would have only a minor effect. Desertification, obviously, is not caused by fossil fuel burning, but if there’s a system of carbon trading that includes offsets, then it will encourage investment in reforestation[1] which might slow desertification.
I mentioned poverty reduction investment because my assumption here is that carbon pricing would add to the cost of energy and slow development; which would mean that some poor areas in China would be at risk of missing out on development they would otherwise benefit from. A common argument made against taxing carbon in China is that the health costs of delayed development outweigh those due to climate change &c. Hence I was thinking some of the government’s revenue from pricing would need to be sunk into supporting (more costly) development in those areas. So in this case it’s not intended as a socialist project[2], but as an example of how a communist government hell-bent on development as a means of maintaining social order would likely use the revenue from any pricing system that increased the cost of development.
I see your point about clean air regulations, but note that they are subject to the same objections as carbon pricing: they raise the cost of development. Strict pollution controls would increase the cost of business, but wouldn’t deliver revenue to the government that it could spend on development assistance. I would have thought from a free market perspective, putting a price on clean air is better than just making rules?
Other points that strike me out of the blue about clean air regulations: in the west they were implemented near the end of the development arc, not near the beginning. Britain only dealt with its smog problems in the 1960s, Europe and the USA in the 1970s – 100 years after the commencement of the industrial revolution. It may be that clean air regulations are better suited to an industrial economy at a different stage to China’s. Also, China is in a different world to the OECD when it implemented clean air regulations, in that there are alternatives to coal that are rapidly becoming cost competitive; so instead of being forced to scrub their smoke stacks, Chinese industrialists also have the choice of switching to energy sources that don’t need smoke stacks. Given the wider range of technologies available to them, maybe pricing carbon gives more flexibility to industry than simply setting clean air laws?
Obviously these are hard judgments to make, probably with no easy right answer. From an environmental perspective the best option is just to slap the lot on at once. But China has to balance this against pressing development needs (India probably even more so). They have often argued against carbon pricing for AGW-related reasons using these development-related issues. Perhaps by considering the risks to health and economic growth caused by the complex of problems related to fossil fuels, they will see (or are seeing) more reasons to implement than to reject carbon pricing.
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fn1: I think there’s debate about whether reforestation is a meaningful form of carbon offset, or from a scientific perspective whether it achieves any of the goals it’s targeted for. I’m not up on that debate!
fn2: not that I necessarily have anything against using carbon revenues to support inequality reduction