McGuinty’s eyes opened to China’s smog problem
Says pollution reinforces Ontario’s plan to phase out coal But understands China’s need to sustain economic growth
BEIJING— Premier Dalton McGuinty says if he had any doubts about closing Ontario’s coal-fired power plants they vanished the instant he stepped off the plane in China’s 12- million strong capital city. To the newcomers it looked like a thick fog, but the smell and taste was a giveaway that it was much more deadly than that.
“ I had heard stories about the air quality and it is real,” McGuinty, who is leading an 11day trade mission to China, said yesterday.
“ It reinforced for me . . . how important it was to continue our phasing out coal- fired generation.” Economic Development and Trade Minister Joe Cordiano said he couldn’t imagine how people can live in smog so thick that it was impossible to see tall buildings 100 metres away.
“ I don’t know how the pilot landed the plane,” he said yesterday as he walked the steps of the Great Wall of China, where the air was much less polluted. The oppressive pollution is one of the serious side effects of a supercharged economy that’s growing annually by almost 10 per cent. And the smog is often overlooked in the business journals as they enthuse about the great potential for trade and investment.
According to the World Health Organization, China, the world’s most populous country at 1.3 billion people, has seven of the world’s most polluted cities. Most of China’s power is produced from coal, which visitors swear they can taste. The greater the economic growth, the bigger the demand for electricity. McGuinty said he is not blaming the government for giving a backseat to the environment.
“ I don’t blame the leadership here . . . because you cannot just pull the plug and not allow the economy to continue to grow. What they’ve got to do is get ahead of that growth with cleaner kinds of energy,” he said. McGuinty, in China for the first time, said the country’s challenge comes when it tries to sustain that growth by using an energy source — coal — that more and more areas in the world are trying to leave behind.
“ We don’t have the right, even though we all share the same global environment, to say, ‘ You can’t do this’ until we get our own act together.” The Ontario government plans to close the province’s coal- fired electricity producing plants by 2009, including the giant Nanticoke facility on the shore of Lake Erie, which is one the biggest polluters in Canada. The Liberals had promised to do it by 2007 but a power supply shortage forced the government to postpone it by two years. Critics doubt it will happen even by 2009, because new supply sources are not coming on stream quickly enough. Compounding China’s pollution problem is the jump in car sales. Even though only 1 per cent of Chinese own a car, that number is beginning to rise sharply as the burgeoning middle class trade in their bicycles for one of the many cars built in China under partnership agreements with automakers from around the world. “They got a big (pollution) problem. It is evident to any Canadian who gets off a plane,” Robert Wright, the Canadian ambassador to China, told the Toronto Star.
“ This is the case, not just in Beijing, but in other major cities in China and throughout east Asia. China has some serious problems. They are aware of it and they know they have to deal with it.
“ What they are trying to do
here is balance environmental problems
with economic
growth.”
Wright said the Chinese are increasingly
voicing their concerns
about the chemical soup they breathe and the pressures of runaway growth.
“ People here in China are worried about the impact of economic growth on the environment. And the Chinese government is very much aware of that. They are sensitive to this issue, no question about it, and they are looking for advice and partnerships with companies . . . who can help them in the area of environmental management,” he said. The Chinese government also has the added deadline pressure of having to clean up the air by the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Running in the kind of deadly smog that now envelops the city could make the marathon an impossibility.
Shred- Tech, a Cambridge, Ont. company, is looking to capitalize on one area of air pollution — the burning of hospital waste.
“ In China, 100 per cent of it is burned,” said He Lin, the Asian marketing manager for ShredTech, which uses a steam process to kill bacteria in hospital waste, such as bandages, before it is shredded and dumped in landfill sites. So far, Shred- Tech has sold one machine for a project approved by China’s environment protection watchdog.