The unprecedented move by the national environmental watchdog to
halt approval of all projects by major power plants and four cities
for their poor environmental performance shows its muscle, but the
agency alone will not be able to enforce its writ.
This is the nut to crack in China's drive to clean up its
environment.
The State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) has
become ever bolder in implementing the country's environmental
policies, evinced by the "environmental storms" in the past two
years.
Such boldness is what China urgently needs, as it strives to
strike a balance between economic growth and environmental
sustainability, a new way of development that must shake off the
past environment-ignoring mode.
The SEPA has thus won support from both the public and the
central leadership. But its limited power means it often has to
depend on the concerted action of other departments to get its
way.
In the latest move, the SEPA can put new projects by offending
companies and cities on hold unless all industries operated by them
have proper approval from the agency.
But it does not mean the automatic stopping of relevant
projects. The SEPA does not have the power to directly halt the
continuation of those potentially polluting projects.
Past experience shows that many such projects, which often
involve the investment of billions of yuan, manage to go ahead
despite environmental orders to stop them.
Companies have been known to install cleaning facilities to pass
the environmental impact assessment then keep them shut to save
costs.
As steel prices were on the decline last year, industrial
insiders said that steelmakers had suffered from slumping profits
and that the costs saved from idling their environmental facilities
had become meaningful.
The latest environmental figures show that the SEPA alone can no
longer hold back the worsening situation.
China missed its 2006 goals of reducing energy consumption by 4
percent and reducing emissions of pollutants by 2 percent.
It is not because the SEPA failed in its duty. It is because the
agency alone is not powerful enough.
(China Daily January 12, 2007)