Each time a grim picture is drawn about the country's increasing
pollution, the public will be shocked to further sharpen their
awareness of environmental protection.
In this sense, the warning against higher pollutant emissions by
the country's top environmental watchdog is more than needed.
On Monday, the director of the State Environmental Protection
Administration (SEPA) confirmed that discharges of COD (chemical
oxygen demand) and SO2 (sulphur dioxide) increased by 4.2 percent
and 5.8 percent respectively from the same period last year.
About one month after the statistical officials figured out how
fast the national economy has grown in the first half of the year,
the SEPA has now come up with the environmental cost.
This is not, in fact, the first time these pollution numbers
have been released: An article by the SEPA published early this
month had already detailed the rise of pollutant emissions. Yet by
repeating the distressing fact of pollution's increase as a result
of rapid economic growth, the environmental watchdog apparently
attempts to drive home more sense of urgency.
In fact, when it was reported that the country's energy
intensity, instead of declining as expected, has climbed by 0.8
percent year-on-year due to excessive and extensive investment
growth in the first six months, our annual environmental prospects
were, unsurprisingly, doomed.
China became the world's largest sulfur dioxide discharger in
2005. And its discharge of COD, a typical indicator used to measure
water pollution, was also high enough to demand immediate
control.
By making it a compulsory target, the Chinese government plans
to cut both COD and sulfur dioxide emissions by 10 percent during
the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-10).
However, to stop and reverse the country's environmental
deterioration, the SEPA should add more teeth to its supervision
work.
It is certainly necessary to depict a general picture about the
country's environmental conditions to keep the public informed of
the severity of the problem.
But it is equally important, if not more so, for the
environmental watchdog to single out those heaviest polluters and
expose them to public scrutiny.
The SEPA has done a good job in heightening public awareness.
Its intervention in some notorious pollution cases won it broad
public endorsement.
But it would be great if it could, on a regular basis, say which
enterprises have performed worst in cutting pollutant emissions and
which local governments have done the least to fulfil their
environmental commitments.
By naming polluters, on the one hand, the environmental watchdog
could focus its supervision on prompt corrective action by these
pollution-makers while setting examples for many other lesser
polluters to follow.
On the other hand, the public will also be invited to keep a
close eye on those named polluters.
(China Daily August 16, 2006)
