Still-Poor China, Burning Coal for Home Heat
[Full post at NCPA Debate Central here]
Rapid industrialization caused vast pollution across industrializing China. But as market-reforms opened the Chinese economy, international investment and trade benefited both Chinese workers and consumers around the world. The Chinese economy has expanded rapidly if unevenly ever since, and manufacturing jobs lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty.
Rapid industrialization in countries with weak rule-of-law institutions brings costs, including heavy pollution of the air and water. Early on, pollution was seen by most as a good thing, a sign of industrial progress, production, and rising wages and job opportunities.
In US and English history:
strong legal traditions enabled ordinary citizens to protect their air, land, and water, often against politically potent parties. Even public law officials, such as attorneys general, used the common law to protect citizens against environmental dangers. Unfortunately, as we will see, statutory regulation has largely supplanted the common-law legal regime that once provided solutions for many environmental problems.
China of course lacks the common law tradition of the US and UK, and US judges began moving away from common law precedents even before passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts replaced Common Law with federal regulations.
In any case, heavy pollution in China today, much as heavy pollution in Pittsburg in the early twentieth century. (See November 2016 post: U.S./China Natural Gas Trade for Cleaner Skies for background).
Rapid industrialization in countries with weak rule-of-law institutions brings costs, including heavy pollution of the air and water. Early on, pollution was seen by most as a good thing, a sign of industrial progress, production, and rising wages and job opportunities.
In Nevil Shute’s novel, Ruined City, a shipbuilding town on the English coast, whose companies had gone bankrupt in the Great Depression, is described to be: “as clean as a sepulcher,” (a small room or monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried).
The factories were closed so no more smoke and noise in the air, but also no more jobs or income. Laid-off shipbuilders and others were out of work, out of income, out of hope, and mortality rates soared (in the novel, a hospitalized financier arranges new shipbuilding orders, and the city comes back to life).
The people of Beijing though continue to live in the pollution of industrial prosperity, with cleaner air delayed by a combination of corruption, poverty, and misguided industrial policy.
“Beijing’s Plan for Cleaner Heat Leaves Villagers Cold,” (WSJ, Jan. 25, 2017) reports the continued problem of burning coal for home heating in communities near Beijing:
Reducing emissions from heating would be among the most effective ways to limit winter smog besides cleaning up industry… Coal-burning by households is particularly dirty because it often happens without the emissions filtering required in power plants. …
But Ms. Gao, whose husband earns about $500 a month at an auto plant, soon noticed a downside.
“Electric heating has become our family’s biggest expense,” Ms. Gao said. She said she may seek a job to help pay the bill.
Despite electricity subsidies for residential consumers, villagers interviewed about their state-supplied heaters said their overall costs had risen substantially. Several said it costs around $300 to heat their homes for the winter, compared with about $200 with coal.
The income divergence between city and rural families is extreme across China. “Here’s What China’s Middle Classes Really Earn — and Spend,” (Bloomberg News, March 9, 2016) shows in an income chart of China’s 770 million workers, just 19% are middle-income earning $11,733 a year. Another 31% are migrant workers earning an average of just $5,858 a year, and the rest are rural people earning an average of $2,000 (plus a .2% slice of the very rich at $500,000 a year).
Of China’s migrant workers, most are of the”floating population” that migrated informally (illegally) to cities for factory jobs. They earn more than they could in their rural villages, but Bloomberg reports: “food and clothing make up nearly half their personal spending” which is just $7 a day.
Anything that adds to the cost of electricity pushes poor workers living around Chinese cities to shift to burning coal in their homes for heat. …