Nation going green
M. J. Akbar

THE galloping double-digit growth in the last five years has more than ever cornered China into a massive energy search to feed its booming economy. In drafting its energy strategies, the Chinese Government has attached unprecedented importance to preventing wasteful economic growth that could affect the country’s long-term development.
To prevent this from happening, the Chinese Government put forward in March 2006 a historic goal of reducing China’s energy consumption by 20 percent over the five years between 2006 and 2010. As the world’s second largest energy consumer, China has a pretty low per capita possession of energy resources, which is about 40 percent of the world average level. Moreover, China’s energy efficiency is only 33 percent, about the level of industrial countries 20 years ago. For example, in Beijing the heating per square meter of indoor space for one winter costs the energy equivalent of 22.4 kilograms of standard coal while it is only 9 kilograms in Germany. Many energy experts believe that enhancing energy efficiency has become an urgent task for the Chinese Government over the next few years.
Energy-efficient buildings
As a matter of fact, among China’s soaring energy consumption, an increasing proportion comes from the skyrocketing number of high-rise buildings. It has been calculated that the ratio of energy consumption used in construction against China’s total energy consumption has risen from 10 percent at the end of the 1970s to around 30 percent now. This proportion is expected to surpass 35 percent in the near future. If indirect energy consumption is included, construction makes up over 40 percent of total energy consumption.
Gu Yunchang, deputy head of China Real Estate Association, said as the largest real estate developer in the world, China constructs a total of 1.6 billion to 2 billion square meters of buildings of all types every year, surpassing that of all industrial nations added together. Of all the new buildings, only 10 to 15 percent meet the national standard for energy-efficient buildings, while around 80 percent are serious energy wasters.
According to Vice Minister of Construction Qiu Baoxing, China’s building energy consumption level is twice that of industrial countries.
Statistics from the Ministry of Construction indicate China has completed the construction of 1.06 billion square meters of energy-efficient buildings, which account for only 7 percent of all existing floor area. Construction experts estimate that if the current construction structure remains unchanged, China will have 70 billion square meters of energy-wasting floor area by 2020. In the case of China, development of technologies for energy-saving buildings should be a strategy of national energy safety.
Deng Xiaomei, who has completed her post-doctoral studies on project management in public institutions at Tsinghua University, said one important reason that Chinese buildings are largely wasteful is that the developers of landmark buildings fanatically pursue exotic designs, new fashions and height while totally ignoring the running costs of their buildings. For example, in the last few years, installing glass-curtain walls has become a fashion among China’s architectural designers. Many property developers have required the installment of glass-curtain walls, unawere of the fact that heat radiates through the walls easily driving up energy consumption. Furthermore, the stagnant airflow in these buildings means air conditioning has to be used throughout the year, leading to further waste of energy.
In order to realize its goal of reducing energy consumption, the Chinese Government has on the one hand closed down high-pollution, high-energy-consumption plants that fail to meet environmental protection standards; and on the other hand advocated the use of energy-efficient construction technologies.
“Enhancing energy efficiency in buildings is not only the requirement to transform the growth model of the construction sector but also the requirement to guarantee energy security,” said Vice Minister of Construction Huang Wei.
Giving incentives to business sector
It has been a long time since the Chinese Government emphasized the importance of building energy efficiency for the first time. In 1986, the government promulgated the first regional standard on designing energy-saving buildings and required the northern part of China, which experiences extreme winter and summer temperatures, to promote energy-friendly construction technologies to the public. This policy was introduced 13 years after the first similar proposal in an industrial country in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.
However, in the following decades, one major barrier to the promotion of energy efficient buildings was the business sector, which took a defensive stance against the government policy, as it had failed in providing incentives to encourage businesses to take energy-saving precautions.
“With the public still to be educated on the importance of energy efficiency of buildings, the popularization of energy-efficient buildings has seen unbalanced development between big cities and small ones. Lack of a functioning management system still affects the effective promotion of this cause,” Qiu said.
2005 is an important year for landmark energy efficiency events. Two national standards on building energy consumption, one on civil residences and the other on public buildings, came out that year. Also in 2005, the Chinese Government drafted a strategic goal of reducing new urban buildings’ unit energy consumption by half by 2010. In the second half of 2007, a series of regulations on energy-saving architecture were launched. According to these regulations, developers or architects who ignore energy consumption standards will face fines or a ban on selling their property.
Of all Chinese cities, Beijing has become a pioneer in adopting new building energy consumption regulations. Since July 2005, the Beijing Municipal Government has regulated that the purchasing contract between developers and homeowners must include energy-saving standards adopted in the property and compensation clauses. Another regulation, enacted on September 1, 2005, states that construction companies must have their designs approved by government agencies when they apply for construction permits. Projects that fail to meet energy saving design standards do not receive the construction permit.
According to a new standard of energy saving in public buildings issued by Guangdong Provincial Government, starting from April 15 public buildings, including hotels and office towers, are forbidden from using large glass-curtain walls.
Qiu said local governments should conduct regular checkups on the energy use of public buildings, including government office buildings, and those that that fail to meet energy saving standards should be publicized.
The last two years have also witnessed the launch of new programs offering incentives to companies that save energy. In September, the Chinese Government decided to allocate 7 billion yuan from central finances to support the technical upgrade of companies to raise energy efficiency. The government has listed 10 key projects to receive financing at the first stage, including upgrading coal-fired industrial boilers, technologies to raise petroleum efficiency and produce oil substitutes, energy-saving technologies in architecture and energy saving lighting technologies.
Subsidies from the government will be used as impetus to encourage companies to upgrade in these areas. The government will entrust professional energy consumption organizations to audit company reports on energy saving and then decide whether they have been faithful to the claimed amount.
In order to further activate companies, the government may prepay part of the subsidies for technical upgrade projects. After these projects are finished, the government will calculate the exact amount of financial reward based on the energy saving effects.
Social investment
Enshi is a backward region in central Hubei Province. In the past, the primary and junior middle schools in rural areas of Enshi could not afford the energy to heat water. Some boarding schools in the region even raised pigs to subsidize their expenditure.
Sponsored by a cooperative program with an international non-government organization, two primary schools in Enshi were able to build efficient energy systems in 2004. New lavatories were built, where human and pig excretion and garbage are turned into biogas. The biogas produced is piped into the kitchens to cook meals and heat water. These two schools now have a round-the-clock hot water supply. The residue from biogas production is used as manure for vegetable farms. The pilot projects have also equipped the two schools with solar power street lamps and clocks. Now such energy schemes have been implemented in 51 schools in Enshi.
China has been expanding the use of renewable clean energy, which has exhibited great market potential. Steve Papermaster, Co-chair of the Energy Committee of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said at a seminar on international clean energy cooperation in Beijing that an increasing number of investors are interested in the market of clean energy-related industries, so money is no longer a problem for research and development.
In September, China’s top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, issued a long-term development plan for China’s renewable energies. According to this plan, China will steadily raise the ratio of clean and renewable energies in the overall energy portfolio. By 2020, the consumption of renewable energies in China will account for 15 percent of total energy consumption. By then, the total capacity of hydroelectric generators will reach 300 million kilowatts, total capacity of wind power generators 30 million kilowatts, annual bio-power production 30 million kilowatts, annual usage of biogas 44.3 billion cubic meters, total capacity of solar power generators 1.8 million kilowatts, annual production capacity of fuel ethanol 10 million tons and annual production capacity of bio-diesel 2 million tons.
China’s sector of environment-friendly technologies has become a new favorite among international venture investors. In 2006, investment in clean energies increased by 147 percent over the previous year, from $170 million to $420 million. The figure for 2007 is estimated to surpass $600 million. British investment banking group Climate Change Capital has already started several investment programs on renewable energy projects in China. “The market of renewable energy in China is booming and full of opportunities,” said Torsten Merkel, director of Cleantech Group’s European unit.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)

Can Islam only be modernised by force?
Farish A Noor

THE return of Benazir Bhutto to Pakistan is something that keen watchers of Pakistani politics have been speculating about for ages, and it would appear that it has finally come true. Now of course the world awaits to see what will happen when both Benazir and Pervez Musharraf try to work together to form a working instrumental coalition to resolve the pressing issues that face the country and shall continue to do so for the months and years to come.
Among the most pressing issues that need to be faced is that of the reform of Islamic education, not only in the countries madrassas, but also in the institutions of higher learning that dot the landscape of the country. Pakistan is not alone in having an International Islamic University, for there are other countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia that have likewise moved to the field of higher religious education for Muslims. What is apparent however is that even after several decades of development the struggle to create a form of higher Islamic instruction that is both Islamic in its essentials and modern in its spirit is sorely lacking.
The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the debate over Islamisation of knowledge, a grand design that has sadly borne little in terms of substantial fruit to date. Looking at the output of those who have been part of this project so far, one is left sceptical about whether such a thing is possible at all. Among the more dubious outpourings of this transnational effort has been the attempts to Islamise the English language and even mathematics; and we have even heard of a case of a book on Islamic Zoology, with the thesis that any animal mentioned in the Quran is an Islamic one and those that are not are presumably un-Islamic. How much money has been spent on such projects, and what pitiable results have we seen!
Furthermore, it has to be said that the reform of Islamic education was never and will never be an easy task. Even at the closing stages of the 19th century when Sir Syed Ahmad Khan founded the Aligarh Anglo-Muhammadan College of India, there were already harsh criticisms of his efforts to modernise Islamic studies. His detractors accused him of trying to dilute and corrupt Islam with non-Islamic subjects like philosophy, logic and material sciences, oblivious of the long tradition of scientific research carried out by generations of Muslim scientists from the 13th century apparently.
By the end of the colonial era many predominantly Muslim states also embarked on similar attempts at modernisation and reform, but with mixed results. Today practically every Muslim country has at least one Islamic university or college, and numerous Islamic research centres. But ironically not a single one of these institutions have been ranked highly in any of the global surveys carried out, and many of them remain obscure.
The sole exceptions to the rule seem to be the National Islamic Universities (UINs) of Indonesia, such as UIN Sharif Hidayatullah and UIN Sunan Kalijaga in Indonesia. Today these are the only institutions I have visited where Muslim students are taught a scientific method of analysis so that they do not simply study Islam, but rather research it as an object of analysis as well. This is what sets them apart from the other Islamic universities in the world, but it also has to be remembered that the UINs of Indonesia were developed largely during the time of the dictator Suharto, who was also opposed to the radicalisation of Muslim students and fearful of the impact and influence of foreign (re: Arab) Islam in Indonesia.
Ironically it was during the Suharto years that the military-backed elite of the country managed to reform and modernise the Islamic educational system of the country, for the sake of development and turning Indonesia into a modern manufacturing-based economy instead. This then leaves us with the dilemma: Can Islamic education only be reformed and modernised by force, at the point of a bayonet? One certainly hopes that that is not the case, for it spells the end of any democratic aspirations on the part of Muslims the world over. However whatever the drawbacks and faults may be, it remains a fact that Indonesia’s Islamic Universities seem to be at the cutting edge of Islamic studies today. For these reasons many observers are now keen to see how the Musharraf-Benazir team will cope with the demands of the Islamic educational reform challenge, and where this will take the madrassas and Islamic colleges of Pakistan. Though the sceptics may be reluctant to place their bets on the success of this endeavour, many others will be praying hard not only for the democratisation of Pakistan, but equally for the success of its educational reform programme. —Khaleej Times





Is Pakistan another Iran?
Jonathan Power

COULD Pakistan go the way of Iran, as it did with the overthrow of the modernising Shah in 1979 and the recall from exile in Paris of Ayatollah Khomeini who ushered in an Islamic revolution that overturned the secular order and moved the country into a paranoid state that feared American intervention unless it developed its nuclear defences? Zbigniew Brzezinki, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor and today the eminent grise on foreign policy in the Democratic Party, seems to think so. As one of the architect’s of Carter’s muddled policy towards the Shah and a senior member of the administration, which was voted out of office mainly because of the debacle over Iran, his insights should be observant and refreshing. They are not.
“When the challenge to the Shah arose we procrastinated too long”, he told me late last month, “I think we should have fished or cut bait more quickly, either making a clear choice to support the Shah in some effort to repress the opposition, to prevent Khomeini from coming back. And then later on embarking on the road to reforms. Or alternatively we could have dumped the Shah very quickly. I favoured the former course. Others the latter. The combination of the two was not very productive. We face the same dilemma right now in Pakistan. We don’t like military dictatorships but are we sure that populism perhaps tinged with Islamic fanaticism will be better? Is it going to be possible to have dual power in Pakistan between President Musharraf and a Prime Minister Bhutto, or is it going to be the first phase of a show down between them that may produce a totally unpredictable Pakistan? I must say I don’t envy the dilemmas the present [American] decision makers confront.”
But both the past tense and the present tense are different in Pakistan and Iran. As Brzezinski is the first to acknowledge Iran has deep reasons for being anti-American. In his opinion it goes back long before the seizure of the American diplomatic mission as hostages in 1979 which launched the US into a bitter confrontational vendetta that has lasted nearly thirty years. “It was related to a problem that at the time was not well understood in the US — the legacy of the American overthrow of Mosadeq in the 1950s. After we overthrew him we stepped in there on a large scale… We became the beneficiaries of the oil bounty… It was then that the US embarked on a course that led overtime to a collision with rising Iranian nationalism.”
But what reason does Pakistan have for being anti-American? There is nothing comparably deep in the Pakistani psyche. American has long been Pakistan’s sugar daddy supplying everything from economic aid, to earthquake relief to the most modern jet fighters. Pakistan acquired its nuclear bomb, not to ward off America, but its neighbour India. Of course there is a lot of anti-Americanism in Pakistan. Much of it is of the de rigueur Third World kind. And it has been stirred by the American war in Afghanistan, which has turned Pakistan into an American base. Yet it doesn’t have that bitter quality that one finds in Iran.
Pakistan was for 200 years part of British India. The Pakistan elite, both civilian and military, is infused with British values of justice and fairplay that, although sometimes clashing with the instincts of Islamic priorities, never quite lose out. Hence even in the time of Musharraf’s dictatorship the supreme court has shown an impressive degree of independence. Moreover, when there are fair elections the religious parties never gain more than 10 per cent of the vote and often much less. Most of Pakistan is concentrating on its increasingly visible economic success. It is understandable that Washington while not wanting to lose Musharraf, who has fulfilled much of America’s post 9/11 agenda, does feel that to be true to its pro democracy rhetoric it has to support a comeback for the exiled leaders of the two principal democratic parties. Yet the choice is by no means as difficult as it was when Carter and Brzezinski confronted the Shah issue.

—Arab News