For our blue sky
Ding Ying

IN JUNE 2005, a public service announcement for car drivers started to appear on Chinese television. It told people, “For our blue sky, please drive one less day per month.” In August 2007, the announcement changed into: “For our Green Olympics, please drive one less day per week.” The State Council also issued a set of standard temperature controls for air conditioners, which stated that in summer the temperature in a building equipped with central conditioners should not be below 26 degrees Celsius; and in winter should not be above 20 degrees Celsius. Efforts to reduce emissions can be seen in every Chinese family and every corner of the country. The changes show China’s firm stance on emission reduction and environment protection.
The difference ordinary people can make was demonstrated when experts calculated that if every person in Beijing drove one day less per month, Beijing’s total vehicle emissions would decrease by more than 44,000 tons a year. If every driver in China did that, the country’s total carbon dioxide emissions would fall by 1.22 million tons every year, with 554 million liters of oil saved. Since signing the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty designed to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, in 1998, the country has been making efforts to fulfill its promise to the treaty, by taking measures to save energy and reduce pollution discharges. In 2003, China confirmed its Scientific Outlook on Development, according to which, a goal of realizing sustainable development is stressed. Two years later, China brought up the concept of building a resource-saving and environment-friendly society.
In 2006, the Chinese Government set a goal to reduce energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 20 percent and major pollutant discharges by 10 percent in the 11th Five-Year Plan, which runs from 2006-10. “China has taken a series of policies and measures to address climate change in the overall context of our national sustainable development strategy and outstanding achievements have been made,” said Xie Zhenhua, Vice Minister of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, at a forum sponsored by the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington, D.C. in September 2007.
Xie introduced China’s achievements on emission reduction. He said China’s renewable energy had reached 166 million tons of standard coal equivalent in 2005, which equals a discharge reduction of 380 million tons of carbon dioxide. From 1980 to 2005, China’s forest protection and tree planting helped to decrease carbon dioxide emissions by over 5 billion tons. China has implemented birth control policies since the 1970s, leading to a population reduction of 300 million. Through this, China has reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 1.3 billion tons every year, Xie said. China also mapped out its goals on energy efficiency and pollution reduction in the General Work Plan for Energy Conservation and Pollutant Discharge Reduction, which was issued on June 4, 2007, stating China’s plan for saving energy and reducing major pollutant discharges by 10 percent by 2010. “We should make sure that the economy grows on the basis of energy and resource conservation and environmental protection,” said the plan.
The State Council stressed that energy efficiency and pollutant discharge reduction should be set as indices for assessing economic and social development in all localities and the performance of government and company leaders. That means company leaders will receive a negative performance assessment if they fail to reach the goals for energy efficiency and pollutant discharge reduction regardless of achievements in other fields. “Greater efforts for efficiency and discharge reduction are urgently needed to deal with global weather change and it is a responsibility we should shoulder,” according to the plan.
Experts suggested that, based on China’s existing situation, two measures are practical. The first is to save energy and use the energy efficiently; and the second is to accelerate the development of clean energy and renewable energy resources. However, being a developing country, China’s efforts remain limited when dealing with this global problem. The UN-sponsored Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and China, as a developing country and a signatory of the protocol, believes post-Kyoto regulations should be part of the UN process, said Chinese President Hu Jintao at this years’ G-8 summit.
On China’s efforts to combat the effects of climate change, Hu said the government took the issue seriously and has adopted policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even though its per capita carbon dioxide emissions are less than one-third that of developed countries. Hu iterated China’s stance on sustainable development and its principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” “Developed countries should, acting in accordance with this principle, meet the emission reduction targets set in the Kyoto Protocol, provide assistance to developing countries and continue to take the lead in undertaking obligations to reduce emissions after 2012,” he said.
Each country negotiated different targets. Developing countries do not have to cut back. Signatories have some flexibility in how they attain these emissions reductions. Kyoto Protocol, which aims to curb the global warming process, came into force on February 16, 2005, with most of the industrialized countries ratifying it. The protocol will have legal force for its participants from the day it took effect after meeting two conditions-backing from at least 55 countries and support from nations representing at least 55 percent of developed countries’ carbon dioxide emissions. Developed countries’ attitudes to the treaty are different: Countries in the European Union (EU) have strong financial support and advanced environmental protection technologies. Clean energy now occupies a big proportion in EU countries’ energy structures. Thus the EU’s stance on emission reduction is steady and calls for drastic measures. Under a 2001 deal made by environment ministers in Germany, countries overshooting their targets in 2012 will have to make both the promised cuts and 30 percent more in a second period from 2013.
Meanwhile, big countries like Australia and the United States refuse to sign the treaty. The United States, the world’s biggest polluter, has accused the Kyoto Protocol of being too expensive and wrongly omitting developing nations. UN statistics show that a total of 141 nations have ratified the pact. China signed the treaty on May 29, 1998, and formally announced its approval in 2002. Since then, China has been making efforts to fulfill its mission of emission reduction based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities.
CDM in China
The Cleaning Development Mechanism (CDM) is a project-based mechanism defined by Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol. The core of the CDM is to allow developed country signatories, in cooperation with developing country signatories, to acquire certified emission reductions (CERs) generated by the projects implemented in developing countries. China is regarded as the best potential CDM market, occupying 40 to 50 percent of the total market in the world. China has set up a CDM management authority and promulgated the Interim Measures for Operation and Management of CDM Projects in China.
CDM projects were introduced to China in 2002. Up to September 21 of this year, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) had approved 842 CDM projects, and there have been altogether 125 CDM projects successfully registered with the National CDM Board (the Board) as of October 30, 2007, and 23 CDM projects issued with CERs. The total volume has reached 20,182,867 tons. There are some general requirements for the projects. CDM project activities must conform to China’s laws and regulations, sustainable development strategy and policy, as well as the general requirements of national economic and social development. No new obligation should be created for China other than those under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol.
Project activities should promote the transfer of environmentally sound technology to China, and funds from developed country signatories should be additional to their current official development assistance and their financial obligations under the convention. The implementation of CDM project activities should ensure transparent, efficient and traceable responsibilities. The priority areas for CDM projects in China are energy efficiency improvement, development and utilization of new and renewable energy, as well as recovery and utilization of methane.
The application and approval procedures of CDM projects are as follows: a) A project owner submits to NDRC a project application and documents as required by the above-mentioned Article 12. Relevant departments and local governments may facilitate such project application. b) NDRC asks relevant organizations for expert reviews of the applied project, and submits those project applications reviewed by the experts to the Board. c) The Board reviews the submitted projects and informs NDRC of the qualified projects. d) NDRC approves, jointly with the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, projects based on the conclusions made by the Board, and issues an approval letter accordingly. The project owner is informed of the decision.
Governments of developed countries can get all or part of CERs produced by projects to offset their obligations defined by Protocol. The CERs acquired by project developers in developed countries can be used to offset their domestic duties for emission reduction, or get profits by selling CERs in the market.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review  Articles Exchange Item)


Nothing but a diplomatic stab in the back!
Ameen Izzadeen

ANOTHER International forum, another blunder. Sri Lanka was making news, as usual for wrong reasons or the wrongs we do. Last Wednesday, foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama went to Kamapala to attend the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group Meeting (CMAG) ahead of the summit of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). We are now told that the same day, the Cabinet decided not to support the Commonwealth move to suspend Pakistan from the 53-nation bloc.
But our minister voted for the suspension of Pakistan. What’s worse, he sat next to the Commonwealth’s outgoing Secretary General Don McKinnon as the announcement to suspend Pakistan was made at Thursday’s news conference. Obviously, for Pakistan, Sri Lanka’s action was a diplomatic stab in the back. How could Sri Lanka betray Pakistan? It was the first country to come to Sri Lanka’s aid when its territorial integrity was at stake in 2000 with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam laying siege to Jaffna. The weapons Sri Lanka received from Pakistan tilted the military balance in favour of the security forces. A Pakistani High Commissioner in Colombo nearly paid with his life for his country’s unwavering support to Sri Lanka when he survived a Tamil Tiger suicide attack. The government on Friday decided to do some damage-control. An angry President Mahinda Rajapaksa decided that he should officially announce Sri Lanka’s objection to the suspension of Pakistan at the CHOGM summit. But it was too little, too late. The bottomline is that our objection did not change the Commonwealth’s decision.
If we had protested when the suspension was being discussed at the CMAG, we would have at least succeeded in extending the November 12 deadline given to Pakistan to restore democracy. We now learn that Malaysia and a couple of other countries also would have supported Pakistan. The nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna was furious. It demanded that the government apologise to Pakistan, while an embarrassed deputy foreign minister Hussein Bhaila said that the mess-up was due to a communication problem. The explanation was far from convincing. How could such a thing happen in a hi-tech information age? This was not the first time the Rajapaksa administration abandoned friends when they needed Sri Lanka’s support. A couple of years ago, our United Nations envoy slipped away when a vote on a resolution condemning Israel for committing atrocities in the Gaza Strip was taken at the UN General Assembly. The move was apparently in keeping with an assurance Sri Lanka gave the United States, which is hell bent on protecting Israel whether the Zionist state is right or wrong.
Rajapaksa, who is projecting himself as a friend of the Palestinians, blamed his then foreign minister, Mangala Samaraweera, and issued a decree that all important foreign policy decisions should be made in consultation with the President’s Office. The two incidents have one thing in common. They show that the government thinks or regrets after it leaps. Or, our government is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of its friends. Pakistan is apparently not impressed, though it has issued a statement thanking Sri Lanka for standing by it. If not for this foreign policy blunder, the Commonwealth summit in Kampala last week may not have attracted much public interest in Sri Lanka. For many Sri Lankans, the 53-nation bloc summit is nothing but a photo op with the British royals for our leaders at tax payers’ expense.
If the question “What does the Commonwealth mean to you?” is posed to the people in the former empire’s former colonies, many may say it means nothing. Some may even say they do not know that the Commonwealth exists. They are right. The Commonwealth has no real power. What is it? Is it an economic bloc? No it is not. Do its members take a common stand on burning issues such as the Palestinian crisis and the climate change? No, they don’t. Do most of the Commonwealth member states accept the British Queen as their head of state? No, only a handful does. Pakistan’ President Pervez Musharraf is right when he did not bother much when the Commonwealth suspended his country. It was just like a person losing his membership in an elite club. For Sri Lanka, however, the Commonwealth meant a lot during the early years after its Independence in 1948. We sought refuge in the Commonwealth from what we suspected to be the evil designs of India.
Our first prime minister, DS Senanayake, lived with the fear of being invaded by India. The dominant strand in his foreign policy was a profound suspicion of India, whose first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1945 said that Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known) would inevitably be drawn into a closer union with India, “presumably as an autonomous unit of the Indian Federation”. It was not only Nehru, but Pattabhi Sitaramaya, President of the Indian National Congress in the late 1940s, and Dr KN Panikkar, a well-known Indian historian, also harboured a design to annex Sri Lanka.
Senanayake had little option. Making our case worse was our inability to join the United Nations upon receiving independence because of strong opposition from the veto-wielding Soviet Union, which labelled Sri Lanka as a puppet of the British Empire. So Senanayake turned to the Commonwealth and believed that the membership in the grouping would provide a “counterforce” against any possible invasion by India. Now that the fear of an Indian invasion no longer exists, the raison d’être for Sri Lanka’s membership in the Commonwealth has become a colonial-era relic. It has only an exhibition value.—Khaleej Times




Has the long farewell of US Dollar begun?
Gwynne Dyer

IT’S JUST straws in the wind so far. India’s Ministry of Culture announces that foreign tourists can no longer pay in dollars when visiting the Taj Mahal and other heritage sites; they have to pay in good, hard rupees. Iran and Venezuela call for a joint OPEC statement on the weak US dollar. Rap star Jay-Z’s latest video shows our hero flashing a wad of euros, not dollars. Only straws in the wind, but all in the past couple of weeks. For the majority of Americans who do not travel abroad, the only visible effect so far of the dollar’s steep fall has been higher fuel prices at the pump. The Chinese imports that fill the big-box stores still cost the same, because the Chinese yuan is still pegged to the American dollar. But that may be about to change, along with many other things.
At the beginning of 2003, one euro bought one US dollar. Eighteen months ago, it bought $1.20. Now it is pushing $1.50, and there is no reason to think that it will stop there. Three of the world’s biggest oil exporters, Iran, Venezuela and Russia, are demanding payment in euros rather than dollars. Last week a Chinese central bank vice director, Xu Jian, gave voice to the suspicion of many others, saying that the dollar was “losing its status as the world currency.” If that happens, then America loses a great deal. Other countries have to maintain large reserves of foreign currencies — most of which they keep in US dollars — to cover their foreign debts, but the United States can pay its huge foreign debts in its own money. If necessary, it can just print more dollars. Having their own money as the world’s reserve currency confers advantages that Americans would miss if they lost them.
The main reason for the collapse of the dollar is President George W. Bush’s attempt to fight expensive foreign wars while cutting taxes at home. This involved deficit financing on a very large scale, and inevitably the value of the dollar began to fall. As the dollar fell in value, the price of oil (which is usually calculated in dollars) rose to compensate for it, but there was no comparable adjustment for foreign central banks that had huge amounts of US dollars in their reserves. China, which was sitting on about a trillion dollars, simply lost several hundred billion as the currency’s value fell. So various central banks started wondering if they should diversify their reserves, and some acted on it.
The downward pressure on the dollar will continue, because the United States is currently borrowing six percent of its Gross Domestic Product from foreigners each year to cover its trade deficit. Foreign banks were happy to go on lending so long as they had faith in the integrity of US financial institutions, but that has been hit hard by the subprime mortgage crisis. Besides, other markets, notably China and India, now offer a better return — and Congress’ resistance to foreign takeover bids, combined with tighter visa restrictions, make the US a less welcoming place for foreign investors.

—Arab News