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China Breaks Promise of Green Olympics |
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Page 1 of 4 By Mark Durham | Monday, 08 October 2007
China promised the world a green Olympics for 2008. Instead, with the Olympic Games less than a year away, China is racing to turn Beijing into a green Potemkin village: sending a million cars into temporary exile, jailing environmental dissidents, and chasing pollution-intensive factories outside the city limits. But while Beijing is making pretty for the foreigners, China's economic engine continues to roar forward, driving the country ever deeper into an environmental abyss.
What happened?
It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 2001, Beijing captured the 2008 Olympic Games after budgeting $5.6 billion for environmental improvements in its municipal five-year plan for 1998-2002, with another $6.5 billion queued up for 2002-2007. "We are pleased to see that, in fact, Beijing has engaged on a ten-year major environment project with huge investment," Hein Verbruggen, chairman of the IOC evaluation commission, told the press in February 2001 at the end of the commission's inspection tour in Beijing.
China's central government did set ambitious targets for environmental change in Beijing — targets that have, for the most part, been taken at face value by the IOC, not to mention foreign governments and gung-ho investors. But in one instance after another, Beijing has failed to deliver on the promises it made in 2001, and many others besides.
Beijing had promised that by the 2008 Olympic Games, safe, clean tap water would flow throughout the Chinese capital. That promise of safe water has now shrunk to include only the Olympic Village. In 2001, the government swore to a 10 percent cut in sulfur dioxide emissions between 2002 and 2005. Instead, emissions increased by 27 percent. Beijing has already missed its first target for reducing energy intensity (a measure of efficiency) and pollution. And so on.
China's preparations for the Olympic Games epitomize the environmental challenges that confront the Chinese government — and the impact on the rest of the world if China fails to meet them. Paradoxically, the Games may also represent a last, best opportunity for the world to influence China's path forward and help steel its resolve. In the run-up to the games, with China desperately hoping to rebrand itself on the world stage, international advisors, environmental activists, and green businesses are looking for leverage to influence China's behavior before scrutiny fades and the opportunity evaporates.
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