Eye on China: Geography adds to pollution problems

China's environmental situation is getting worse, and the culprit is essentially the country's vast size.

If you accept, as one must, that any process involving a change in chemical structure will generate side-products (waste or pollution) then China is confronting an uncomfortable dilemma.

Whatever China does now to reduce emissions will not change the fact that, in absolute terms, it will still be making a large contribution to pollution. Even if you are cutting emissions from 20 per cent a tonne to 10 per cent, if you are producing three times as many tonnes, the total amount of pollution goes up.

What scientists fear is that China is growing so fast that even if it adopts the most modern and efficient pollution control mechanisms, the impact on the environment will still be huge.

What exactly that impact will be, nobody really knows, although global warming is the most common bogeyman.

One should note that global warming and pollution are not synonymous, although they do overlap.

Global warming is caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide. This CO2 is released by fossil fuels. However, it's also released when we speak. China's huge population means that up to 10 per cent of China's CO2 is caused by people breathing. Thus, CO2 is not directly harmful to humans at all.

In fact, it is useful to remember that pollution can be defined as a concentration of chemical elements which are perfectly harmless on their own, but fatal when they reach a certain concentration.

The importance of the concept of concentration helps to explain the paradox of why the United States, the world's greatest consumer of fossil fuels, has so much fewer environmental problems than China, which has an intensity of energy consumption per head much lower (intensity is directly related to high living standards. US wealth makes it a glutton for energy).

The reason for the environmental health of the US is that the Government has taken the relatively simply step of preventing the concentration of chemicals in high levels. Thus, US factories and power stations are limited in size.

Geography helps. The US has high population densities on the coasts but the interior also shows a relatively even distribution.

China is the polar opposite. Beijing and the neighbouring city of Tianjin have a greater population than Australia.

The city of Chongqing had risen to 30 million before the Government halved its size through the simple expedient of redrawing the administrative map.

China's geography doesn't help. Vast swathes of the western interior are dramatically hostile to man. Millions of people are migrating every year to the small number of rich provinces propelling China's growth - essentially Guangzhou, Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, out of a total of 33 provinces.

Add to this a Government, which like many totalitarian governments, is obsessed with size. The biggest power stations in China are 6GW, twice the size of anything permitted in the US. State-owned factories also tend towards gigantism.

For a national Government, it makes sense to aim for economies of scale through building plants as large as possible, especially when the population is so huge. But this is disastrous in terms of minimising pollution. Huge plants in huge cities produce torrents of waste which are much harder to manage than if the infrastructure were more dispersed. Eco-systems get overwhelmed.

Rivers can effortlessly absorb certain amounts of pollution. But we all know from chemistry lessons that if the water becomes saturated by outside elements, it takes an intervention to reverse the situation, either through more water or spooning out the excess matter.

The good news is that fossil-fuel users are coming up with ways to recycle the waste products given off by fossil fuels.

Coal gasification is one technique and there are many others. The problem with these techniques is that they obviously put an extra overlay of cost on to manufacturers - precisely at the time when fossil fuels are prohibitively expensive.

"Renewables" are an attempt to exploit cheaper sources of energy. They are cheaper because they are, by definition, renewable. Therefore scarcity shouldn't become a problem. Ironically, fossil fuels are renewable. The problem is that it takes millions of years of compression and rot to change a forest into an oil deposit. Wood simply has a shorter cycle - and the particles it gives out are potentially just as harmful in high concentrations.

Wind, solar and hydro are renewable and they don't give off nasty emissions. But wind energy farms require large amounts of land, so it's difficult to see their application in built-up urban centres.

Setting them up in Mongolia is fine, but transport over long distances means a high wastage rate. Solar energy seems to be useful for heating water in summer but producing the panels is energy-intensive.

China's solution is audacious: It's going for nuclear. It plans that 20 per cent of its energy needs will come from alternative energy by 2020 - more than half of that from nuclear reactors. It's cheap, renewable and clean. That is, until the plant has to be decommissioned (nuclear plants are eventually devoured by their own radioactivity) and buried hundreds of metres underground in giant bunkers for thousands of years.

There really are no easy answers.

* Eye on China is a journalist based in Beijing.