Modeshift

At the national level America’s environmental movement is in a period of befuddlement. Not exactly a giant mope. But with the big issue of the day — how to gain ground on reducing carbon emissions linked to global warming — the policy and campaign staffs of the big national groups are tagging along as political momentum to deal with climate emmissions is stalled at best, or shifting to reverse.

In Tianjin this month progress was measured in diplomatic centimeters. In the U.S., almost every Republican running for governor or national office is campaigning on a platform that insists the scientific evidence for climate change is specious.

The regional and local wings of the movement, though, display no such confusion. While their national colleagues push hard for limits on climate emissions and m0re clean energy investment, local groups in dozens of states are pushing back with active civic campaigns to block those very same clean technologies. Though there are exceptions, dozens of big clean energy and renewable projects — solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, biomass, and transmission lines — are encountering protests, lawsuits, and popular opposition led by environmental groups.

More evidence was documented earlier this month in the New York Times in an article by Felicity Barringer. In the hours after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved a new solar thermal power plant on federal land in California’s Imperial Valley, local greens announced they would step up their opposition. Felicity, a Times colleague of mine in the 1980s and 1990s, reported that Basin and Range Watch, a regional environmental group concerned about the Sonoran and Mojave deserts said this about the plant:  “The project will scrape 10 square miles of habitat for flat-tailed horned lizards, burrowing owls, Pensinsular bighorn sheep and rare plants. Hundreds of cultural sites will be destroyed.” The group’s Web site says it supports renewable energy, but only in certain places.”

Todd Woody reported in Yale Environment 360 last February on local green group influence in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to secure a large chunk of the Mojave as a preserve in order to block new solar development.

Nick Cain reported in Circle of Blue in August on how big solar thermal power plants were inviting opposition from the Sierra Club because of how much land they needed for operations.

And here on Mode Shift, I’ve reported on the gathering opposition at the grassroots to big and small clean energy plants including solar. My interest was stirred by the fierce opposition to a high-tech biomass plant proposed by Traverse City Light and Power, a local northern Michigan utility that asked me to help develop a public engagement campaign in support of generating 30 percent renewable energy by 2020. Green opponents, armed with the same kind of fear and anti-science hysteria that characterizes Tea Party campaigning, stopped the plant and the 30 by 2020 goal cold. The default position: more coal.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China — On Monday, two days after the UNFCCC climate conference ended after six days of grudging negotiation, the sky above this busy city turned blue, the sun appeared for the first time in a week, and Tianjin’s angled skyline, not visible previously in the thick smog, appeared like a gleaming glass and steel mountain range.

The beautiful warm day not only brought a fresh focus to just how earnest China is in building cities of the future, it also helped to clarify the outcomes of this nation’s first global climate gathering.

From the speeding bullet train that brought participants from Beijing to this city’s spotless train station, to the state-of-the art electric buses that transported them to and from the brilliant marble and glass conference center, to the advanced coal-fired power plant and lithium ion auto batteries being built within city boundaries, China is as serious as any nation in adding clean energy and energy efficient tools to its economic development strategy.

The second big lesson of these intercessional talks is that a good portion of China’s work in the clean energy economy is occurring in close cooperation with either the American government or American companies.

Beneath Bickering, Real Progress
So while China and the United States continued the diplomatic bickering over commitments each was making to limit climate-changing emissions, and how to measure progress, the story on the street is that both nations are kind of walking hand in hand toward the same goal.

But one partner seems more ready than the other to take the lead. The big difference, made plain last week here, is that China’s leadership has developed the world’s largest markets for wind and solar power and appears committed to the clean energy enterprise. Meanwhile the staying power of the United States has been weakened by the opposition party’s conviction that climate change is a myth, and its avowed goal to roll back federal investment in solar, wind, clean car, rail, and other clean energy initiatives advanced by the Obama administration.

Christiana Figueres, the UNFCCC executive secretary, considered all of these competing trends and accurately declared the Tianjin conference a step forward. Negotiators completed a draft text to submit to the annual global climate summit that begins late next month in Cancun that, she said, defines “what is doable in Cancun and what will be left after Cancun.”

In the artful language of global negotiations that means negotiators here managed to push ahead a bit to resolve issues related to forest conservation, technology transfer, and financing for developing countries that could eventually lead to a global climate agreement.

Work Party Is Global Success
In the other big global climate story, tens of thousands of citizens from over 180 countries gathered in a giant global work party on Sunday to mark the second annual international demonstration for climate action. Days before the work party, which was organized by an alliance of groups, the White House announced it was installing new solar panels on the roof, the result of a concerted campaign to do so by Bill McKibben, the writer and 350.org leader.

One of the largest demonstrations occurred in Beijing where 30,000 students from 200 Chinese universities used the Global Work Party for a national call for climate solutions, marking the biggest show of youth environmental action in China’s history, said Paul Horsman, a leader of Tcktcktck.

“How do you say ‘thank you’ 7,347 times?” asked McKibben in a message sent to supporters. “People got to work yesterday in at least that many places around the world — the planet has never seen anything quite that widespread. Or quite that beautiful.”

– Keith Schneider

A long time ago, in the mid-1980s, I wrote about New York City’s infrastructure modernization in Manhattan Inc., an upscale business magazine that no longer exists. It was a perfect gig for a writer who as a kid counted bridge overpasses on the highway during the regular family drive from suburban New York to suburban Boston to visit my grandparents. I loved watching new skyscrapers get slotted into New York City’s skyline. I was fascinated with the bulldozers and road graders at Interstate highway construction sites. In my first weeks as a New York Times reporter I spent an evening with a Port Authority construction crew assigned to upgrade the ventilation system in the Lincoln Tunnel. It was classic boy stuff.

Infrastructure, in short, is the collection of basic civic equipment – roads and highways, rail lines, reservoirs, dams, water and sewage pipes and treatment plants, transmission lines, broadband, airports, public buildings, parks and plazas  – that civilizations require to function efficiently and provide citizens a reasonable quality of life. Infrastructure is the public investments that nations make to advance their economies and provide for their citizens. Essentially, infrastructure is a measure of a nation’s vision, will to invest, and its capacity to join engineering and design in service of the public interest.

Heads of state and their aides think of infrastructure in terms of budgets and spending. But architects and engineers have a more fun phrase  –  ”tolerances” – that they use to describe their work.  Tolerances are a measurement of precision — the refinements of spacing, line, angle, materials, and craftsmanship that describe the quality of design and construction. Basically tolerances define a nation’s capacity to make the investments -  and for designers, developers, and contractors the capacity to sweat the details to produce projects that last 150 years in instead of 15.

Infrastructure and Tight Tolerances
Let’s just put it this way: China knows tolerances. After spending more than two weeks in Beijing and Tianjin, it’s plainly evident that China’s drive to build its infrastructure and the nation’s rapid rise to the top of the world’s economic heaps is told in its ability to fit the pieces together to achieve state-of-the-art design tolerances.

The most exceptional example that I found on this trip, my first to China, was the Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center, a 2.5 million-square foot marble, glass, and polished stainless steel showcase of Chinese design and construction technology. There is no comparable exhibition center in the United States, and certainly none that was constructed in eight months, as the Meijiang center was earlier this year before it opened in September. The way the interior steel trusses supported the roof 10 stories above the center floor, the close fit of the fine-grained wood walls, and polished marble floors, and the use of natural light and noise absorbing carpets made the gigantic building seem almost cozy, airy, and exceptionally comfortable. Just as impressive was the great plaza outside, as large as a military parade ground, a perfectly flat expanse of marble paving tiles so precisely fitted together that the lines between the tiles were thousands of feet long and as straight as a gun shot.

The Impossible Plaza That’s Possible
Karl Burkhart, a communications specialist with Tcktcktck, and a trained designer with a masters in architecture, also marveled at the convention center and the plaza. He told me that in the United States, such a building would take two years to plan and design with available computer programs and equipment. The speed with which China executed the Meijiang convention center indicated that Chinese architects used state-of-the-art three dimensional design programs and constructed the building as they developed the design. Moreover, he said, the great marble plaza would not even be attempted in the U.S. because even if it could be done – which he doubted – it would be so expensive that “no American architect in his right mind would even suggest it.”

I’ve spent weeks at a time in every state in the United States except Hawaii, and have now traveled to over 20 nations on four continents, and when it comes to the overall scope and quality of infrastructure, the U.S. remains among the global leaders. Of special note in the U.S. today is the competition among cities to build new light rail lines that join neighborhoods to each other and to downtowns.

But the current scope of infrastructure work in the recession-dragged, politically daffy U.S. pales in comparison to what China is achieving today. The other showcases of design and engineering tolerance are China’s high-speed rail lines, and the fabulous modern train stations that launch and catch the bullet trains. The distance from Beijing to Tianjin is crossed by a snow white train with blue accents that streaks at 205 miles per hour on an elevated track. Outside, the flat landscape flies by. Inside there is no quiver, no shake, no tremble, and no noise except the muffled sound of rushing air. The non-stop 90-mile trip takes 30 minutes.

In Tianjin the train launches from a crowded and spotless station that is lit naturally with sunlight pouring through a grand glass roof. In Beijing, the train arrives in an even newer station where the platforms are paved in mirror-shine marble and the waiting room, distinguished by towering blue, green, and red LED arrival and departure boards, has even more natural light from windows that line the roof. China has built 4,000 miles of high-speed rail and has 6,000 more under construction or planned.

An Era Passed For U.S.
It’s not that the United States hasn’t constructed some of the world’s iconic infrastructure. The Hoover Dam, more than 700 feet tall and built to generate power by holding back the mighty Colorado, was the highest dam in the world when it opened in 1936. The Empire State Building was, for decades, the tallest building in the world. The Golden Gate bridge spans the Pacific entrance to San Francisco Bay. The 40,000-plus mile Interstate highway network is a global envy. The great metropolitan skylines of New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles are recognizable around the world.

It’s just that the exuberance of China’s construction program, and its accompanying attention to detail and tight engineering tolerances, are emblems of a country that’s so clearly saying “It’s our time!” Meanwhile in the United States, we seem an old and tired nation, unwilling to marshal the unity of purpose that it takes to build a high-speed rail network, or great solar and wind farms, or new smart transmission grids or even the great soaring buildings that once distinguished our nation.

New construction has come to a near halt as a result of the Great Recession. And where our architects thrive, and where we’re putting our cultural resources is in new stadiums like the one in Dallas that has one of the world’s biggest TV screens, or New York where the Giants and Jets play in one sky-box extravaganza and the Yankees play in another. We’re playing games while China plays us.

China is certainly awake in the 21^st century. The corridor between Beijing and the flat lands south of Tianjn is one immense construction zone. Every quarter mile, on both side of the rail line and highway, towers rise in clumps. Not one at a time, but in groups of 10 or 15. The International Energy Agency reported today that China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest consumer of energy.  It’s another of China’s world firsts, which also include being the largest producer of climate-changing emissions, the largest car market in the world, the largest solar and wind markets, and the fastest growing industrial economy.

Within a decade China could also surpass the United States as the largest economy. It looks inevitable. The American century ended on 9/11. The soaring Chinese century, and its tight tolerances, is very clearly past the lift-off phase.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – Whatever the differences that irked delegates from China and the United States during the six days of climate negotiations that ended here on Saturday, divisions principally defined by how each would control carbon emissions and measure progress, the unmistakable conclusion reached by most of the delegates and participants is how closely tied the two nations are to each the other.

Lying quietly below the nuanced diplomatic language of frustration and distrust expressed all week by Chinese and American negotiators is an expanse of cooperative projects in and outside government that are expressly designed to help China and the U.S. use energy more efficiently, develop new technology, and lower carbon emissions.

Participants this week toured an advanced coal-fired power plant that is being built by a consortium of Chinese companies and includes an American coal company. Chinese and American partnerships also are being forged in solar and wind manufacturing, and in carbon capture and sequestration emissions control technology. The two countries last year established a joint clean energy research center, with offices in China and the United States.

Coda Electric Car
Another good example is how Coda Automotive, a California-based electric vehicle manufacturer, and Lishen Battery Company, a Tianjin-based manufacturer, are collaborating to build batteries in their joint venture factory for Coda’s all-electric cars for sale in the U.S. starting early next year. The powerful, 800-pound lithium-ion battery pack that will provide the Coda with a 100-mile range between charges, is being built and assembled in Lishen’s joint venture plant on the city’s south side.

The Coda’s drive train and electric engine are American designs built in factories in the U.S. The car’s safety systems were engineered by American and European experts and will be built by American companies. And a Chinese auto manufacturer will receive all of the various parts and assemble them under contract into new cars for shipment to the U.S. The company is planning to build a battery assembly plant in Ohio, where Coda’s chief executive, Kevin Czinger, was raised.

In his blog posts and various interviews in recent months Czinger has expressed his own frustration with energy and climate policy in the U.S. But that is not affecting his company, which he says will sell 14,000 cars in California next year. “The good news is that we can take action,” Czinger writes in his latest blog post. “We don’t need to wait for our leaders.  We can do what we do best –  take new ideas and new technology and create.  The electric car can be the driver of a new economic and energy system.  It can be the driver of a new American mindset and a revived manufacturing foundation.  Within a globally interdependent world that will have increasingly higher shipping costs, we can rebuild our car industry based on a new technology.  And we can replace our foreign oil with clean, secure and affordable electricity generated in America.  We can create a new prosperity for this century.  We have the choice. Now.”

The Coda (see pix right) will be priced at around $45,000, and with federal and state electric vehicle and clean energy incentives, the off-the-lot cost will be closer to the low $30,000′s. Either way, neither the Coda, nor the other all-electric passenger cars making their way to the market – the Nissan Leaf and the Ford Focus – are priced low enough for sale in the world’s largest car market here in China.

Biggest Car Market and Big Oil Demand
Last year, China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s number one vehicle market, recording 13.5 million car and truck sales, according to the China Passenger Car Association. Manufacturers, by contrast, sold 10.43 million in the U.S., according to the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Michigan. This year vehicle sales in the U.S. could reach 11.6 million according to J.D. Power.

Sales in China in 2010 are expected to top 16 million units. Xu Changming, a research director at the State Information Center, told reporters in June that the number of vehicles in China could reach 78 million units, up from 63 million at the end of 2009, and surpassing Japan as the second largest nation for vehicle registrations. He also said the number of vehicles in China is expected to eventually rise to about 490 million units, though he did not offer a date for reaching that forecast.

A Coda executive on Saturday said that at the current sales pace China’s vehicle population could reach 200 million by the end of the decade, or roughly 60 million less than the number of vehicles in the U.S. this year.

Electric vehicles, of course, are a staple of transportation in China, though most of them are two- and three-wheel bikes, scooters, and carts fitted with small electric motors. The country manufactures state-of-the-art electric buses, a number of which were used to quietly transport climate negotiators and participants to and from the conference center and their hotels.

The country also is rapidly electrifying its high-speed rail network capable of transporting tens of thousands of passengers on trains, like the one that links Tianjin to Beijing (see pix below and right), capable of speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. According to Chinese NGO experts at the climate conference, China has built 4,000 miles of high speed rail and is in the process of constructing 6,000 more miles.

China, though, could use many more electric cars. Gas and diesel-fueled cars jam China’s highways and urban streets, and contribute to the smog in China’s major cities that is so thick (see pix above in Tianjin) it obscures the tops of buildings. The rapid rise in vehicle ownership also is challenging China’s economic security, just as it is in the United States. China’s oil consumption last year reached 8.625 million barrels a day, or 3.1 billion barrels annually, or nearly twice China’s consumption in 1999, according to the respected 2010 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. U.S. oil consumption is now just under 7 billion barrels annually, according to the Department of Energy.

China produces nearly 3.8 million barrels of oil daily from its own oil fields, which means that it imports 56 percent of its petroleum. That percentage will grow steadily higher. The demand for oil in China grew 539,000 barrels a day from 2008 to 2009, or nearly 7 percent. Meanwhile China’s oil production fell 111,000 barrels a day during the same period, or just under 3 percent.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – Though Chinese workers this week celebrated the 61^st anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, a holiday season as significant as July 4 in the United States, a swarm of construction laborers at China’s GreenGen coal-fired gasification power plant were busy welding pipes, fitting massive joints, and bending steel for forms to be filled with concrete.

Since construction on the $1 billion project began in June 2009, said Li Liangshi, the deputy chief engineer, the dusty construction site has been a nonstop 24/7 hive of activity for 2,100 workers. Next year, the consortium of companies financing the project, five of them Chinese plus Peabody Coal, an American producer, plan to start operations.

GreenGen’s principle purpose is demonstrating advanced Chinese technology to burn coal much more efficiently than conventional power plants, remove many troubling air pollutants, and prove that its climate-changing carbon emissions can be safely captured. Much of the sequestered carbon will be pumped into oil wells to increase production in one of the China’s mature oil fields.

“China has a lot of coal,” said Deborah Seligsohn, the principal advisor of the World Resource Institute’s China Climate and Energy Program, who joined a Clean Air Task Force–USCAN-sponsored tour of the plant on Thursday.  ”This project deals with efficiency and pollution abatement in a fairly clean way.”

Outside Stalled Negotiations, Promising Steps
This week the UN climate negotiations inside the expansive Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center here have been stymied, in large part by a dispute between China and the United States about how the two countries take action to combat climate change and measure progress toward those ends.

Outside the closed negotiating sessions, though, a series of side events convened by NGOs and governments have detailed the progress, some of it quite impressive, that both countries are making to advance clean technology and energy efficiency that are intended to simultaneously build economic vibrancy while lowering carbon emissions. In some cases, Chinese and American companies are cooperating on clean energy and efficiency projects.

The trip to GreenGen illustrated both the competition and cooperation between China and the U.S. to develop the tools and technology to burn coal more efficiently, and to safely dispose of its dangerous emissions. In terms of investment and the number of projects, the U.S. and China are both working to perfect the technology, design and deploy the equipment, and command the potential multi-billion dollar annual market for what both countries call “clean coal” power, but more accurately can be called “advanced coal.”

GreenGen will test gasification technology developed by China’s Thermal Power Research Institute (TPRI). TPRI has licensed the gasification technology deployed at GreenGen to Houston-based Future Fuels LLC. Future Fuels plans to use the technology at its Good Spring IGCC project in Pennsylvania, which it expects will deliver 270-megawatts of electricity while capturing over 50 percent of the CO2 output initially and nearly 100 percent by 2020.

Coal in the China, U.S. Path To Lower Carbon Future
Coal’s influence in both countries on climate change is significant. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported last year that coal combustion at American utilities accounts for 2.7 billion tons of the roughly 6 billion tons of annual U.S. carbon emissions. In rapidly developing China, coal accounts for 80 percent of the 6.3 billion tons of carbon emissions, or about a quarter of all the climate-changing emissions globally.

Both governments, along with utilities and manufacturers see the need to reduce coal’s influence on global warming, and an opportunity to build economic strength in reaching that goal. Last November, during a trip to China, President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao formally announced the establishment of a joint Clean Energy Research Center to collaborate on the science and development of low-carbon energy, and to cooperate specifically on generating energy from coal with much less pollution. In March, Steven Chu, the American secretary of energy, announced that over the next five years the Energy Department would invest $37.5 million in the joint center to support research conducted at a facility in the U.S. and another in China.

The United States, according to the Department of Energy, also is spending $3.4 billion to leverage $8 billion more in private investments to build a national array of plants that demonstrate CCS technology, and that showcase new combustion techniques.

Advanced Coal Projects
They include the $1 billion U.S. investment, just announced in September, for FutureGen, to build a high-tech oxygen equipped coal boiler unit to an existing 200-megawatt unit at an American Energy Resources plant in Meredosia, Illinois, and then deploy CCS technology to sequester the carbon emissions. The DOE also just approved a $308 million investment in a $2.8 billion Kern County, California plant to develop cleaner combustion technology and carbon sequestration techniques. Other investments include $350 million toward a $1.7 billion a state of the art integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant with carbon emissions directed to producing more oil in old wells in Texas, and $36 million for a $2.15 billion IGCC plant in Minnesota. Private IGCC plants are under development in Indiana and Pennsylvania as well, and the Duke Power plant in Indiana is testing CCS storage techniques.

According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution U.S. and Chinese companies are collaborating on a number of projects. In August 2009, Duke Energy signed a memorandum of understanding with Huaneng for developing renewable and clean energy technologies. In September 2009, Southern Company and KBR Inc. agreed to license their IGCC technology to the Beijing Guoneng Yinghua Clean Energy Engineering Company. Peabody Coal is an investor in the GreenGen project. Huaneng joined the FutureGen Industrial Alliance.

Here in Tianjin, the GreenGen project is at the head of a pack of Chinese power plants designed to burn coal more efficiently and to develop and prove CCS techniques. China has built over 20 supercritical and ultra-supercritical power plants that operate at extremely high water temperatures and pressures that produce much higher efficiencies, producing more power with less coal, and thus lower emissions per megawatt of power generated.

According to the World Resources Institute, China has developed and approved seven major energy projects to demonstrate CCS techniques, and to develop more efficient energy generating practices. They include the 845-megawatt Huaneng Gaobeidian Co-Generation plant in Beijing, the first in China to fully test CO2 capture, and features a full suite of environmental controls. During winter months, steam from the plant is used for district heating, and efficiency can be has high as 84 percent. Engineers estimate the plant uses about 400,000 tons less coal annually than a similarly-sized conventional plant.

GreenGen Could Be Big Step
GreenGen represents the next step in China’s drive for higher efficiency and lower pollution in generating power from coal. When the first of three phases opens next year, GreenGen will be the first utility-scale IGCC power plant in China, and one of the few operating in the world.

When fully operational in 2014, Chinese officials assert, Greengen will generate 650-megawatts at 60 percent to 80 percent efficiency – about twice the efficiency of conventional coal-fired power plants – and dispose of its climate-changing emissions through carbon capture and storage technology.

If the plant is a success, said Jiang Kejun, a director of research for the Energy Research Institute, a unit of the National Development and Reform Commission, China is prepared to build 20 more such gasification and CCS power plants. “We want to make sure it works,” he said.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China — Two of the significant participants in the UN climate change conference here, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres (at center in pix above) and chief U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing, have made it known they are increasingly unhappy with a tangled negotiating process that seems unable to move beyond producing more snags.

Over the last 18 hours or so, the two made their frustrations public and issued veiled warnings about the relevance of the negotiations and whether it was meeting the urgency of the task at hand.

In statements to reporters yesterday Pershing described the punishingly slow pace of the negotiations, which he said were revisiting old issues and haven’t moved nearly far enough beyond where they were nearly a year ago, when countries agreed to the Copenhagen Accord. “What is frustrating in these negotiations is to see countries not using that as the basis, but relitigating things that we resolved,” he said.

Pershing, who’s participated since the late 1980s in UN climate conferences in various roles inside and outside the government, also said that the pace diminished the value of the UN climate negotiations, and that while the U.S. would stay in the process it also was pursuing progress on global warming in other councils of influence around the world.

Negotiators hoped to use the six-day Tianjin climate conference, which ends on Saturday, to close gaps on issues big and small in order to possibly reach consensus on one or more of the big ideas that could lead to a binding legal agreement next year or in 2012.  Those include financing for developing nations to adapt to climate change, technology transfer, forest preservation, limits on carbon emissions, and a means to verify progress. The annual 2010 global climate summit starts at the end of November in Cancun, Mexico.

This afternoon, Figueres briefed non-governmental organization leaders and expressed a similar level of alarm at how little movement has occurred in the first four days of negotiations in Tianjin. “Parties had a huge number of issues and a huge number of details within each issue when we got here,” she said. “The  effort is to pair that down into a realistic number of issues and a realistic level of details. There’s a big challenge here in balance.”

But Pershing and Figueres clearly indicated that the negotiations are not getting as close as they need to in order for the summit in Mexico to yield an outcome significant enough to signal the world is ready to come to a binding climate agreement. That, in turn, could jeopardize the credibility of the UN process for developing a legal framework for limiting climate changing emissions.

“We’re locked in detail and specificity,” said Figueres. “It’s a 3-D picture and overlaid to all of that there is the big question is how do you choose, literally choose, how do you pick out from all the details those aspects which will be the kernels from which parties make a decision? And what do you do with the rest? There is no possibility to have a legally binding treaty in Cancun. But it can be a very good effort to set the foundations and cornerstones.”

She urged negotiators to lay aside at least some portion of their differences and move the world closer to an agreement. “We can not safeguard our future. I do still harbor the hope that we will still be able to make a difference.”

She added: “Can we guarantee that you will have the same quality of life that we did when I was growing up on this planet?  I don’t think so. There is already a built-in precarious nature. We are bound to what is happening. There is an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. We are giving back a diminished planet. It’s true. I am not going to sit here and pretend that the planet that you have now is the same planet we had when I was growing up. It’s not.”

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – This industrious nation’s allegiance to construction projects of massive scale is as familiar to the world as the 2,500-year-old, 5,500-mile Great Wall of China, which protected the country’s northern frontier, and as imposing as the wide moats and towering red stone walls of the 600-year-old Forbidden City at the heart of Beijing.

Still, international visitors attending China’s first U.N. climate change conference are struck by the immensity of the brand new polished marble and glass Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center, the site of the meeting, and the intensity of the retail, commercial, and infrastructure construction occurring outside its hangar-like entry.

Spanning 2.47 million square feet and soaring to interior heights of 10 stories, the exhibition center, which resembles the Trade Federation’s shining headquarters in the Star Wars films, is easily large enough to house a small fleet of transoceanic jetliners. It opened in September following just eight months of construction. The building is so new and was constructed so quickly that the center does not appear on the city’s newest maps, which memorialize the small lakes and wetlands wrecked by its presence.

Meanwhile, flanking the brand new 10-lane boulevard out front are dozens of construction cranes, sprouted like dandelions atop the steel skeletons of residential and commercial towers under construction.

The speed and scope of the development here, and in dozens of other Chinese cities, is visible evidence of the breathtaking economic expansion that in a generation has pulled 400 million Chinese from poverty into the middle class. At all times of the day and night, Tianjin’s restaurants are full and its noisy streets are a tangle of walkers, bikers, and drivers. China’s economic development ministries consistently state that they anticipate growth to continue apace, and by 2020 the economy will be 60 percent larger than it is today.

This week, in a number of side events, including one sponsored on Tuesday by the U.S. Climate Action Network, several of China’s leading environmental scientists and technical specialists are describing the consequences of reaching that goal to the work of taming the warming climate. But there are other effects, too, on China’s natural resources, particularly on the already scarce reserves of fresh water. In almost every instance, the conclusions are enormously troubling.

A Future Built on Coal
Lying at the other end of China’s surging economic expansion is a powerful engine fueled principally by coal. This nation, the world’s largest coal producer and consumer, will mine 3.15 billion tons of coal, three times more than the United States, according to the International Energy Agency. The result for the atmosphere is that China this year will add 6.3 billion tons of climate changing carbon emissions, the most of any country, according to the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy.

China understands its dilemma and is diversifying its energy portfolio. The country has 11 nuclear plants generating 11,000 megawatts and the government’s goal is to add 60,000 to 75,000 more megawatts by 2020, or roughly 60 to 70 new nuclear generating units. The nuclear expansion is a feature of the country’s plan, announced in July to spend $738 billion over the next decade on “alternative energy development,” which also includes biomass, wind, solar, and natural gas from deep carbon bearing shales.

Moreover China has already built 4,000 miles of high speed rail, including the 205 mph bullet train between Tianjin and Beijing, and plans to build 6,000 more miles. It has developed policies to improve buildings, construct eco cities, and save energy.

Yet according to a range of estimates by authorities in and outside China, coal production and consumption by the end of the decade will still reach 3.5 billion to 4.5 billion tons.  China announced last year at the Copenhagen climate summit that it would cut the “carbon intensity” of its emissions 40 to 45 percent by 2020, meaning it would reduce the amount of carbon needed to generate a dollar of growth. The world welcomed the commitment, the first time China ever bound itself to any emissions limits. Its representative here say they are meeting the goal.

But the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a new report that looks at various scenarios of economic growth and China’s ability to diversify its energy sources, still projects that China’s carbon emissions will essentially double by the end of the decade.

When asked about this, Jiang Kejun, a director of research at the Energy Research Institute, a unit of the National Development and Reform Commission, shrugged and then said in an interview, “There’s disagreement about how much coal will be produced. We project that coal production will peak by 2020 at 3.4 billion tons.”

The effect of China’s surging growth in coal production has even more dire consequences for the nation’s water supply. “People outside China talk about emissions,” said Fuqiang Yang, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Solutions project in Beijing. “Inside China, water is the highest priority.”

Can China Escape Looming Water-Energy Collision?

The reason is that China’s rising energy demand, the fastest in the world, is colliding with its rapidly declining supply of fresh water. China, the nation’s third driest country, has roughly 163 trillion gallons of water available for all uses, according to a study released in December by McKinsey’s 2030 Water Resources Group. About 63 percent is used by farmers, down from 85 percent in 1980, according to China’s Water Ministry. Municipal and domestic use has been stable at around 12 percent, and industry uses 23 percent; 80 percent of that is used to operate and cool China’s 10,000 coal-burning generating units at 550 power plants.

But by 2030, according to the McKinsey study, the demand for water in China’s rapid growly economy will reach 215 trillion gallons, 52 trillion gallons more than is available. The increase in coal production and consumption accounts for most of the increase. The amount of water consumed by China’s energy sector will reach 70 trillion gallons or 32 percent, said McKinsey, while agriculture’s share will fall to 51 percent.

The China Water Ministry, in the unadorned language of central government, described the situation this way in a report earlier this year: “Rising water consumption associated with socio-economic development increasingly strains China’s freshwater ecosystems, challenging traditional water resource management.”

In effect, the most critical economic and environmental question in China today, said Yang and Kejun, is whether there is enough water for China to continue its stunning modernization. “We’re putting a lot of time to understand that challenge,” said Yang.

Last year, amid one of the most severe droughts in China’s modern history, the Ministry of water announced a new “water intensity” goal, similar to the emissions “energy intensity” goal, to reduce water consumption 60 percent for every dollar of economic activity. The new policy is stirring work on water recycling, cleaning up China’s polluted waters to make them suitable for industrial use, and conservation. China also is developing new coal-fired generating technology that will increase the fuel efficiency of its generating stations while also lowering water consumption by half, said Kejun.

Yang added that more investments in wind power and solar photovoltaics, which do not use water, will help. And the country has passed new building standards, appliance standards, and other efficiency measures that will conserve energy, and thus reduce water demand. “Innovation and new technology is the answer,” said Yang.

Both experts acknowledged, however, that the unyielding economic trend numbers still point upwards at a steep angle, meaning rapidly rising energy demand. Similarly, the angle of the downward trend for water supply, made sharper by the effect climate change is having on precipitation, point to an unavoidable collision.

– Keith Schneider

On opposite sides of the Pacific, leaders of the world’s two biggest economies and carbon polluters are plainly thinking about clean energy to power up their economies and cool the climate.

In Washington, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced their intention to extend vehicle efficiency standards that went into effect in April in order meet a national goal of 60 miles per gallon average fuel economy by 2025.

President Obama, in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine promised to keep pushing the clean energy and climate action envelope. And in his Saturday national radio address, the president attacked the Republican campaign plan to scrap clean energy incentives.  ”We can go back to the failed energy policies that profited the oil companies but weakened our country,” the president said. “We can go back to the days when promising industries got set up overseas.  Or we can go after new jobs in growing industries.”

China Making Clean Energy Progress But Coal Dominates
Meanwhile in Tianjin, where China is hosting its first U.N. climate conference this week, Chinese officials also are touting clean energy initiatives. They include mandatory building standards established five years ago that are lowering energy demand, new offshore windfarms that supply as much power as big coal-fired power plants, new cities built on principles of energy efficiency and conservation, and a national commitment to lower the levels of carbon pouring into the atmosphere.

What distinguishes China from the United States is that there’s no political opposition getting in the way. China’s national policy vector is very plainly pointing in the direction of incorporating more clean energy technology, and energy efficient practices into its economy. The U.S. gear at the national level, with Republicans campaigning on a message attacking climate science, the Senate unable to act on a comprehensive bill, and investors unsettled by the roiled politics, is in danger of slipping into reverse if it hasn’t already done so.

What makes the countries similar, though, is how far each needs to go and what both countries are willing to do to really make a dent in reducing global carbon emissions. That, of course, has been the central issue confronting negotiators at UN climate meetings for several years, and it’s the single biggest issue in Tianjin.

Very briefly, while both nations are investing considerable sums in clean energy development, China and the U.S. also are tightly hugging the existing fossil fuel economy as essential to national stability and well-being. The consequences of that are considerable for the environment and the rest of the world.

The U.S. produces and burns 1 billion tons of coal annually, uses almost 7 billion barrels of oil, and last year produced 5.8 billion tons of carbon emissions. China meanwhile, according to state economic agencies, will mine and combust around 3.15 billion tons of coal this year, consume more than 3 billion barrels of oil, and produce around 6.3 billion tons of carbon emissions.

Soaring Energy Demand In China, Off The Chart Emissions
While U.S. energy demand and carbon emissions are slipping as a result of the Great Recession, China’s energy demand is soaring. By 2020 according to government projections, China will use 4.2 billion tons of coal – which accounts for 80 percent of its emissions.  And even if China meets its 40 to 45 percent reduction in “carbon intensity” by 2020,  an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council projects that China’s carbon emissions will essentially double by the end of the decade.

Tianjin climate negotiators, aware of the stakes and stymied by the pace, press ahead here to draw a bit closer to global agreements on financing for developing nations to pursue clean energy, conserving forests, reducing the effects of climate change, verification and transparency, and other issues. The annual global climate summit in Cancun, Mexico approaches at the end of November. The new UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres, said yesterday there is a dire need to show the world’s citizens that the negotiations are making “visible progress.”

Essentially what she meant is that negotiators need to change the vector of a grim situation. She commended NGO groups for generating grassroots support, including 350.org, which is holding its Global Work Party on Saturday at thousands of sites in nearly 200 countries.

Indeed, there’s time, bushels of good ideas, and a tide of public will to act. The NRDC and Environment America calculated that reaching the 60 mile per gallon mileage standard in the U.S. by 2025 would save consumers $101 billion in 2030, cut oil use by roughly 1 billion barrels, and reduce heat-trapping carbon pollution by 470 million tons, the equivalent of taking nearly 70 million vehicles off the road.

And here in China, before the Tianjin climate meeting opened, leaders in the Guangzhou, the nation’s third largest city, said that they were spending $37 billion on 34 projects to reduce fuel consumption, increase energy efficiency, and lower climate emissions. The projects include advances in public transit, replacing low efficiency lighting with LED technology, and generating a sizable share of the city’s power with green energy sources.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – In almost every way – timing, media coverage, official attention, and spirited engagement  –  the brief morning event to open the climate conference here was a triumph for its organizers — the Global Campaign For Climate Action (GCCA), Tck tck tck, and Greenpeace. The stamping of a symbolic Great Climate Wall of China with a Chinese proverb also was another satisfying example of leveraging art in the public interest for the Great Wall’s creator, 26-year-old sculptor and fine artist Joseph Ellis.

Ellis, an American raised in upstate New York, has lived and worked in Beijing for five years, during which he became the first Westerner to graduate from the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ prestigious  sculpture program. His work is colorful, creative, dynamic and fresh, just the sort of artistic message distinctive enough to generate commissions and a handsome living, attract a New York Times profile earlier this year, and earn him a TED Fellowship, one of 20 awarded from the more than 5,000 candidates who applied.

His work also attracted Greenpeace, which worked with Ellis two years ago to design and execute an hourglass presented to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton during a climate action demonstration at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. In 2009, Greenpeace funded Ellis to execute 100 life-size sculptures of children carved from ice for another climate action event.

In creating the Great Climate Wall of China, at a cost of $6,000, Greenpeace and other NGOs collected snapshot portraits, which Ellis assembled into a mosaic that formed a dominant image of the real Great Wall. He printed the impressionist mosaic on fabric, fitted it to supports and assembled the display in side-by-side units to build a tall, colorful barrier with a direct message. “I will act on climate, will you?”

The entire project, start to finish, was completed in six days. “It’s amazing what you can do in China in just under a week. The people here are incredible and using the resources at my disposal never cease to amaze,” said Ellis.  “When we combine our efforts the chance for change is at our grasp. Art is such a wonderful way to portray such an idea.”

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – In a gesture that signaled more urgent engagement to cool the planet, the United Nation’s chief climate negotiator today opened this nation’s first international climate conference by sealing a symbolic Great Climate Wall of China with an ancient proverb. Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat and climate expert, who in May was named the new executive secretary for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stamped the proverb – “with everyone’s determination, we can win anything” – on a mosaic wall of 4,000 portaits of people from China and around the world concerned about the increasing evidence of the warming climate.

“The symbolism of this mural is significant,” said Figueres. “Addressing climate change is not just about governments working collectively. It’s also about all of us working collectively and deciding what kind of stamp we want to leave on human history.”

The six-day Tianjin meeting, which ends on Saturday, is the latest opportunity for 3,000 participants from 176 nations to make progress on a global climate agreement, and sets the tone for the annual two-week UNFCCC climate summit, which this year occurs from November 29 to December 10 in Cancun, Mexico. The conference is being held in the brand new and immense 230,000-square meter Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center (see pix above), which opened earlier this year after just 8 months of construction, according to conference organizers.

Activism Supported By UN
Figueres described the need to make the transition from the individual actions that nations are taking to reduce global warming to collective global steps that can be formalized in a binding treaty. Her participation today in an event organized by the Global Campaign For Climate Action (GCCA), Tck tck tck, and Greenpeace was clearly intended to signal a new resolve at the United Nations to generate more political and public attention on the actions countries are taking to reduce carbon emissions. With her animated support for more civic activism, Figueres’ unmistakable message is to encourage public activism as a tool to push negotiators to a binding agreement. She also sought to spotlight the broad international support among citizens at the grassroots, including 350.org’s Global Work Party on October 10, which has organized nearly 6,000 events in 183 countries

Her tone and tilt are a departure from her more cautious predecessor, Danish diplomat Yvo de Boer. Figueres called the GCCA’s international work to mobilize citizens for climate action “important, significant, and impressive,” and concluded her remarks with this: “Thank you for the inspiration. I will take it into the negotiations this week.”

Government negotiators and non-governmental organizations said today that the Tianjin and Cancun meetings could produce enough progress for legal decisions that launch a global system to preserve forests, establish a financial system to coordinate adaptation and emissions reduction projects, formalize emissions reductions commitments, and establish a system to review progress toward those goals. The question is whether the Cancun meeting will set a stronger negotiating foundation that can lead to a formal international agreement between all nations in time for the 2011 climate summit in South Africa or the 2012 summit in South Korea.

Though the United States and China, the two largest carbon polluters, have been reluctant to set a binding global emissions limit, there is evidence that nations want to reach that goal. Last year in Copenhagen, heads of state and climate negotiators from 28 countries that are responsible for 80 percent of climate-changing emissions developed the Copenhagen Accord. The accord is a political agreement that indicates nations individually and collectively should check carbon emissions sufficiently to limit the rise in global temperature to less than 2 degrees Centigrade. In the accord, which was reached on the last day of the Copenhagen summit, developed nations also committed to provide $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 to assist developing nations make the transition from a carbon-based to a clean energy economy.

Hope and  Evidence That Nations Are Moving Steadily Toward Big Steps
This month, the UNFCC reported that 139 nations, including the 27-member European Union, have agreed to the accord or have expressed their intent to sign on, The UNFCCC reported in March that it received submissions of national pledges to cut or limit emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 from 75 countries, which account for all but 20 percent of global emissions. In addition 41 industrialized countries formally communicated their economy-wide targets and 35 developing countries have “communicated information on the nationally appropriate actions they are planning, provided they receive the appropriate support in terms of finance and technology.”

In an interview in March, Yvo de Boer, the outgoing UNFCCC executive secretary who managed the Copenhagen climate summit, said, “You can argue that while Copenhagen failed in a legal sense, it was a success in a political sense. The question is now how you take that forward.”

There are as many answers sweeping through Tianjin’s modern and vast conference hall here as negotiators and participants. The focus, as it was in Copenhagen and will be in Cancun is action on climate warming that can be formalized in a written agreements. This week negotiators and the world will gain more insight into what nations are willing to do to accelerate the clean energy economy, reduce the cutting in the world’s forests, and adapt to warming temperatures.

And just as it’s been in the previous meetings over the last several years, China and the United States will suck up most of this week’s attention and concern. There is good reason for that. It’s true that India is acting to reduce its carbon emissions and is expanding solar power, Mexico is adopting new vehicle efficiency standards, and the European Union invested $41 billion last year in clean energy and more than half of the continents new power production in 2009 came from renewable energy sources.

China and U.S. Center of Attention
Still, China and the U.S. are collectively pursuing a kind of schizophrenic energy and climate strategy that by necessity commands the world’s focus.

China’s energy consumption last year was the world’s highest, equivalent to 2.3 billion tons of oil, 0.4 percent more than the U.S. energy consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. Moreover, demand for energy is rising faster in China than any country, and it is the largest producer of climate emissions, according to the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy. And though Chinese officials say they are meeting the goal, announced last year in Copenhagen, of a 40 to 45 percent reduction in carbon intensity by 2020, an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council concludes that China’s carbon emissions will essentially double over the decade to more than 12 billion tons a year.

The basic reason is that even as China invested $35.6 billion last year in clean energy development, announced closures of hundreds of inefficient coal-fired power plants, and became the unmistakable global leader in solar manufacturing, it also said it will increase coal production by 2020 to over 4.2 billion metric tons annually, an increase of 33 percent from the 3.15 billion tons the country will mine and consume this year, according to the China National Coal Association. China produces and burns more coal than any other country -three times more than the U.S. – and coal supplies 70 percent of the nation’s total energy demand.

The U.S. meanwhile passed legislation in 2009 to invest roughly $100 billion in clean energy development, energy efficiency, and fuel-saving transit, and became the largest generator of wind energy in the world. The Environmental Protection Agency, acting at the direction of the White House, formalized in April new rules to significantly improve fuel mileage efficiency in vehicles and light trucks that will conserve energy and contribute substantially to lower carbon emissions, which have been going down in the U.S. since 2008, according to the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the Department of Energy. Yet conservatives in the House and Senate insist that climate change is a scientific fraud, candidates are running this year on campaigns to block any national effort to curb emissions, and the American oil industry is spending an estimated $100 billion annually to perpetuate the fossil fuel era by developing “unconventional” sources of oil and natural gas from tar sands and deep shales that produce more carbon emissions than “conventional” fuel sources.

For both nations, the negotiations about limiting carbon emissions is impeded by economic priorities. Clearly both countries embrace the existing fossil fuel economy as essential to national stability and well-being. Both countries also are pursuing clean energy development; China produces seven percent of its energy from renewable sources; the U.S. produces eight percent.

What’s troublesome is that while the Obama administration continues to press hard for new jobs and investment in the clean energy sector, the U.S. Congress does not seem to view the opportunities from pursuing low-carbon clean energy development as clearly as China’s leaders appear to at the moment.

“A decade ago China made one percent of the world’s solar panels,” said Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts, in September during a House hearing of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. “Today it makes nearly half of them. The $15 billion worth of solar panels China exported last year was more valuable than America’s corn, beef, and chicken exports combined. China is no longer coming. They are here. They ate our lunch, and they are moving on to our dinner.”

This week China is putting on display a number of its clean-tech breakthroughs in coal production and clean technology manufacturing. The U.S. Climate Action Network has organized several tours of facilities later in the week. We’ll bring you reports from each.

– Keith Schneider, with additional reporting from Jonathan Adams