Beijing

I spent almost two weeks in Beijing in late February/early March – a little bit earlier than my June visits in previous years – and the trip was a busy one. I gave a two hour lecture at Peking U., covering the same topic as my Singapore talk (i.e., P vs. Q for China’s carbon) – but at a more leisurely pace, & with an opportunity for interactions and Q&A with both the students and faculty. In addition, some of my GEF/World Bank colleagues came for the lecture as well, making the session even more interesting.

Dr. Liu (left) & Prof. Yang

We did another one-day workshop for the GEF/World Bank SO2 trading project – and I spent the morning bringing the project team up-to-speed about the U.S. Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR). This is a rather complicated topic even for U.S. utility executives and power plant personnel actually affected by the regulation – let alone foreigners who have only cursory knowledge about the U.S. legal system, and the numerous challenges and lawsuits that always come about when EPA promulgates a regulation. CSAPR was thrown out by the courts a few days before it was to go into effect, and the court will not be hearing arguments about the case until this coming April. Even before this latest case, however, the SO2 markets had crashed when EPA first proposed the limited trading approach (in July 2010), and it is now becoming clear that full controls on SO2 will ultimately happen – and those plants still uncontrolled will probably be shut down instead. (The posting about the Eddystone plant in late 2010 was a harbinger of such coal-plant shutdowns, and the boom in shale gas makes such actions even more likely.) My colleague Prof. Yang Jintian of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning led the afternoon session about Total Emissions Control (TEC) in China. You can see both of us – along with Dr. Liu Junguo, the GEF/World Bank project director, in the nearby photo.

China has been moving aggressively to implement its energy & carbon intensity goals (announced prior to Copenhagen, & incorporated into the 12th Five Year Plan), and I had a chance to meet up with UNDP’s environmental team in China about their on-going projects supporting this effort. UNDP arranged meetings with the Energy Research Institute, the Sinocarbon Innovation & Investment Co., Ltd., the World Bank, and others during my visit – and it was especially nice to meet up with Ms. Hou Xin’an once again. Xin’an and I had worked together in Ulan Bator in Mongolia in the late 1990s, and she has moved up the UNDP management ladder and is now heavily involved in governance issues within the country.