Implementation is the Key to the Green Leap Forward
by David B. Sutton, Ph.D.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
I want to commend Professor Zhu Dajian for his insightful comments in his opinion piece (Shanghai Daily, 28 December, 2009). I absolutely agree that China’s future, indeed that of the entire world, depends on its celebrated Green Leap Forward.
As some one who has worked in the sustainability field for more than three decades, it is encouraging to see China taking the steps it appears to be taking. A direction which the United States, where I come from, seems to be still incapable of moving.
It is a great irony to me that many of the very places with the freedom and creativity to come up with the newest innovations for more sustainable living and the ability to implement them seems to lack the political will to do so. This clearly is the case in the United States.
I have spent the majority of my professional career promoting sustainable development as have many of my more progressive colleagues in the US. We, as dissident academics, have long sounded the alarm and called for more sustainable policy and many of the very same measures of energy efficiency and clean technologies that we now see China taking. But our government’s policy still lags far behind.
I have come to understand why this is so. Put quite simply the goals of the dominant powerful corporate interests which control the direction and policy of the government are not aligned with the boarder needs of the society as a whole and all of its citizens.
I am quite aware of the free-market fundamentalist’s twisted logic that it is the obstacles to the free operations of the market that are the cause of the massive disparities and depletions. This argument is ridiculous on its face and it is not my purpose to dispel here. The current state of the economies of the West should be sufficient evidence to the contrary.
My point here is, it is the government’s role to protect the commons and ensure the public good. Deferring this crucial task to a mysterious (fictious) ‘invisible hand ‘ is simply an abrogation of a government’s responsibility.
To me, it is this role that the Chinese government is so responsibly accepting with its policies of ‘scientific development’ (read sustainable development). It is quite encouraging to see and hear of all the positive policy pronouncements and now to hear and see the wise insight from China’s Halls of Academia. I sincerely hope that they follow through with the implementation of the policy, taking the advice of those who clearly understand the dynamics of the challenge such as Professor Zhu Dajian.
For several years now I have been following with great excitement the talk about eco-cities in China. I have read about beautiful visions of sustainable communities using state-of-the-art clean technology to greatly reduce their ecological footprint.
I have studied the concrete designs and implementation plans produced by leading experts in the field for such examples as Huangbaiyu and Dongtan. I can remember my excitement upon reading in “Science” (America’s leading scientific journal) about the plans for “World’s first carbon neutral urban development,” Dongtan on Chongming Island. I felt so lucky to be living in Shanghai, just miles away from this ground breaking urban experiment. I wanted to contribute and couldn’t wait to see its implementation.
But the excitement was short lived. For as is the case in so many other examples of my elevated hopes, they were ultimately dashed by inadequate follow through and implementation. This is a pattern seen again and again – big talk, image building and public promotion only to be followed by a major failure or short-fall in implementation due to inadequate management and implementation or misappropriation of funds. It is as if it is felt that talking about all the good intentions is sufficient to meet the challenge. IT IS NOT.
This is the juncture China now finds itself. How to implement what it says it wants to do. The next critical step in China’s new-found prominence in the field of sustainable development needs to be concrete demonstration of doing what needs to be done.
Acknowledging what that is and enlisting informed expertise in the planning has been a revolutionary first step – one taken by few other nations in the world. But to really make a difference these visions and plans must be fully realized, using that same outside foreign expertise if that is what it takes, to accomplish it.
Taking the right advice is critical here. It makes little sense to me to listen to those who haven’t succeeded themselves in achieving any degree of sustainable development.
Listening to the very same bankers that have brought the world economy to its knees or the essentially failed, nuclear power industry (that only exists because of a long history of massive subsidies) makes no sense at all to me.
Taking the right advice
Principles of sustainable development are easy enough to understand. They simply require that we look to nature for guiding principles. Natural systems have undergone 4 billion years of R&D in perfecting their life-sustaining processes. Moving towards sustainability and a circular economy will require a fundamental understanding of the natural systems that support us and all of our activities.
There is a set of laws that influence all human enterprise, they are the Laws of Nature. There is virtually universal agreement on the parameters set by our Earth’s natural life-support systems. They are clearly expressed by The Natural Step as:
All systems on earth are ultimately powered by the energy of the sun. A constant input of solar energy drives all life’s processes as well as the global physical forces that maintain the land, oceans and atmosphere that harbor life.
With respect to matter, the earth is a closed system. There is a finite amount of physical resources at our disposal.
Living systems sustain themselves by accessing the constant flow of incoming solar energy and circulating the material resources they need through grand closed looped cycles of use and reuse.
These are the systemic parameters within which all sustainable practices must ultimately exist.
Based on the false assumptions of unlimited natural resources to draw from, unlimited ecosystem services to support us and unlimited places to put our wastes, human society has evolved linear economic systems that takes natural resources, makes products and then disposes of them as waste when they are no longer useful to us. Sooner or later, in a finite world, this one-way industrial process must end. There is a limit to resources available as well as the capacity for the earth’s life-support systems to absorb the impact. The myriad of environmental problems we are experiencing today are a manifestation of reaching these limits. Calls for moving towards a circular economy come from such an understanding.
The solution to all problems is not simply more consumption. It concerns me to hear China being given the advice that it needs to consume its way out of the economic mess that the West has created. “People in China save too much,” say the pundits. “They need to buy more to stimulate the economy.” I agree with Professor Zhu’s plea to “jettison the possession –oriented mindset. ” To follow the way of the mass consumer society of the US in China would be a disaster of epic proportions.
To create a sustainable society it will certainly require less consumption of offending goods and services (those that violate the natural guiding principles stated above), and their substitution by more benign and cost-effective alternatives – that better provide for the needs of the whole society.
For example, China has now become the largest maker and market of automobiles in the world. A major feat and an awesome responsibility. Because China can not go the way of the other industrialized societies before it. It is quite clear that the internal combustion engine and the tons of molded steel it propels has been a major architect of many of our most prominent urban and environmental problems. These gas guzzlers (to use Professor Zhu’s term) are not only major polluters (polluted air, acid rain, noise pollution, global warming; not to mention the foreign policy consequences of dependence on imported oil ), they require that the country’s communities, both urban and rural, be designed to accommodate them.
China’s focus and manufacturing expertise in electric cars is encouraging but cars are cars, whether powered by green technologies or not, they will make their contribution to the damage to urban neighborhoods and communities, highway congestion and deaths, the loss of biological diversity, the damage to fragile landscapes, and urban sprawl. Infrastructure design and investment needs to be deployed towards meeting the transportation needs of all people not just around the needs of the automobile.
Then there is the advice as to what “green technologies” to adopt and how to implement them. My caution here is to watch for vested interests. Those selling a given technology have a vested interest in their product and way they want to see it deployed. This may not be the most benign, cost-effective, efficient means of meeting end-use needs and using a given technology.
Unfortunately many of China’s initial projects involving renewable energy resources are not encouraging. Large mega-damns (e.g. Three Gorges Damn), nuclear power plants, wind farms in Mongolia and solar farms in Inner Mongolia are all inappropriate applications in my estimation having concomitant vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, diseconomies of scale. The simple fact is the all the potential end users served by these projects could have been better served more cost-effectively and efficiently — with a mix of more appropriate (scientific, elegant, what I have called “soft path”) options having less waste, environmental impact and concentration of wealth, control and power. (I have written further on this aspect in a previous Opinion Piece, see attached).
Combining the Will with the Way
China is poised to lead the world on a different path of development – one in which the historic linear industrial processes of the past are converted into a circular economy emulating the processes of natural systems driven by the power of the sun and cycling their substance in pursuit of meeting the needs of all its members.
To do this it makes little sense to follow the failed examples and flawed advice of those who have gone before.
Production and consumption need to be focused on meeting the needs of all those in the society not just the wants of a wealthy elite. A mass market consumer economy does not necessarily do that. A vast accumulation of wealth for a few is no model for providing for the needs of the many. Economic policy dominated by corporate suppliers using massive resources to manufacture demand and the consent for the systems that feed it will not do it.
I am in full agreement that in the opening to a market economy, China must retain its socialist perspectives of internalizing the external social and environmental costs of a single minded market and provide for all of its citizens. This is not something you will hear from the architects of our current economic crisis.
The upcoming World Expo 2010 offers a grand opportunity to usher in a Green Leap Forward. Demonstrations and expertise from all around the world will be on display – it could and should serve as a catalyst for combining China’s expressed will with ways for its implementation. But it will take more than a few isolated demonstrations, image building promotional campaigns and financial windfalls to a few in charge. There needs to be wide-spread application of these best practices across the board in all new building and construction projects. I am looking forward to seeing that happen.
The author is a former University Professor from the United States (The University of California and Stanford University) teaching environmental conservation, technology transfer and sustainable development. He is now living and working in Shanghai. Fifteen years ago he helped initiate The Natural Step (from Sweden) into the United States, he is now working to do the same in China and throughout Asia.
As it appeared in Shanghai Daily, Jan, 22, 2010: [bad link] http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=426511&type=Opinion