Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ecologically sensitive areas, seismically active
areas, underground water bodies, and populated
communities. Besides improving technology in
RD&D activities, effective regulations are placed
to control and reduce those impacts and risks.
Some developed countries have worked hard on
the issue because of the monitoring pressures from
legislature, civil organizations and affected com-
munities. The effort has resulted in some outcomes,
like CCS Guidelines and CCS Ready Policy. The
CCS Guidelines is an initiative “to develop a set
of preliminary guidelines and recommendations
for the deployment of CCS technologies in the
United States, to ensure that CCS projects are
conducted safely and effectively.”(WRI, 2008,
p.8). CCS Ready Policy is a policy concept in
which “carbon-emissions-intensive plants are
encouraged or required to prepare for CCS dur-
ing their design and planning phases so they are
ready to retrofit CCS at a later date.” (GCCSI,
2010, p.1). Both of them show the importance of
environmental regulations in CCS demonstration
and future commercial development. Some inter-
national collaborative projects address China's
CCS regulatory framework, including STROCO2
project (EU, 2010), CCS Guidelines in China
(WRI, 2009). However, the features of Chinese
environmental regulation and the relationship
between environmental regulation and large state-
owned companies have not been analyzed. The
existing researches on CCS regulatory framework
in China focus more on the operational level of
policy reform. (E3G, 2009; CAP, 2009 & WRI,
2008)
been seriously polluted. Ironically, China has ad-
opted ambitious air quality standards, which, in
some elements, are even stricter than those of the
United States (Hayward, 2005). It is evident that a
big gap exists between environmental regulation
and enforcement.
To address the gap, some scholars suggest a
series of policy reforms, including detaching local
environmental agency from local government,
removing local governmental impact on courts,
setting up environmental public interest legisla-
tion and offering an effective procedure for public
participation in environmental lawsuits and other
activities (Wang, 2007). However, these policies
cannot change the structural primacy of economic
development against social and environmental
justice. The primacy is based on a self-interest
motivation that the endless economic booming
can justify the legitimacy of one-party ruling.
Therefore environmental regulation serves for
securing the ruling position rather than addressing
public interests, such as environmental protection.
The conflicts between the two ends are inevi-
table, but environmental regulation rarely wins.
For instance, in 2005 - 2009, a few regulation
campaigns by the State Environmental Protection
Administration aimed at big state-owned compa-
nies that disregarded the Environmental Impact
Assessment (EIA) Law in many large power
and heavy industrial projects. The projects were
suspended for a while. But most power projects
owned by state-owned power giants were resumed
not long after the firms just submitted the EIA
reports. However, affected local communities
and civil society organizations cannot participate
in reviewing the EIA reports and usually have no
access to the complete EIA reports.
Environmental regulation will not make differ-
ence if political freedom does not function well.
The historic experience in developed countries in
1960s and 1970s have demonstrated the strong
link between political freedom and environmental
performance (Hayward, 2005). Political free-
China's Environmental Regulation
Failure and Institutional Rationale
China's environmental watchdog, the State Envi-
ronmental Protection Administration, has failed
to fulfill its responsibility to provide a healthy
environment for the society. China homes many
of most air polluted cities around the world. More
