Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
public concerns on environmental quality. More
importantly, political freedom is able to uproot
authority's self-interest motivation on legitimacy.
Meantime, political freedom can also return people
the right to monitor the quality of regulation and
protect themselves from environmental dangers
with independent legal means.
All CCS guidelines introduced in developed
countries all address the issue about public
participation in CCS projects planning. The
confrontations between developers and local
communities have taken place in some European
and American CCS projects (GCCSI, 2010). The
solution must compromise all parties' concerns.
Nowadays, those self-organized local communi-
ties or Non-governmental organizations (NGO)
in China have fought their rights, but have to face
suppression from the authority in name of social
stability and public security. In the past years,
Chinese government has taken stricter measures
to suppress active individuals and organizations
even though across the country thousands of pro-
tests against environmental pollution and social
injustice take place each year. Few of them have
been addressed properly.
As for CCS, a complicated technology relat-
ing to various natural and policy environment,
an effective environmental regulation can limit
the negative consequences caused by CCS proj-
ects. However, the deadlock of one-party rule in
China's political institution deters a constructive
and effective environmental regulation.
real open and competitive. This may reduce rent
seeking possibility and avoid regulatory capture
by dominating state-owned electricity companies.
Second, civil rights of local community, NGOs
and environmental groups should be secured.
This institutional provision is significant to fight
the potential social and environmental negatives
from CCS projects particularly when government
fails to seriously take into account the concerns
and interests of local people and environmental
common goods.
A tactical policy can be setting up a special
public fund to deal with future accidents caused
by CCS projects. The fund may come from taxing
relevant actors getting profits from CCS projects
and from a certain portion of fiscal funding. The
fund has to be monitored by public. The decision
making related to the fund should be participated
by civil society organizations.
The establishment of special fund is to make
major social stakeholders work together to address
the risks of CCS projects. Above all, the two policy
strategies are kinds of deep institutional reforms
and must not be achieved easily. However, if the
reforms are successful, the beneficiaries will go
beyond climate protection.
CONCLUSION
By examining the impact of China electricity
market establishment and environmental regula-
tory institution on CCS, this paper argues that
CCS development may face significant chal-
lenges from electricity market and environmental
regulation. The solutions in policy level include
protecting IPR, freeing power market, and enforc-
ing environmental regulation. To ensure these
policy solutions successful, returning political
freedom to people can be a long term reform
objective. This institutional change should secure
China's effort to fight global warming with help
of various means and technology, such as CCS.
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
There exist significant systematic risks in China's
environmental regulation institution and electric-
ity market establishment. Without finding out
solutions to remove or undermine the systematic
risks, CCS's development may not bring a result
that people usually expect, but compromise social
justice and environmental sustainability. First,
