The skies over Beijing had cleared propitiously, it seems, for the opening of its parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), this week. But only days ago the capital had been engulfed once again by a filthy smog that had citizens wearing masks, schoolchildren sent home, protests, and hospital admissions soaring. Authorities raised the pollution alert to the second-highest “orange” danger level for the first time.
New research suggests that if the smog persists, Chinese agriculture will face conditions "somewhat similar to a nuclear winter", a professor at China Agricultural University, He Dongxian, said last week. Her work has shown that air pollutants adhere to greenhouse surfaces, cutting by half the light inside and impeding crucial plant photosynthesis. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences claims in a report that Beijing's pollution is making the city almost "uninhabitable for human beings".
"We will declare war on pollution and fight it with the same determination we battled poverty," Prime Minister Li Keqiang told the NPC, signalling what the party says is a renewed determination to tackle the issue. "Environmental pollution has become a major problem," he said, "nature's red-light warning against the model of inefficient and blind development."
The commitment is welcome, but whether sufficient is another matter. Although the environment ministry last week promised a crackdown on firms contributing to the smog, the government’s 2014 budget for energy conservation and environmental protection, at $34 billion, is up on last year’s only marginally. And the NPC last year had the opportunity to pass an environmental tax on polluters but spurned it – it has the chance to put that right this year.
Li said pollution will be tackled through price reform to boost non-fossil fuel power and capacity cuts in the steel and cement sectors, China’s largest air polluters. But such plans represent only a modest 2-2.5 percent of total capacity, and closures may well be outstripped by new capacity under construction.