Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-231)
MR JOHN
ASHTON
26 APRIL 2006
Q220 Ms Stuart: There are all the
assumptions, like on the environment—180,000 people a year
die because of air pollution. In the UK that would be an outrage.
51,000 unrests—that is significant. We have had people give
evidence that it actually quite suits the Chinese Government to
have 51,000 small-scale unrests, because that is the pressure
cooker; that stops the lid from just going off. I could be wrong.
Tell me wrong, but I am just getting a bit uneasy.
Mr Ashton: Perhaps I could just
pick a couple of bits of that to start with. I would be quite
surprised if in the internal discussions of the Chinese Government,
when they look at the figures for local unrest, they say, "This
is quite a good thing". My perception is that Chinese leaders
are very worried about instability and about the way in which
resource pressures might fuel instability. If you like, the main
offer to the Chinese people of the Chinese Communist Party to
be the regime in China is that by and large, up to now, it has
successfully delivered stability, I guess since the late 1970s.
I think there is a real question of legitimacy—a concern
about legitimacy there. A lot of the big decisions that the Chinese
leadership takes can be understood as attempts to strengthen the
foundations for stability in China. I am not sure I understand
the point about risk-taking. I was trying to address the underlying
dynamic that simply comes from the scale and the rate of growth
of Chinese demand for resources; for timber, for example. I was
in China on the day in 1998 that the Chinese Government announced
that it was going to ban logging in China—the felling of
timber. There had been a major flood, a very damaging flood, and
one of the factors that had made that flood worse than it would
otherwise have been was that a lot of valley slopes had been illegally
felled. One understands that that has been a reasonably successful
policy in terms of logging in China itself, but it has also had
very tangible consequences outside China; because it is easier
to stop people cutting down trees than it is to switch off the
demand for timber in your economy. So all of a sudden there was
a much stronger demand for timber, some of which was manifested
in an increase in illegal logging in Siberia, in South-East Asia
and in West Africa, which is linked to what I said earlier about
Liberia and the warlords.
Q221 Ms Stuart: Linked to the risk-taking
argument, one of the things we sometimes see as an opportunity
in helping the Chinese in their economic growth is by exporting
some of the environmental technology. Do you think there is scope
for that? A risk-taker responds to this; a gambler does not.
Mr Ashton: I think there is huge
scope for that. If you take energy for example, China has recently
announced what are arguably the world's most aggressive policies,
both on energy efficiency and on the promotion of renewable energy.
The EU also has reasonably aggressive policies in those areas,
which will be highlighted in the UK very soon with the results
of the energy review under way. If you say how can the EU engage
China, or is there a way in which the EU can engage China that
will enable us both to meet our respective requirements for greater
energy efficiency and faster deployment of renewable energy by
working together than we could by working separately, then that
opens up enormous opportunities. If you created, in effect, a
single market between Europe and China for ultra-efficient appliances,
for very efficient vehicles, for renewable energy products of
one kind or another, then you would be accelerating the deployment
of those technologies in China, in Europe; and you would be driving
down the global prices of them, so you would be doing that globally
as well. That is a big business opportunity for European companies,
apart from anything else.
Q222 Ms Stuart: What about assisting
the Chinese, either as the UK or as members of the EU, in dealing
with carbon emissions?
Mr Ashton: I think that is part
of the same coin. There is one point about that. The Chinese themselves,
I think, have come quite a long way in the last few years in coming
to their own assessment of the implications of climate change
for China. The Chinese economy is very vulnerable to the impacts
of climate change. A large part of the most productive part of
China is on the eastern seaboard: very exposed to a rising sea
level; exposed to storm surges; saline intrusion. A large part
of Chinese agriculture depends on patterns of rainfall and hydrology
that need to be reasonably predictable, and so hydrological instability
is a threat to them. That has become a more tangible feature of
the internal discussion in China. However, at the same time I
think that it does not yet have the urgency that matters of energy
security have for the Chinese leadership. The Chinese leadership
is worried about China's growing dependence on imported oil and
gas. It is worried about the inability to build power stations
fast enough to supply the increase in demand for power. Again,
I think that they see that as having an immediate stability connotation.
When they put climate change next to that, climate change also
appears increasingly as a stability issue but it is not an immediate
one for them. Chinese emissions are a huge part of the climate
change equation. The challenge for us is to engage China in the
following way: to say, "How can we work with you in a way
that will help us to meet your energy security requirements"—along
the lines that I have just been trying to describe—"while
at the same time meeting our climate security requirements?"
Because if you drive up energy efficiency, if you accelerate renewables,
if you find ways of burning coal without emitting carbon dioxide,
if you make your transport system less emissions-intensive, you
are also addressing the climate problem at the same time.
Q223 Ms Stuart: Do you think that
there will be an extensive increase in the use of nuclear energy
in China? At the moment it is not a very significant part of the
energy mix for the Chinese.
Mr Ashton: It is not. There is
a nuclear debate in China, as there is in many other places; but
even on the most ambitious assumptions about the rate of growth
of nuclear in China, I think the International Energy Agency projection
is that even by 2050 it will amount to no more than about three
per cent of their primary energy production. There is one important
consequence of that for the climate change debate, which is that
if you address the question globally then, whatever question nuclear
energy may or may not be the answer to, it is not the answer to
how do we stabilise the climate. At the same time, Chinese deployment
of coal is rising much faster than their deployment of nuclear
energy and will, by any assumption, continue to do that for at
least a generation or two.
Q224 Mr Horam: As I think you were
saying in response to my colleague, China is trying to tie down
resources worldwide, sometimes in quite a selfish way, if you
like. This must have adverse consequences for other countries,
affect the foreign policy of other countries, and be in contrast
to what you describe as their attempts to improve their own environment.
How do you see this working out?
Mr Ashton: I think it goes back
to that choice between hard and soft power, and some of the options
that the Chinese are investing in in the hard power side of that
equation are apparent on the question of resources. I think that
it is questionable. If you do a deal with President Mugabe, for
example, to secure your mineral resources for a set period of
time, it is questionable how reliable that deal will actually
prove to be; but it can also have other potentially destabilising
consequences.
Q225 Mr Horam: But they do not really
see it. As you say, there are priorities about this.
Mr Ashton: Yes.
Q226 Mr Horam: It may well be that
their immediate priorities are to secure resources just to keep
the economic growth going, because that is necessary to keep civilian
control; and the environmental considerations, as you were saying,
are necessarily a second priority. "Maybe something we will
hopefully achieve in 10 years' time, but today we've got to get
that timber out of Liberia."
Mr Ashton: I think they are attacking
the resource problem from both directions. They are trying to
secure their supplies, but they are also trying to use the resources
that they procure more efficiently; which is why they have such
an aggressive energy efficiency policy.
Q227 Mr Horam: They really do see
this, do they? They see the problems they are causing the world
by this grab for resources?
Mr Ashton: They see it, I suspect,
more in terms of problems that they are exposed to themselves.
The more they depend on imported oil, the more geopolitical risk
there is for them associated with competition from others for
that oil. So why not use that oil as efficiently as possible?
At the same time why not invest, as they are doing, in an alternative
source of liquid fuels using coal? They have just announced $20
billion of investment, effectively in making vehicle fuel from
coal. So I think that they are spreading their bets. However,
that is an opportunity for others. If we want to engage in a way
that will help them to use resources more efficiently, it is telling
us, "Well, actually, we are already interested in this and
we are open for that conversation".
Q228 Mr Hamilton: Mr Ashton, can
I go back to something that Gisela Stuart mentioned earlier, about
renewable energy sources? I notice that about 20% of China's energy
consumption comes from renewables—which I think is a lot
better than ours at the moment. I wondered whether you could tell
us a bit more about renewable energy sources, perhaps in terms
of wind. I gather that—is it in the north of the country?—there
is considerable resource there for generating wind power, and
whether that is something that they are investigating. Also, of
course, energy efficiency, which is very important in all this;
and whether, in looking for example at automotive power, they
are investigating biofuels and the hydrogen fuel cell development—which
is very hi-tech, I know. Is there an opportunity for the United
Kingdom here, with our Environmental Industries Association, which
is pretty big and is growing, to export some of these environmental
technologies to China, to help them help themselves and help the
world, of course?
Mr Ashton: The short answer is
yes, I think there is; but, just running through those areas,
the Chinese are investing heavily in wind power and they do have
a very prolific wind resource in northern China. That is all correct.
I think that they are increasingly interested in developing their
own manufacturing capacity. The Danish wind turbine manufacturers
are working with them on that. Energy efficiency we have covered
a bit already, but that covers a huge range of technologies, both
on the supply side and on the demand—the sort of infrastructure
and buildings side—and I think that any country that has
something to offer there has potential opportunities in China.
Biofuels, yes, they are very high. If you go to any Chinese conference
on energy, you hear a lot about biofuels. I think that there is
one particular area of biofuels which is of interest, which is
the increasingly talked-about technology for making ethanol out
of what is called cellulosic waste; in other words, agricultural
waste. That connects with another concern of the Chinese leadership,
which is how do you create new revenue streams for people living
in the countryside? They are worried about the income gap between
the countryside and the cities, and the massive movement of people
from the countryside into the cities. There is a huge amount of
agricultural waste being produced in China which, if it could
be turned into petrol equivalent, would be of great interest to
them. There are technologies, including technologies which British
companies have interests in, which offer huge potential in that.
I would however come back to the point I made about Europe. For
the UK or any other Member State of Europe, those companies that
have relevant technologies can explore the opportunities; but
if we want at the same time to achieve the geopolitical goals,
the strategic goals, of reducing that Chinese resource footprint,
then it needs to be part of a coherent strategy operating at a
very high level of ambition: a higher level of ambition than we
have at the moment in our respective national China policies,
or in the EU projection into China. It is about scaling up rather
than about understanding the detail of each piece of it.
Q229 Mr Hamilton: Can I come back
on one point you made? It relates to wind electricity generation.
One of the big problems that we have in the UK are our planning
laws. Obviously, people do not like these wind farms. Some people
do, but most people do not—especially if you live in Ilkley!
Am I right in thinking that, because of the political system they
have in China, ie a complete lack of any democracy, you can get
through planning issues like, "We're going to build a wind
farm with 10,000 wind turbines, and too bad if you don't like
it, because it's going to be done"? Is that one reason why
they might be more successful in generating more electricity from
renewable sources?
Mr Ashton: I am not steeped in
the detail of Chinese planning requirements, but you only have
to spend a few minutes in China to suspect that they are a lot
more rudimentary than they are in some places. However, I think
that connects also with the questions earlier about civil society.
Some of these stresses that environmental activism is giving voice
to in China arise from very local questions about how land is
used, and how one person's amenity might be another person's threat
or jeopardy. I suspect there will be an increasing trend to a
more contested, and hopefully in the end more transparent, system
of decisions. So I would not imagine that the status quo will
remain. I think that it is also true that some of the places in
China where there is the most abundant wind resource are also
places where the population density is not as high as it is in
eastern China—in north-west China for example. If they at
the same time were building a grid system which was capable of
accommodating a large amount of wind-generated electricity coming
from more remote regions, then the planning issues might be a
bit less serious.
Q230 Chairman: In the few minutes
we have left can I switch focus to the question of water and the
importance of water? I understand that the Chinese population
has quite a low use of water per capita compared with the world
average, or many other countries. Clearly, as there are potentially
200 million people moving from rural areas into urban areas and
urbanisation continues at the rate it is going on, you will have
serious problems, will you not, of supply of that water? How are
they addressing that issue? Are they doing it in a way which is
sensible? Are they still talking about diverting rivers, big dam
projects, and so on, or are they focusing on other ways?
Mr Ashton: First of all, there
is an immense anxiety about water stress in China. There is a
structural problem, which is that in the North China Plain you
have about a third of China's population and a third of China's
economic production, but only about 7% of China's available water.
That has always been a problem but it is getting worse because
the demand for water is increasing. At the same time, the sources
of available water are drying up. The aquifers that supply a lot
of the water in northern Chinese cities are just running out,
and at some point before too long they will be dry. That is why
there is debate about very large-scale projects to move water
from southern China to northern China. As I mentioned before,
part of the growing worry about climate change is a realisation
that the impacts of climate change will make those stresses even
worse than they are already. They are also well aware that there
is a link to the movement of people. A lot of the people in northern
China who are moving into the cities are doing so because there
is no longer enough water to grow enough crops to make a living
in the arid margins of north-western China. So there is lots of
anxiety; quite a lot of debate, I think, about the various choices.
Is it wise to be moving large amounts of water in mega-construction
projects, or should the emphasis be more on using water more efficiently,
conserving water? I think the thrust will be both. My concern
is, again, whether the scale of the response and the effectiveness
of the response is adequate to the scale of the problem. I think
that water stress could potentially be a very destabilising problem
in China. One other thing, and it is a link that is not often
made. There is a close link, I think, between the efficiency of
water use in China and the global food economy. The more Chinese
agricultural production is hit by shortage of water—and
I should say irrigation is easily the largest single slice of
Chinese water consumption—the more that will be an upward
pressure on global food prices. On top of that, as China gets
richer, there is more of an appetite for meat, and producing meat
is more water-intensive than producing arable crops. Some of that
water intensity is in effect exported. China has become a very
large-scale importer of soya, for example from Brazil, for animal
feed. In Brazil there are also issues of water stress, which are
exaggerated if you grow more soya. So just another example of
the interconnectedness.
Q231 Chairman: Is there also a problem
about the growing soil erosion and desertification of the country?
Is that now high up the political agenda too, or is that not talked
about?
Mr Ashton: No, it has been high
on the agenda for a long time. There has been a project which
was being invested in greatly when I was first in China in the
1980s, called "the Great Green Wall", which is effectively
a massive tree-planting campaign across northern China. It is
an attempt, as it were, to hold back the advance of the desert;
but, as the Committee will have seen from the recent news coverage
of the dust storm in Beijing the other day, the desert is still
coming. When you visit Beijing, it almost feels like a kind of
advancing army, only more implacable. The Gobi Desert has a very
distinct fringe. You have plants there, you have sand there,
and the sand is moving in that direction. The edge of the
Gobi Desert is about 240 kilometres from Beijing at the moment,
and it is advancing at about six kilometres a year. People who
live in Beijing understand that in a very tangible and immediate
way.
Chairman: We will be visiting China soon
as a Committee and no doubt when we are in Beijing we will see
what the air is like at that time! Thank you very much, Mr Ashton,
for coming along and for giving us a very useful session.
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