Severe air pollution: the Ministry of Environmental Protection admits that tackling it will require 1.75 trillion yuan
Hong Kong media reports that Chinese officials, at an environmental forum in Guangdong, admitted that China ranks first in the world in almost every category of air pollution, including sulfur dioxide and nitric oxide, and the same is true of carbon emissions.
According to a Hong Kong media report on December 6, experts also pointed out that the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region is one of the most polluted regions in the world.
The media, citing Wang Jinnan, chief engineer of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning under the Ministry of Environmental Protection, said that achieving China's pollution reduction targets before next year will require investment of 1.75 trillion yuan, but the investment gap poses a huge obstacle to this effort.
At the recently held "2016 China Environmental Protection Listed Companies Summit", Wang Jinnan said: "The emission indicators for almost all pollutants and carbon dioxide emissions rank first in the world, and the pressure on the entire atmosphere is unprecedented."
He said that there are large amounts of pollutant emissions in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, and the direct result is a rise in pm2.5; nationwide, visibility has declined by an average of about 50 km in recent decades, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has become one of the most polluted regions in the world.
Lei Wen, an official of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that over the past 10 years the state has invested enormous manpower and material resources in energy conservation, emissions reduction and environmental protection, and achieved notable results, but overall the production model of high input, high emissions and high pollution has not undergone the most fundamental change.
China's total industrial output value surpassed that of the United States in 2011, becoming the world's first, but factories' failure to strictly enforce environmental standards has become the main cause of pollution.
Lei Wen said that although most of China's thermal power plants have installed advanced filtration devices, factories' coal burning is not well regulated, and they continue to emit pollutants into the atmosphere.
CCID Research Institute, under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that in 2015 coal consumption in the non-electric power industrial sector accounted for about 46% of the country's total coal consumption, and the environmental standards for these industrial furnaces and kilns are not as strict as those for the thermal power industry.
Wang Jinnan also said that insufficient environmental protection investment remains a prominent problem. The central government has promised that environmental protection investment will account for about 1.5% of gdp, but in recent years the amount actually invested in environmental protection has not been that high, at roughly only about 1%.