Thomas L. Friedman: The Green Leap Forward

Beijing

A friend of mine here wakes up every morning and does his own air quality test — as many Beijing residents do: He looks out his 24th-story window and checks how far he can see. On a rare pristine day, when the wind has swept Beijing, he can see the Fragrant Mountain rising to the northwest. On a “good” pollution day, he can see the China World building four blocks away. On a bad day, he can’t see the building next door.

Shortly before I arrived in Beijing, China had been host of a summit meeting of 42 African leaders. Time magazine reported that Beijing officials had “ordered half a million official cars off the roads and said 400,000 more drivers had ‘volunteered’ to refrain from using their vehicles” in order to clean up the air for their African guests. No sooner were they gone, however, than all the cars returned and Beijing’s air went back to “unhealthy.” China’s Environmental Protection Administration, Time noted, recently estimated the annual number of premature deaths in China caused by air pollution at 358,000.

No, China’s officials are not in denial about their environment. But they also have not fully come to grips with how big a project it will be to take this incredible locomotive of an economy and clean up the engine without stopping the train.

I would argue that the same kind of bruising effort it took for Deng Xiaoping to move China from communism to capitalism will be required to move China from its polluting model of capitalism to a sustainable one. Mao almost destroyed China with his Cultural Revolution to make it more red, more communist. Without a new cultural revolution to make China more green, more sustainable, the Chinese growth juggernaut will destroy itself.

“To reverse this kind of situation we can’t just make speeches,” Pan Yue, China’s vice minister for environmental protection, told me. “It will only come from a shift of attitudes from the very top to the very bottom. My job is to educate and encourage this shift, so that officials don’t just think about economic growth as G.D.P. growth, but also factor in environmental health.”

Three big shifts will be needed. The first is addition by subtraction. China can’t go on trying to solve its energy problem by building the equivalent of two 600-megawatt coal-fired power plants a week. China needs California-style virtual efficiency “power plants” — E.P.P.s. These E.P.P.s are companies formed to identify and implement ways to save energy — from better lights to better designs to more efficient appliances — in a particular region. E.P.P.s sell the kilowatt-hours they save to the power grid at a fraction of the cost the grid would have had to invest to generate that same power with a coal-fired plant. The idea is to have profit-driven companies focused on adding power — by saving it where it is not needed so there will be more capacity where it is needed — without having to build more smokestacks. China is exploring E.P.P.s.

Second, China has set ambitious environmental targets. But it has to better persuade officials at every level that meeting not only their growth targets but also their “green” targets will determine if they advance or not.

China’s 10th five-year plan, which began in 2000, called for a 10 percent reduction in the sulfur dioxide that produces acid rain. When that plan concluded in 2005, air pollution in China had increased by 27 percent. The 11th five-year plan calls for a 20 percent improvement in energy consumption for every percent of G.D.P. growth and a 10 percent reduction in pollution, now from a higher base.

This time, Beijing is stipulating exactly how much each province and locality and the top 1,000 factories have to improve. So far, though, the first year has seen another increase in air pollution. Until local officials start getting fired en masse for missing their green targets, you won’t see big change.

Finally, China’s leaders are going to have to allow more press freedom and public participation, because the best environmental watchdogs are local newspapers and farmers. Beijing, to its credit, has begun to allow citizens to take part in environmental impact assessments and to bring environmental lawsuits. But this needs to go further.

I repeat: China’s leaders do get it. But moving this place to a new sustainable model will take more than ordinary leadership. It will take a giant leader who by sheer force of will moves the whole system against all the entrenched habits and interests. It will take a green Deng Xiaoping. Nothing else will suffice. Otherwise, every day here will feel like midnight at noon.