To an LSE Environmental Initiatives Network seminar last night on China. I had meant to get there for a talk on Dongtan, the “zero-carbon” new city that is going to be the size of Bristol and will have the first phase of 30,0000 people living there within little more than three years.

But events being events, I didn’t make that half, but the second half, about the absolutely fascinating China Dialogue website, presented by its editor, Isabel Hilton.

She presented a bit of a dampener on the Dongtan enthusiasm, pointing out that China is continuing to build other cities at phenomenal speed, and not on the Dongtan model.

She said that Dongtan was typical of the top-down environmental model now being applied in China. If you spoke to the senior leadership and read the 11th Five-Year Plan you’d feel good about China’s moves on sustainable development. That plan represented a substantial change in direction from the 10th, which although it set a few environmental targets, all of these were missed and there were no consequences.

The 11th Plan by contrast represents a rebalancing of growth model – the terminology is of working “towards a harmonius society” At the official level that’s fine, and also encouraging is the view on the street. The general view is clearly that the environment needs to be cleaned up.

Where the problem lies is in the middle levels of officialdom. Ms Hilton spoke about Anwei province, which has a huge coal industry that has caused enormous environmental damage about which there is great local concern. But the businessmen who run the companies that run the mines aren’t worried, because of course they don’t live in Anwei province, and the environmental damage doesn’t affect them.

“The ‘development first environment second’ Jiang Zemin model is still held very widely across the country.” For most Chinese, pollution is the price you have to pay for prosperity. Memories of hunger and deprivation are still strong.
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Over on Comment is Free I’ve a piece on the Australian decision to ban incandescent light bulbs – you might think I’d be simply in favour, since it is said it will eventually save 1% of national electricity use. But there are issues – one this is no replacement for more substantive, bigger action on say, the coal industry, and two, the fact that some people may be simply unable to afford the bulbs, and find themselves having to choose between light and food.

The world: 1.9C hotter than an average January.

Then this was in my inbox this morning – attributed to Gavin Schmidt, an atmospheric scientist who works in James Hansen’s team at NASA GISS….

…radiative forcing which the planet is experiencing just now is roughly the same as the current CO2 levels, but only because of the massive cooling effect from sulphour aerosols (which are very short-lived, and which we can expect to decline dramatically if we move to a low-carbon economy). The full radiative forcing from all the greenhouse gases is around 460 ppm CO2e now, but if you add forcings from black soot and ozone, it’s around 560 ppm CO2e.

I spent half of yesterday at a conference on Sustainable Schools, which was as such things usually are a mixture of fascinating stuff and some very bad Powerpoint presentations.

One figure that really struck me: on the average building site 20 per cent of the goods delivered to the site go off it again as rubbish – usually straight into a skip and into landfill. That’s a good measure of our throwaway society, when you think about it.

Also interesting that schools consume a 15% of public sector energy and emit about 6% of all UK emissions – so trying to deal with their issues is not trivial, or a case of educating future generations about sustainability, although that’s certainly important.

It speaks of just how fast things are changing:

Grass can grow only when the ambient temperature is 5C (40F) or higher. Until recently lawns could be left untended between November and March as the average temperature for the winter months was a chilly 3.7C. But a mild November and December, which averaged 6.4C, was followed by the warmest January since 1916, and the second-warmest on record, at 5.9C. In the South averages were even higher, at 7.1C.
Tim Sparks, an environmental scientist at the National Environmental Research Council, in Cambridge, said that between 1961 and 1990 the average January temperature was 3.8C. But January the past five years has been above average, and grass was growing all year.
He said that three years ago only 20 per cent of people would cut their lawns between November and February. “Going back 20 years that figure would have been almost zero.”