A SIGNIFICANT move that bears HUGE political implications for China's envi governance, air pollution, & coal development. On Jan 29, the central environmental inspection group (CEIP) released findings on its inspection at the National Energy Administration (NEA). Thread.
CEIP is essentially a tool that Xi Jinping established to ensure his environmental agenda is implemented on the ground. The subjects of the inspection is various govt agencies. The target for this time, NEA, has been engulfed in corruption scandals in recent years.
The report from the NEA inspection is released on the MEE website. It is unusually harsh and critical in its tone - definitely the juiciest and most insightful bureaucratic doc I've seen in years: mp.weixin.qq.com/s/B501AB7WTt0i…
The report provides a long list of misbehaviors. Only reading original text will do justice, but here are a few big ones: 1) creative interpretation of air pollution regulations - changing low quality coal import "ban" to "limit", changing "shall" to "encourage" in NEA documents.
2) misguidance on coal power base planning - leading up directly to the construction of coal projects that should be banned and regional coal over-capacity.
3) the mentality of ensuring energy security at the expense of envi protection, taking economic and industrial burden as excuse for selective enforcement of envi standards.
Many of these misbehaviors have long been exposed by ENGOs, but falling on deaf ears. It's astonishing, for example, to see NEA approving coal projects when half of them stand idle. Now that CEIP puts it all in front of NEA, I am sure the career of some are doomed, and rightly so
NEA needs to provide a public response to the findings within 30 work days. It will be interesting to see how they plan to change course - that will hopefully have a major impact on China's coal development trajectory & contribute to clean up the sky as well as decarbonization.
Many correctly point out that the effect of China's campaign style inspection is often short lived. But I believe this one is a bit different - it will at least reshape the institutional culture of the NEA and align it with the latest vision on carbon neutrality.
Overall, a move long overdue and should set the record straight for the provinces and industries developing their peaking plans. END.
One addition: the NEA inspection was conducted using previous CEIP guidelines, which does not include climate as an evaluation indicator. As a result, the coal related laments were made on airpollution&overcapacity basis. MEE is now pushing climate into the inspection criteria.
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