Climate change still out of sight and out of mind

• Source: Global Times
• [21:41 November 11 2009]
• Comments

By Bill Siggins

As the world waits to see if China and the US can save the earth at the UN Climate Change Conference Copenhagen next month, I walk through my community in north Beijing shocked by the apparent lack of awareness of global warming.

Copenhagen's goal is to produce a new agreement to limit polluting emissions when the Kyoto Protocol expires.

Meanwhile, as our heating system gets fired up, it seems the homeowners, renovators and the property managers in my community are oblivious to the causes of climate change.

At least a dozen homes here are being gutted and expanded, but not one bale of insulation has been used.

New and expensive facades of granite and marble are being bolted to outside walls to help perpetuate the façade of wealth, but not one of these renovations shows any concession to mitigating climate change.

It's apparently a case of out of sight, out of mind as our central heating plant does all the nasty work. The all-concrete homes don't have chimneys and won't emit carbon dioxide on their own, but they will leak heat like water down a drain.

Even more disturbing is that we only have to look to the back of the community to see our contribution to what ails the world. A 50-meter smokestack billows ash and fumes as giant boilers churn out hot water for both washing and warmth.

A few days ago I walked into the heating plant, which is the biggest building in the community apart from the four low-rise apartment buildings. It's a throwback to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, complete with scurrying workers blackened by coal dust from head to toe.

With Beijing's recent cold snap they have fired up two of the six giant furnaces that growl with intense heat.

Each is at least 25-meters long and surely must be fed with tons of coal each day. Out back of the plant building is an outdoor, roof-covered coal yard big enough to accommodate delivers from hundreds of dump trucks.

The whole works, which occupy the space of perhaps half a dozen houses, is far from rundown or antiquated. The entire place may be covered in black but it hums with efficiency. No one at the plant could tell me how much coal is used, let alone how much carbon dioxide is emitted.

Ms Zhang at the management office told me that the plant in the back services three adjoining communities of about 1,200 households.