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Joe Biden looks to revive Obama’s climate plan. Scientists say that’s not good enough.
This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
At a moment when mounting reports from the world’s top scientists indicate humanity is barrelling toward climate catastrophe and ecological collapse, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is preparing a climate policy that appears to put the United States back on the pre-Trump trajectory.
The former vice president’s proposal is anchored in resetting the clock to 2016 by rejoining the Paris climate accord and reinstating Obama-era regulations on power plant and vehicle emissions, according to a Reuters report published Friday. The policy is expected to maintain a role for fossil fuels, and veer away from the Green New Deal framework that most of Biden’s top rivals for his party’s 2020 presidential nomination have embraced.
“Reheating the Obama administration’s regulations-plus-Paris approach will be totally insufficient,” said Joseph Majkut, a climate scientist and policy expert at the center-right think tank Niskanen Center.
TJ Ducklo, a spokesman for Biden’s campaign, said in an email statement that the former vice president “knows how high the stakes are” and noted his record on addressing climate change.
“As president, Biden would enact a bold policy to tackle climate change in a meaningful and lasting way, and will be discussing the specifics of that plan in the near future,” he said. “Any assertions otherwise are not accurate.”
The descriptions of the forthcoming policy offer only a first glance at Biden’s proposal to address a global crisis that, over the past year, has surged to the top of Democratic primary voters’ concerns. But the position appears dangerously out of step with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The world’s leading climate science body warned in October that governments must cut global emission by nearly half and begin removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to keep warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point the havoc wreaked by extreme weather and sea-level rise is expected to cost $54 trillion and kill millions.
The finding, confirmed a month later by 13 federal agencies in the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, cast a shadow over the Obama administration’s climate legacy. While the 44th president forged the first global emissions-cutting deal to include the United States and China, his administration oversaw the rapid expansion of U.S. oil and gas production, a fact about which Obama boasted last November. Expanded U.S. drilling threatens to add 1,000 coal plants’ worth of greenhouse gases by the middle of the century, according to a January analysis by researchers at more than a dozen environmental groups. That will make the emissions reductions set out by the IPCC all but impossible to meet, and discourage countries like China, India and Indonesia — whose emissions are growing at a rapid clip — from adopting cleaner development strategies as the world’s richest nation and biggest historic emitter fails to set an example.
“The greatest fault in his proposal is the suggestion that natural gas can be part of the solution,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said by email. “The solution to a problem created by burning fossil fuels cannot be the burning of fossil fuels.”
Biden has called climate change an “existential” threat. And during a campaign speech in Iowa earlier this month, he noted that he was “one of the first guys to introduce a climate change bill, way, way back in ’87.” PolitiFact looked into the claim and found it to be true.
Yet, in a speech last month, the former vice president parroted a familiar oil and gas industry line, declaring, “North American energy makes us independent.” And, according to Reuters, he picked Heather Zichal as a climate adviser. Zichal, 42, who advised in the Obama administration, served on the board of liquified natural gas giant Cheniere Energy Partners from 2014 until last year.
Zichal came to Biden’s defense in a post to Twitter on Friday afternoon, saying “Reuters got it wrong.”
“There may have been a chance for modest, ‘all of the above,’ ‘middle ground’ climate strategies 20 years ago but we’ve passed that point now,” said Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and co-founder of California’s Pacific Institute. He added that “many politicians still fail to understand or accept the severity of the climate crisis or the speed with which we now have to act.”
Of the nearly two dozen Democrats vying for president in 2020, only two — Washington Governor Jay Inslee and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke — have laid out detailed climate policies, as The Guardian reported this week. But the plans set a far different course from what former President Barack Obama envisioned.
O’Rourke, who climate activists criticized for pro-fossil fuel votes in the past, proposed a sweeping $5 trillion plan to beef up infrastructure and make the United States carbon neutral by 2050.
Inslee, who’s making climate change the sole focus of his White House bid, went further, outlining a detailed vision to eliminate emissions from power plants, passenger vehicles and new buildings by 2030.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) vowed to ban new fossil fuel leases on federal lands and waters and increase renewable energy generation on public acreage by nearly tenfold.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) threw his weight behind the Green New Deal resolution that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) released in February, which calls for a sweeping national industrial plan to decarbonize the United States and expand the social safety net over the next 10 years. Roughly half the 21 Democrats running for president pledged to reject donations from the fossil fuel industry.
“In an election where more than half the field had pledges to reject fossil fuel money, Biden has a fossil fuel bird member leading his climate policy development,” David Turnbull, a spokesman for the nonprofit Oil Change U.S., said by email. “This is not a good look, and worse yet will lead to terrible policy stuck in the past.”
Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, said the policies described in the Reuters story “do not sound very ambitious” and would likely blow past the additional degree of average temperature rise the Paris Agreement aimed to cap global warming.
“My rough intuition is that this approach would be more in line with stabilizing at 3 to 4 degrees C of warming, rather than staying below 2 degrees C,” he said by email. “So I would categorize this as a bit disappointing.”
Yet he said it may be a “politically savvy” appeal to draw voters who elected President Donald Trump in 2016. That may be a strength in the general election, but the proposal drew fierce criticism from Democratic activists who could influence the primary election.
“I’m a Woolsey Fire survivor,” RL Miller, political director of the political action committee Climate Hawks Vote, said referring to one of the historic wildfires that blazed in California last year. “Does Biden mean that the next wildfire will compromise with me which half of my home emerges unscathed?”
Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash, whose youth-focused group led the protests that propelled the Green New Deal into the national conversation last year, called Biden’s “middle ground” policy “a death sentence for our generation and the millions of people on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”
The Green New Deal remains the only framework on the scope of the crisis, and the movement to enact it initially drew stunning bipartisan support. A December poll from Yale and George Mason universities found 81 percent of voters, including 64 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of conservative Republicans favored the policies outlined under such a program. But months of negative coverage on right-wing media outlets like Fox News — which routinely smeared the Green New Deal by falsely claiming it would ban hamburgers, trigger genocide against white men, or set the stage for Stalinist government policy — dramatically eroded support among Republicans, new polling shows.
Labor unions, a key constituency for Democrats, are divided on the Green New Deal. The building and construction trade unions, a powerful force in the labor movement, rely on the fossil fuel industry for lucrative jobs with coal trains and pipelines, and as such have opposed proposals that threatened those sectors.
Yet proponents of the Green New Deal say a Democratic leader with strong appeal to unions could help bridge that divide by promoting the policy’s potential to generate unionized clean energy jobs.
“It’s a false tradeoff to say that we have to seek moderate climate policy in order to appeal to both the environmental left and the labor movement,” said Greg Carlock, the researcher who authored the left-leaning think tank Data for Progress’ Green New Deal blueprint last year. “We can decarbonize our economy and we can grow good jobs.”
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Joe Biden looks to revive Obama’s climate plan. Scientists say that’s not good enough.
The town that extended ‘smart growth’ to its water
This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As with so many towns in the West, the history of Westminster, Colorado, can be told through its water supply.
The turning point in that history was the hot, dry summer of 1962. Westminster was already embroiled in a debate over where to source its water when a drought choked the small city, forcing officials to impose a sprinkler ban. Soon enough, residents noticed that the water trickling from their taps was slightly discolored and didn’t smell right. The desperate city had started drawing water from the Kershaw Ditch, a pool it had recently abandoned over treatment issues.
Although the city said the water was “safe, but stinky,” fed-up local mothers were convinced it would make their children sick and raised hell. In what became known as the “Mothers’ March,” more than 100 women gathered at city hall to protest the city’s water management. City-council meetings were disrupted by protesters who would shout questions through open windows, and the mothers flogged petitions on street corners. They attracted enough attention that Dan Rather did a segment on the protests for CBS News.
The events of that summer ensured that water would become Westminster’s defining issue for years to come, until the city struck a deal with local farmers to share water from the artificial Standley Lake. But even with its supply settled, Westminster continued to focus on taming demand, most recently with a conservation and planning approach that’s become a regional model for managing growth without straining resources.
“Starting from such an uncomfortable place, we’ve kept our eyes on the prize,” said Stu Feinglas, who retired last year as Westminster’s senior water-resources analyst. “Sustainable development and sustainable water.”
Feinglas, who started with the city in 2001 (as another drought gripped northeast Colorado), approached the problem holistically, with a data-driven approach that has become influential for other cities in the West. By merging the city’s land-use plans with water data, Feinglas and colleagues ensured that Westminster wouldn’t run dry, even as its population boomed from less than 10,000 at the time of the water protests to 113,000 today. The surrounding county was even water-healthy enough to support Colorado’s first two water slides as part of the Water World theme park.
The state’s population is expected to keep growing — as much as 70 percent by 2040. At the same time, climate change is fueling persistent droughts. In 2018, parts of nine Western states, including Colorado, were in severe or extreme drought, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Conservation measures have helped many Western cities decouple population growth from water use, but that approach often puts the burden on businesses and residents to be more efficient. Taking a demand-focused approach to water from the earliest stages of planning is still rare, said Erin Rugland, a junior fellow at the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy in Phoenix.
“There’s always been a way to engineer around it,” Rugland said. “It’s been feasible to find a new supply. But I think we’re starting to reach a turning point.”
The recent sustained drought — which has left the critical storage facilities Lake Powell and Lake Mead at their lowest levels since they were being filled — has cemented the idea that Western states are going to have to try to do more with less water. On April 8, Congress approved a seven-state Drought Contingency Plan, which lays out shared cuts if supplies continue to stay low.
The plan builds on 2007 guidelines that helped manage the early years of the drought; now states, tribes, agriculture groups, and cities are negotiating a new set of guidelines set to take effect in 2026. Previous agreements have hit agriculture hard, since the industry is by far the biggest water user in the West, but most everyone agrees that the 2026 guidelines will require some sacrifices from cities, even as they grow as economic engines.
That’s where Feinglas thinks his approach — which current Westminster officials are sticking with — needs to become the norm.
Using Westminster’s comprehensive plan, which zones parcels for general use like multifamily housing or retail, Feinglas made a rough estimate of how much water each type of building would use. Then the city built GIS software that overlays water resources and infrastructure over the comprehensive plan — making it easy to see, for example, how much water a proposed strip mall might use.
It’s a step up from the typical water-per-capita measure that most cities rely on, which doesn’t reflect the fact that denser developments are typically more water-efficient than a single-family house with a green lawn. It also, Feinglas said, helps planners guide developers to smarter construction, even previewing what their water rates and tap fees might be.
“We didn’t want public works to determine how the city developed. We wouldn’t be the ones to say no,” Feinglas said. “What we could do is show how much water we have and ask them to be creative and make their development work with that.”
That meant city planners could identify where it might make more sense to zone for multifamily housing, or see where new pipes might be necessary. Developers could amend their permits to include more low-flow toilets or water recycling. On rare occasions, proposals have been scrapped because they’d need more water than the city could supply. Essentially, Westminster is planning for the worst, making sure that another drought won’t force anyone to turn off the taps.
It seems straightforward, and more or less mirrors what cities have been doing for years to align transportation and transit demand with new construction. But only a handful of other cities — notably Flagstaff, Arizona — have made it work.
“It requires operating between the silos of water management and planning, two disciplines that don’t have a lot of common language,” Rugland said. “Efforts for collaboration would have to be on top of day-to-day duties.”
Also, water data isn’t always easy to come by, especially on a lot-by-lot basis that breaks it down by business type. It’s even tougher for cities that draw their water from multiple sources, who may keep data in different forms (California, for instance, had to pass a law in 2016 requiring that the various state and local agencies be able to share their water data).
More states and cities are trying to make the water-land link. Colorado’s Water Plan calls for 75 percent of citizens to live in communities that have integrated water conservation into land use by 2025, and the state’s water conservation board has guidance to help local governments (the Keystone Policy Center has also held a dialogue with state and local partners). Arizona has a law that requires local jurisdictions to include available water supply and demand as part of a comprehensive plan, but not necessarily to make the link to planning (government cuts reduced state oversight for those comprehensive plans, as well). New software tools, like Razix Solutions, offer off-the-shelf guidance for local officials.
Ultimately, Feinglas said, the model requires city departments to talk to each other and plan for the worst, even if it means some short-term pain. “We know water is valuable, especially now,” Feinglas said. “The last thing you want is to lose your economy because you can’t supply your citizens.”
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How Linda Garcia risked everything to keep Big Oil out of her community
This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Every time Linda Garcia’s cellphone pings, she wonders if it will be another death threat. The environmental activist has been targeted by anonymous callers for five years since taking on Big Oil to save her community from environmental devastation.
Garcia lives in Fruit Valley, the kind of close-knit place where everybody knows everybody. The low-income community in Vancouver, Washington, sits just across the river from Portland, Oregon, and is home to a thousand households. It also has a severe air pollution problem. In 2013, when Garcia, 51, first heard of a plan to put a massive fossil fuel transportation hub on the edge of her neighborhood, Fruit Valley was suffering the worst air quality in the city. Parents were regularly warned to keep children indoors to protect them from the dark industrial smog that descended across the river.
Goldman Environmental Foundation
Concerned about how the new development might exacerbate the problems, Garcia, who was secretary of the Fruit Valley Neighborhood Association, started asking questions. She was skeptical of dubious claims being made by executives from Texas-headquartered oil company Tesoro (as it was then called) and elected officials about impressive job creation and minimal environmental risks.
“They made it sound amazing — jobs, jobs, jobs — which in a low-income community like Fruit Valley that was still recovering from the recession sounded great … But most of it turned out to be slick PR,” Garcia told HuffPost.
The deeper Garcia dug, the bleaker it looked: She believed the mega-terminal would have devastating consequences — health, environmental, and social — for the community and across the region.
The project would be North America’s largest oil terminal. The plan was to transport up to 11 million gallons of oil every day halfway across the country on mile-and-a-half-long trains from fracking fields in North Dakota through the Columbia River to the industrial Port of Vancouver, where the proposed terminal would be located less than a mile from most Fruit Valley residents. The oil would then be loaded onto ocean tankers at the terminal and shipped to Asia, where rapidly rising energy demands are enticing U.S. fossil fuel companies.
The oil company’s environmental and safety track record rang alarm bells for Garcia, especially the death of seven workers at one of its refineries in nearby Anacortes in 2010. In 2016, as the community continued its fight, the Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency fined Tesoro $10.4 million for air pollution violations relating to six refineries and $720,000 for alleged safety breaches at Anacortes refinery.
The more Garcia chipped away at the project’s marketing veneer, the more worried she got, which motivated her to organize the community to oppose the oil giant and forestall environmental devastation. Over the course of her long campaign against the terminal, she kept up the momentum — despite multiple death threats that continue even today.“I didn’t give up; I’m not backing down. I am doing the right thing, that’s who I am,” she said.
Six years later, the Tesoro-Savage terminal is dead in the water and Garcia is the recipient of one of the world’s most prestigious environmental awards.
It was her steely determination that stood out to the committee, which awards the annual Goldman Environmental Prize to six grassroots environmentalists, one from each inhabited continent, in recognition of their leadership and efforts to protect the natural environment at significant personal cost. (This year’s other winners come from Chile, Liberia, North Macedonia, Cook Islands, and Mongolia.)
“Despite personal risks, political and legal obstacles in her path, and challenges with her own health, Linda demonstrated steady leadership throughout a long campaign — and didn’t stop until the terminal was defeated,” said Goldman prize spokesman Ilan Kayatsky.
Garcia was relentless. Through the neighborhood association, she met with company and council officials and organized public meetings to share information with friends, neighbors, and local businesses about the terminal.
Goldman Environmental Foundation
She also works with the Washington Environmental Council — a nonprofit that focuses on sustainability and climate action throughout Washington state — which helped her garner support from outside environmental groups like Columbia Riverkeeper and the Sierra Club. As the community got educated and organized, the company stopped turning up at public meetings.
In response, the community got political, voting out two of the three elected port authority commissioners who had twice voted for the mega-terminal despite widespread public opposition and growing concerns about safety.
Garcia testified as a community witness at public hearings and city council meetings, using general safety reports published by the federal agency PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) and experience from similar projects to argue that the daily procession of rail and river traffic would threaten fish and wildlife species, and cause harmful air and water emissions damaging to human health.
The community was also deeply concerned about the risk of accidents and spills especially following the Lac-Megantic disaster in Quebec in July 2013, when a 14-car oil train derailed and killed 47 people in a fiery explosion. And in June 2016, as the battle heated up, a Union Pacific train carrying 3 million gallons of oil derailed in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in Oregon — the same area the Tesoro-Savage railway would pass through.
The company accused activists of using “scare tactics,” claiming the trains would be safe and the project would bring jobs and economic growth to the community.
As Garcia gained prominence as a key leader in the community resistance, the death threats started. In addition, she suffered a life-threatening illness during the campaign and would often travel directly from chemotherapy to council meetings to testify on behalf of Fruit Valley residents.
“I was fighting for my own life and the lives of others … I knew that the second the terminal went online we’d be living with 24/7 toxic fumes that would exacerbate or cause conditions people could die from,” she said. “This kept me motivated.”
Garcia and the other campaigners convinced the city council to appeal the project at the state level, and in late 2017, the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (the state agency responsible for sanctioning new projects) recommended against the oil terminal on the grounds it posed significant, unavoidable harm to the environment and community. In January 2018, Governor Jay Inslee denied the necessary permits. It was over, Fruit Valley had defeated Big Oil.
Fruit Valley’s triumphant resistance was remarkable, but not isolated.
The Pacific Northwest, a politically progressive region that identifies strongly with the environmental movement, has for almost a decade been under siege by the fossil fuel industry as it eyes the lucrative Asian energy market.
The plan of energy companies was to turn the picturesque Pacific Northwest into a fossil fuel highway for the next 50 years by expanding refineries and building terminals, trains and pipelines to transport millions of tons of coal (from the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming), oil (extracted by fracking in North Dakota), liquefied natural gas (from the Montney Formation in western Canada), and petrochemicals.
In total, 30 or so infrastructure projects were destined for communities in the region, including federally protected Indian tribal territories. If constructed, the combined capacity could be at least five times greater than the massive (and massively maligned) Keystone XL pipeline, according to analysis by Sightline Institute, a sustainability and energy think-tank, bringing huge pollution and climate implications.
But the region’s response was to unite. The coordinated opposition movement, known as the Thin Green Line, has beaten back all but four of the proposed projects (two relatively small expansion projects were sanctioned; two other battles are ongoing).
The unity took work. At first, communities and tribes took on the projects individually, until it became clear that the threat was regional, said Eric de Place, a researcher at Sightline Institute, which coined the term “Thin Green Line” to describe the commonality of the threats. Local and state organizations — including Garcia’s Washington Environmental Council — formed a coalition that spearheaded three campaigns: Power Past Coal, Stand Up to Oil, and Power Past Fracked Gas.
“Regional coordination stopped the industry being able to pit communities against each other, as together our negotiating bottom line was no, not one ton, not one community, just no,” de Place said.
The coalition pooled resources to investigate the economic, environmental and safety risks, which in turn helped persuade diverse sectors including tourism and commerce that it was in their interest to resist the fossil fuel corridor. Together, they turned out thousands of people to every public meeting, in every community, to take on the company executives and local officials.
“It was aggressive activism,” said de Place. “Our hard-line stance made it clear to elected officials that this was a binary issue and taking any money from coal or oil would be a political death sentence. This might not work everywhere, but it worked here.”
It’s noteworthy that the Pacific Northwest’s coordinated resistance has targeted transport and infrastructure projects, not the actual oil fields and coal mines. By disrupting the only economically viable transport options, they have made the intended extraction of millions of tons of coal economically unviable. “Find the weakest point in the supply chain, and go after it, that’s what we showed was possible,” said de Place.
The region’s opposition strategies and successes have served as rallying points for the larger climate movement and “keep it in the ground” campaign (which advocates against further fossil fuel burning), said Hilary Boudet, associate professor of sociology at Oregon State University’s School of Public Policy.
But, she warned, with huge profits at stake, Big Oil isn’t giving up. “A proposal’s defeat in one location doesn’t necessarily mean that fossil fuel export won’t happen somewhere else … The Trump administration has been very vocal about its policy of ‘energy dominance,’ which includes fossil fuel export,” Boudet said. Local and state-level politics are crucial to opposing this, she added.
As Garcia’s personal story shows, things can get ugly. At times, community leaders, especially tribal leaders, have been attacked as anti-development, anti-jobs, even anti-American for trying to protect their corner of the planet. But staying united has been their key to prevailing.
Garcia said: “There’s a tremendous sense of responsibility in our communities to take care of the planet so that it can be passed on to our children, and their children. We need more people to speak out, stand up, and form armies of resistance.”
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How Linda Garcia risked everything to keep Big Oil out of her community
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How one activist used a little shaming and a lot of patience to clean up Chinese factories
This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
One humid July day, the Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun stood in front of an alley sandwiched by two warehouses at the factory of an Apple supplier called Catcher, a two-hour bullet-train ride south of Beijing. He wore safety goggles and scribbled in a notebook. Two Apple executives flanked him.
Guides from Catcher toured Ma around towering black tanks and large sheds containing vats and pipes that disposed of the toxic chromium waste produced in manufacturing parts for iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. Apple and Catcher said the state-of-the-art system processed the waste without any discharge. Ma’s group, the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), was considering writing a report on the technology, if it could verify the claim. After a tour of the nearly 500-acre facility, Ma and the executives adjourned to an office conference room on the campus. The atmosphere was cordial, one of partners rather than adversaries.
Apple’s meetings with Ma weren’t always like this. The first one, at its California headquarters in 2011, when he confronted the company about environmental problems at multiple factories, was tense. IPE had issued a damning report on the behavior of tech companies in China, and Apple took a year and a half to set up a meeting with IPE. The discussion lasted about five hours, with Apple ceding little beyond a vague statement about transparency. More than seven years later, IPE has helped audit many of Apple’s factories and suppliers in China, and the group now ranks the company first on its list of the most transparent companies.
Apple isn’t the only company that Ma has helped push toward reform. Since IPE was founded in 2006, his team has gotten more than 1,300 factories to address environmental messes such as discharging waste into rivers. The secret to Ma’s success is a clever tool: IPE has compiled a database of more than 1.3 million environmental violations committed by Chinese factories. It publicly displays this information in online maps and apps, pushing factories and the brands they supply to clean up. Many of them do, agreeing to third-party audits approved by IPE and its partner organizations to clear their records from IPE’s database. With this, Ma has convinced two of the world’s most opaque institutions — international corporations and the Chinese government — that publicly monitoring pollution is in their interest. For his accomplishments, he has won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize and many other awards, making him a major face of China’s environmental movement.
Despite the accolades, Ma’s demeanor is humble and self-deprecating. He sees his work as an effort to help companies, not undermine them. His modesty is likely one of the reasons the Chinese government doesn’t feel threatened by him. “There were all these fire-breathing Greenpeace types,” one observer of the Goldman award ceremony told me. “And then there was Ma Jun.”
On smogless days in Beijing, the city’s west side is visible from IPE’s office tower. Ma Jun, 50, grew up there in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, born in 1968 to an engineer and government administrator. Mao Zedong had disbanded traditional schools, and Ma spent much of his childhood playing with crickets and beetles and exploring farmland. His childlike curiosity has stayed with him, though the fields have been overrun by Beijing’s sprawl. After graduating from college, he found a job as an assistant for the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English newspaper. He cut out every environmental story he found, studying what few articles he came across, and spent vacations reporting on water pollution in China. The country’s rivers, he discovered, were catastrophically polluted and overdrawn. He wrote a book about the issue that reached a wider audience than he’d expected, and soon, among global environmental circles, it began drawing comparisons to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
After the book’s publication, Ma worked for an energy consulting firm in Beijing and then left to study at Yale’s World Fellows program, which helps train up-and-coming leaders from around the world. He studied American environmental law, contemplating which regulatory tools could be best applied in China. By the end of his time in New Haven, he’d written a new book that argued for progressive legal reforms to Chinese environmental law, including ones that emphasized greater environmental transparency from both government and corporations along with remedies for the victims of pollution. Editors in China were afraid to publish it. “They told me I’d forgotten where I was,” he recalls.
Instead of publishing the book, he decided to implement its ideas through a non-governmental organization. For its first project, in 2006, Ma’s three-person staff mined every available government record of water pollution in China, transcribing them by hand, then publishing a rudimentary interactive map online. “In the beginning, all that work felt useless,” says Wang Jingjing, one of IPE’s early staffers, and now married to Ma. IPE’s first breakthrough came after Panasonic executives contacted it about one of their factories on the map. Together with IPE, they orchestrated a full cleanup. Soon, other companies began contacting IPE for help, often after journalists or activists used IPE’s map to expose factories’ environmental violations.
IPE’s reputation continued to grow within environmental circles, and in 2014, it released a pollution-tracking app now called the Blue Map. The app’s greatest success came amid somewhat awkward circumstances: in China’s most famous environmental documentary film, Under the Dome — which the government first promoted and then censored — Chai Jing, the film’s reporter-director, gave the app a shout-out, encouraging people to download it. The film received around 300 million views within a week of its release, and the app crashed. To get it back online, IPE turned to software engineers who manage train ticketing systems during China’s lunar new year, the greatest annual migration in the world, when 400 million people return home for the holidays.
For thousands of years, Chinese rulers have struggled to enforce laws passed in Beijing at the local level. “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away,” goes one proverb. Local officials are largely promoted based on economic growth, which makes them wary of enforcing costly environmental laws. It’s common, for example, for officials to tip off factories before environmental inspections occur, reminding them, say, to turn on the scrubbers that clean the emissions passing through a smokestack. Regulators and judges have limited power to prevent such moves, since they’re subordinate to these officials or can be easily ignored. In the short term, it’s often more effective for IPE to sidestep local governments and directly contact brands and factories about the information it’s collected. After seeing their records made public, factory owners often agree to address them. “What we’ve done is kind of like Chinese acupuncture,” Ma told me. “You press one spot in one place, and that causes a reaction in another.”
If IPE can persuade companies to behave better, Ma argues to skeptical officials, this makes the Communist Party look more effective and enhances social stability — the only performance metric the government considers as important as economic growth. It’s working: Over the years, as Ma has won the trust of China’s leaders, his access to them has increased. A few weeks after the Catcher visit, he spent two days in a neighboring province training local officials on the benefits of transparency. “It’s funny, local regulators love him,” says Alex Wang, a former lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who is on IPE’s board.
In China, environmental activism tends to be tolerated more than other types of advocacy, even under President Xi Jinping’s more repressive politics. Yet Ma is careful not to push the government too far. Scholars who study Chinese politics sometimes refer to its authoritarianism as strategically “consultative” of civil society; officials have actively asked for comment and feedback from grassroots groups and independent experts on major policies like the 2014 Environmental Protection Law. Influential public figures like Ma have developed a kind of expert status in official circles, and they’ve worked hard to keep the Chinese government open to allowing — and even inviting — such public feedback. Sometimes, maintaining that cooperation requires backpedaling and finesse. Once, a team from one of IPE’s partner NGOs was driving around the countryside with a camera, photographing factories with violations listed in IPE’s database. It posted the photos on social media, revealing the precise locations of the pollution. Ma received a firm order to halt the project, which was unnerving the government. He assented, knowing that alienating officials could result in IPE losing favor, or even being shut down.
Ma knows that this delicate dance means progress is slow. Moving hundreds of China’s millions of factories toward compliance, “is only a drop in the bucket,” he admitted to me. IPE, with 37 staffers, cannot monitor all of Chinese manufacturing on its own, and it will need more reform and resources from the government to scale up its approach. State-owned enterprises, too, will need to become more transparent.
At the Catcher tour, the wrap-up meeting in the conference room ended well. Ma smiled and said he was impressed with the factory’s efforts. There was just one matter left to be sorted out: At the end of the disposal system sat a white container about the size of a doghouse, holding the final waste product, which was shipped to a recycler. For Apple and Catcher to receive the zero-discharge rating they sought, IPE would have to confirm that the waste was being properly disposed of offsite. The executives promised to follow up on that, and the mood in the room remained jovial.
In the car ride back to the train station, Ma was reflective. A week earlier, in Beijing, Dell officials had arrived to discuss speeding up their environmental auditing process, challenging Apple for the top spot in IPE’s rankings. “To see what the best companies can do now,” he said optimistically, “it’s just incredible.”
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How one activist used a little shaming and a lot of patience to clean up Chinese factories
