Speaker 1: Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatarrati. This week pollution, power and
Speaker 1: public data. As someone living in Europe, everything about China
Speaker 1: seems big. It's a big country with a big population,
Speaker 1: with a big carbon footprint. But it's also a country that,
Speaker 1: with its state led capitalism and top down political order,
Speaker 1: has built a big lead in green technologies. So to
Speaker 1: talk about China on a climate podcast, you necessarily have
Speaker 1: to pick a slice, and for today's conversation, we're going
Speaker 1: to focus on local pollution of air and water. In
Speaker 1: a democracy, citizens are free to criticize the government and
Speaker 1: call out injustices such as toxic air and poisoned waters.
Speaker 1: It's not so easy to do it in China, but
Speaker 1: that's exactly what my yesterday. Mar June has built his
Speaker 1: career doing his work documenting stunning amounts of air and
Speaker 1: water pollution with the help of citizens, has made it
Speaker 1: possible for people to talk about it and even make
Speaker 1: change happen. Mar June began his career as a reporter
Speaker 1: for the South China Morning Post in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Traveling the country, he saw the impact that becoming the
Speaker 1: factory of the world is doing to China's water supply
Speaker 1: rivers were running dry or running black. Mar Jun wrote
Speaker 1: a book called China's Water Crisis, chronicling the problem. It
Speaker 1: was a wake up call, garnering comparisons to what Rachel
Speaker 1: Carson's Silent Spring did to the environmental movement in the
Speaker 1: US in the nineteen sixties. Identifying a problem is one thing.
Speaker 1: Mar Jun wanted to do something about it, and he
Speaker 1: did that not through writing, but by founding a nonprofit,
Speaker 1: the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, a low key
Speaker 1: name for an organization that was about to do something
Speaker 1: very bold. Using data from Looke governments, his team compiled
Speaker 1: and published online databases off water pollution and air pollution,
Speaker 1: in some cases even tracing the pollution to its source,
Speaker 1: and even with internet access, could see how pollution was
Speaker 1: changing in their homes over time. Environmentalists, journalist citizens, even
Speaker 1: people in corporations wanted to make their supply chains cleaner.
Speaker 2: The issue was quite sensitive. You we are working on
Speaker 2: something that either transparency and public participation, none of this
Speaker 2: is quite in the DNA of our culture. So there
Speaker 2: was suspicion. There was pushback.
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, China instituted a war against pollution, and
Speaker 1: it has made the air less toxic and the water cleaner,
Speaker 1: but there is still a long way to go. I
Speaker 1: sat down with mar June to talk about why founding
Speaker 1: a nonprofit was such an important part of the solution,
Speaker 1: what the world gets wrong about China's approach to climate change,
Speaker 1: and how he used data to supur action in the
Speaker 1: factory of the world. My June, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: You began your career as an investigative journalist. How did
Speaker 1: you get started on that beat, something which is difficult
Speaker 1: to pull off in China?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that work was not easy, but it's quite rewarding,
Speaker 2: you know. It was that during that period of.
Speaker 1: Time, and we're talking nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nineteen nineties. That job gave me the chance to travel,
Speaker 2: you know, in different parts of China, and I was
Speaker 2: struck by the environmental damage, including the damage all of
Speaker 2: our water resources. You know, some rivers dried up, and
Speaker 2: some lakes got so polluted, and the fresh water ecosystem
Speaker 2: is being compromised. So I put it into a book,
Speaker 2: China's Water Crisis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which has been compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,
Speaker 1: which is plished in the US to talk about similar problems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a relatively early in China to write
Speaker 2: about this issue. But I have my greatest admiration to
Speaker 2: retro Carson, and my book is no comparison.
Speaker 1: It's difficult to do the work of criticizing government, of
Speaker 1: pointing out problems that the government, you know, should ideally
Speaker 1: be dealing with. Was there any backlash from the government.
Speaker 2: At that time? It was not as easy because at
Speaker 2: that time, you know, China is going through the enormous
Speaker 2: industrialization and most of the local government officials they put
Speaker 2: GDP growth rate ahead of environmental protection. And with us,
Speaker 2: you know, talking about we need to factor in the
Speaker 2: environmental impact and try to clean up. Sometimes, you know,
Speaker 2: there was this question, suspicions and even pushback not just
Speaker 2: from the factories that we tridle supervised, but also sometimes
Speaker 2: from the local agencies contacts. So a lot of pressure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you write a book as an investigative journalist
Speaker 1: and it's clearly widely read and has an impact on
Speaker 1: focusing the government to do more about the water crisis.
Speaker 1: But then you give up journalism and you get into advocacy.
Speaker 1: What was that transition and why did you make it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: After the book was published, I think it reached some
Speaker 2: targeted readers, including some of the officials from the agencies
Speaker 2: in charge, and most of the readers say that they
Speaker 2: agree with the conclusion that if we would not take action,
Speaker 2: we're going to face water challenges and even crisis. But
Speaker 2: they just want to know how to solve the problem.
Speaker 2: They You know, I've been challenged over and over again
Speaker 2: until I believe that it was time for me to
Speaker 2: try to delve deeper into this issue. You know, the
Speaker 2: media means to the mission is to identify the problem
Speaker 2: instead of being this solution provided.
Speaker 1: So you wanted to try and solve the problem, and
Speaker 1: you did that by creating a non governmental organization, which
Speaker 1: also isn't easy to create and operate in China, right.
Speaker 2: It was not easy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The reason I decided to create this organization eventually is
Speaker 2: the course about five six years of further study into
Speaker 2: this issue, I found that the root course behind all
Speaker 2: our environmental damage is very complicated, complex, and the magnitude
Speaker 2: is so big. So the problem cannot be overcome without
Speaker 2: extensive participation from the public, and the prerequisite for that
Speaker 2: is access to information. And at that time, there was
Speaker 2: no other organizations focused on this transparency issue, so I
Speaker 2: decided to build this organization.
Speaker 1: So you founded the Institute of Public and Environment Affairs.
Speaker 1: And it was at a time when in the foreign
Speaker 1: press at least, the one issue that came up with
Speaker 1: China was smog. Beijing was covered in deadly air pollution,
Speaker 1: and there was clearly outreage even within the country around
Speaker 1: how bad smog was getting. But even though you could
Speaker 1: see the pollution, you didn't always know how bad the
Speaker 1: pollution was because there was no measurement being done around it.
Speaker 1: So how did you go around trying to convince the
Speaker 1: government to share data that would make them look bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when we started, the pollution in some way reached
Speaker 2: some sort of climax. I still remember that year when
Speaker 2: we got started, two thousand and six, some twenty eight
Speaker 2: percent of the nationally monitored river sections and lakes were
Speaker 2: in a category worse than category five. That means it's
Speaker 2: basically running black good for no use. Three hundred million people,
Speaker 2: mostly in the in the rural countryside, exposed to this
Speaker 2: unsafe water, and in the in the cities, hundreds of
Speaker 2: millions are exposed to smog, which is getting increasingly more
Speaker 2: severe until you know, as you mentioned around twenty eleven,
Speaker 2: you know, for a whole week of time, the smog
Speaker 2: got so bad that airplane would not be able to
Speaker 2: land and we could not see clearly the building next
Speaker 2: to our own office, and so you know, people started
Speaker 2: raising this question is it just natural foggy days or
Speaker 2: smog and we haven't started earlier, you know, to try
Speaker 2: to identify the course of the problem, so by publishing
Speaker 2: not just the environmental quality data but the whole you know,
Speaker 2: compliance records of those emission sources. And the issue was
Speaker 2: quite sensitive, and you know, we are working on something
Speaker 2: that either transparency and public participation, none of this is
Speaker 2: quite in the DNA of our culture. So there was suspicion,
Speaker 2: there was pushback, and so we decided that we're going
Speaker 2: to start from the government source. So whenever there's a
Speaker 2: pressure coming, we can show that there was a link
Speaker 2: to a government document or website.
Speaker 1: And that was the basis of creating the water pollution map.
Speaker 2: Yes, that was the principle for us to develop the
Speaker 2: first the water pollution map and then extend it to
Speaker 2: air and soil other issues. And it may sounds kind
Speaker 2: of safer, but on the other hand, there was not
Speaker 2: much government source environmental information available, so we decided we
Speaker 2: need to develop an index with our partner and our DC,
Speaker 2: you know, develop the Pollution Information Transparency Index and used
Speaker 2: that to assess the performance of one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: cities for more than ten years of time and during
Speaker 2: the process, of course identify the gaps but also the
Speaker 2: best practice, and eventually, you know, we witness an historic
Speaker 2: expansion of the environmental transparency in China. You know, first year,
Speaker 2: we started with only two thousand records of violations by
Speaker 2: the companies that we can compile, but today we have
Speaker 2: more than two point seven million of them in our database.
Speaker 1: And so what do you have to convince the government
Speaker 1: to allow you to do that? Because it is going
Speaker 1: to make the government look bad at least at the start.
Speaker 1: Maybe once you improve the pollution things will look better.
Speaker 1: What did you have to do to convince the government?
Speaker 2: Yeah, first we got pushed back from those corporations we
Speaker 2: put on the polluters list, this so called blacklist. Some
Speaker 2: of them will come to us directly in sometimes very unhappy,
Speaker 2: and some of them would have approached to their contacts
Speaker 2: in local government and give us some hard time. But
Speaker 2: the way for us to convince them it is first,
Speaker 2: you know, to make sure that it all coming from
Speaker 2: credible sources, and then develop the path towards solution, to
Speaker 2: showcase that we're trying to help where we're not their enemy,
Speaker 2: were trying to help solve the problem. And then it's
Speaker 2: also very very important eventually to make them understand that,
Speaker 2: you know, this pollution problem, we cannot allow this carry
Speaker 2: on forever and it will have huge impact on the
Speaker 2: public health and social economic development and ecosystem. If we
Speaker 2: really want to solve the problem, we must stop this
Speaker 2: so called breezing down to the bottom. You know, everyone's
Speaker 2: kind of those who cut corners on the environmental pollution
Speaker 2: got benefited in the market. So what we are doing
Speaker 2: is actually helped them to level the playing field. So gradually,
Speaker 2: not just the companies but also the local government realized
Speaker 2: that okay, maybe in this way people can give us
Speaker 2: more trust. You know, so I still remember after you know,
Speaker 2: this Mark motivated the people to make their voice heard,
Speaker 2: and the government responded with a clean air action plan.
Speaker 2: We managed to get the government to require for the major,
Speaker 2: the largest emitters to give their auto monitoring data to
Speaker 2: the public every hour they reported that to the public,
Speaker 2: and we build a blue map app and help people
Speaker 2: not just to access this data from thirty different platforms,
Speaker 2: put them together, but also color code them, you know,
Speaker 2: try to help people visualize, you know, who are not incompliance.
Speaker 2: And after we launched that, a few months later, we
Speaker 2: got an invitation to meet with the head of the
Speaker 2: environmental agency of the largest province with the largest emission.
Speaker 1: And that would have been a fun conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got a bit nervous, you know, be course,
Speaker 2: I kind of thought that maybe another round of pressure
Speaker 2: would gon. But the director started by saying that, look,
Speaker 2: you know, we have one hundred million people in our
Speaker 2: province burning four hundred million tons of coal. By the way,
Speaker 2: that's half of the total core consumption of the United States. Ptgether,
Speaker 2: and which province is this? It's Shandom And now he said,
Speaker 2: I was required to bring down the PM two point five,
Speaker 2: the fine particles that have the severe health impact. And
Speaker 2: he said, I believe that we would not be able
Speaker 2: to achieve this without the public understanding and support.
Speaker 1: And what year was this?
Speaker 2: That was twenty and fourteen, So eight.
Speaker 1: Years after you started, you essentially had a high level
Speaker 1: government employee turn around and praise you for your work,
Speaker 1: and not just that saying your work is critical for
Speaker 1: us to be able to do our jos.
Speaker 2: To be fair, you know, the ministry of the central
Speaker 2: government always being more sympathetic because they are a bit
Speaker 2: more detached from the very sharp local conflict of this
Speaker 2: business and their business interest. But on the local level,
Speaker 2: you're right, that was one of the first very positive
Speaker 2: engagement from the local government.
Speaker 1: After the break. Marjune talks about how companies that you
Speaker 1: probably buy things from can use his data to clean
Speaker 1: up their supply chains. By the way, the East coast
Speaker 1: of the US recently experienced severe air pollution from Canadian wildfires.
Speaker 1: It dominated the news, but that kind of toxic care
Speaker 1: is a problem in many parts of the world. In
Speaker 1: a special bonus episode that you can find in your feed,
Speaker 1: zero has an explainer on what air pollution does to
Speaker 1: your body. The work you've done has also made a
Speaker 1: business case for itself because the data that you're our
Speaker 1: organization publishers around pollution metrics is now being used by
Speaker 1: Western corporations. Give us a few examples.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at the beginning, we're thinking about making an impact,
Speaker 2: and so First, we have the multinationals approaching as they
Speaker 2: themselves or their joint ventures were on our polluters map
Speaker 2: and pollution map, and so they try to solve their
Speaker 2: own problem. But I think, you know, we need to
Speaker 2: extend from that because most of them actually did not
Speaker 2: have much of their own production, but they purchase, they
Speaker 2: source it in a massive way in China. So it's
Speaker 2: the supply chain which a bigger problem. And so two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven we launched a Green Choice initiative trying
Speaker 2: to engage with them on this issue. And at the
Speaker 2: beginning they all say that, sorry, in China, we don't
Speaker 2: know who are polluting and who are not. I said,
Speaker 2: I happen to have some data, a map that can
Speaker 2: help you identify some So.
Speaker 1: No longer can Apple or Nike say we don't know
Speaker 1: what's happening in China. You can show if you have
Speaker 1: a supply chain in China, you can show what the
Speaker 1: pollution is tied to your supply.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They can start by comparing their list with our list.
Speaker 2: So some of them started to do that in a
Speaker 2: more proactive way, but some others have to wait for
Speaker 2: our you know, I tap into my investigation negative skills
Speaker 2: I learned through the media and link the severe pollution
Speaker 2: problem with some of the largest brands in the world
Speaker 2: and with their sourcing practice, and we're happy to see
Speaker 2: one by one, you know, increasingly they started changing their
Speaker 2: behavior and tapping into the data that we aggregated, you know,
Speaker 2: all these records performance compliance records. So it has basically
Speaker 2: reached some hundreds of thousands of suppliers and so far,
Speaker 2: among them, more than twenty thousand have come to us
Speaker 2: and openly either address their violation records or try to
Speaker 2: use the digital platform to measure and disclose their carbon footprint.
Speaker 1: Now we've talked about water pollution, soil pollution, and air pollution,
Speaker 1: which is mostly particulate matter pollution. What about carbon emissions?
Speaker 1: Has your work had an impact on reducing renals gas emissions.
Speaker 2: In some way? Yeah, indirectly. When we try to control
Speaker 2: the local air pollution, one of the ways is to
Speaker 2: try to stop this vast expansion of coal consumption. You know,
Speaker 2: before China took the Clean Air Action Plan initiated that
Speaker 2: in just eleven years of time, our co consumption got
Speaker 2: tripled along with a massive increase this is eleven Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's right. But then ever Since that, you know, the
Speaker 2: thousands upound thousands of coal mines have been shut down
Speaker 2: and China issued policy to try to control the use
Speaker 2: of coal. And with that, you know, the whole coal
Speaker 2: consumption got stabilized.
Speaker 1: Right, it's blattered, It hasn't fallen, and it's blattered.
Speaker 2: It plattered, that's right, but it's not enough. You know,
Speaker 2: it's still half of the total global burning or coal.
Speaker 2: You know, it's still half of the total, so still
Speaker 2: too much. And then China work together with the other partners,
Speaker 2: particularly with the US, to pave the way for Paris Agreement.
Speaker 2: After that we are approached by the multinationals or use
Speaker 2: our data. They said, from now, you know, we need
Speaker 2: to tackle the also the climate issue along our supply chains.
Speaker 2: We hope you come up with something more integrated. And
Speaker 2: in response to that, we developed the supply chain Carbon
Speaker 2: Climate Action Index and use that to assess the performance
Speaker 2: of hundreds of major brands. And then after China made
Speaker 2: the commitment on carbon PEIC and neutrality.
Speaker 1: Yes, in twenty twenty, China set the target for COVE
Speaker 1: neutrality by twenty sixty.
Speaker 2: By twenty sixty, that's right. And after that, you know,
Speaker 2: we based on our previous work launched the Blue Map
Speaker 2: for Zero Carbon because we trust that we need to
Speaker 2: learn from the experience in dealing with local pollution. If
Speaker 2: we want to tackle our carbon problem, we also need
Speaker 2: transparency to raise public awareness, to basically enhance the enforcement
Speaker 2: and also empower public participation.
Speaker 1: And in this process, have you seen any shift in
Speaker 1: how the government treats you and your work?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there has been a major shift. In those earlier years.
Speaker 2: You know, we felt a lot of pushback and a
Speaker 2: lot of pressure. But then over the past ten years
Speaker 2: things have changed quite dramatically.
Speaker 1: So the government now sees what you're doing is supportive
Speaker 1: not just for us supportive water, soil or air pollution,
Speaker 1: but also for its own cove neutrality targets.
Speaker 2: Right, and this data driven method and all this digital
Speaker 2: way of doing things can help to make it more
Speaker 2: efficient and cut down the cost of for example, you know,
Speaker 2: managing carbon and management.
Speaker 1: But is there a flip side to it, which is
Speaker 1: now that there is a carbon neutrality target, has the
Speaker 1: focus shifted to carbon pollution so much that water and
Speaker 1: soilt pollution don't get the same importance.
Speaker 2: So far, you know, there are policy made to try
Speaker 2: to synergize all of this to create integrated solutions to
Speaker 2: address these issues together.
Speaker 1: So I think so the tradeoff hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 2: The tradeoff hasn't happened yet, but a bigger actually, a
Speaker 2: bigger risk, a bigger challenge, is that now the three
Speaker 2: long years of COVID impact, along with the all this
Speaker 2: turbulent global energy supply and market situation, and also the
Speaker 2: geopolitical tension, all of this work together to shift the
Speaker 2: global focus from environmental and climate work to some other issues.
Speaker 1: More domestic energy security issues, economic develop major economies all
Speaker 1: try to ramp up to a certain extent and the
Speaker 1: fossil fuel capacity to try to insure energy security.
Speaker 2: So in China, you know, with the easing of the
Speaker 2: COVID policy, COVID restriction, the economic recovery have been prioritized
Speaker 2: so earlier in the first quarter of this year, we
Speaker 2: already experienced some rebound in our edition. So I think
Speaker 2: now it's very very important that we don't relax our
Speaker 2: environmental work, and we need to find more creative ways
Speaker 2: to basically balance better balance development and protection and try
Speaker 2: to build back in a greener way.
Speaker 1: In your experience doing this work for nearly two decades.
Speaker 1: Have you seen a shift in public opinion on environment
Speaker 1: and climate issues? And how have you seen that shift
Speaker 1: in a tangible way?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Absolutely. When we got started, even if you stop
Speaker 2: someone in the passes by in the street, you know,
Speaker 2: not just factory owners or local officials, even the passes
Speaker 2: in the street, most of them would say that, you know,
Speaker 2: China was poor. We need to develop first before we
Speaker 2: eat even think about environment. But things have changed so
Speaker 2: much now, so many more people started paying attention to
Speaker 2: this issue. You know, our blue map app the course
Speaker 2: of that millions of users and we have a program
Speaker 2: called take a Picture to create a blue calendar, and
Speaker 2: we have many followers, and they uploaded more than one
Speaker 2: point five million photos, each one of them with a
Speaker 2: watermark of the air quality when they took the picture, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it just shows how people really care about this issue.
Speaker 1: What's the biggest thing people get wrong in trying to
Speaker 1: understand China's approach to tackling climate change.
Speaker 2: I think some of the misperception is that China has
Speaker 2: not been trying to do it in a serious way.
Speaker 2: That's not right, because China, despite the very fact that
Speaker 2: we're still going through this development stage, there's no way
Speaker 2: to that naturally, you know, neutralize all these more than
Speaker 2: ten billion tons of carbon dioxide. We still made that
Speaker 2: commitment and started taking action on that. So I think
Speaker 2: that part most of the people are supportive to this work,
Speaker 2: but I do hope that this can be recognized also
Speaker 2: by people from other parts of the world. And we
Speaker 2: need to do our own duty. You know, absolutely, we're
Speaker 2: the largest current greenhouse gacimitter in the world. We understand
Speaker 2: our duty. But in the meantime, you know, we are
Speaker 2: the factory of the world, not just manufacturing for ourselves,
Speaker 2: but all our exports have a lot of embedded carbon.
Speaker 2: So I think it will be so much better if
Speaker 2: we can work together on that. And I do hope
Speaker 2: that people from this part of the world, particularly from America,
Speaker 2: can understand that there are opportunities for them to join
Speaker 2: our efforts because every day, the day in, day out,
Speaker 2: a lot of their consumption have they products mad, Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of mading China products, or at least
Speaker 2: that some of the most carbon intensive components of the
Speaker 2: products are made in China. So if they care, they
Speaker 2: can tap into our data to riad questions to those
Speaker 2: brands sourcing from China and challenge them to pay attention
Speaker 2: to this issue because we have the ways to track
Speaker 2: down the supplier. If they care, then they can make
Speaker 2: greener choices. Of course, they need the consumers to recognize that.
Speaker 1: Ma June, thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: What happens in China matters to the world, but how
Speaker 1: exactly change happens there isn't always clear, so it's valuable
Speaker 1: to get an insight from someone who has made an
Speaker 1: effort to work within the system and has some successes
Speaker 1: to show for it. Thanks to Columbia University Center on
Speaker 1: Global Energy Policy for space to record this conversation in
Speaker 1: New York City. The Center celebrated ten years this April,
Speaker 1: and at its celebratory day long event, I moderated a
Speaker 1: panel discussion with mar June and other experts from Morocco
Speaker 1: and India to talk about energy and climate needs in
Speaker 1: emerging economies. You can check out that panel in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Thanks for listening to Zero. If you like
Speaker 1: the show, please rate and review, share it with a
Speaker 1: friend or someone who recently bought something made in China.
Speaker 1: Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine
Speaker 1: driscoll Art. The music is composed by wonderly special thanks
Speaker 1: this week to Kirubin Rim and Dan Muta. I'm Akshatrati
Speaker 1: back next week