than it had been in 1995. The Project estimates that, by 2010, China’s
new appliance efficiency standards will reduce projected residential
electricity use by approximately 9 percent and greenhouse gas emis-
sions by 56 million tons.
All this is good news—though not quite as good as certain analysts
have suggested. In the summer of 2001, there was a flurry of media
attention on the question of China’s energy efficiency and its effects on
global warming. In June of that year, the New York Timesran a story
that credited China with having substantially reduced its annual green-
house gas emissions during the late 1990s, at the same time that its
economy was growing rapidly. The Timesbased its story, in part, on a
report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which relied
on data supplied by the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the U.S.
Department of Energy to assert that China had reduced its emissions
by 17 percent from 1996 to 2000, even as its economy had grown by
36 percent. The NRDC report was issued at about the same time that
the current Bush administration was condemning the Kyoto Protocol
as bad for the American economy, and the implications the NRDC
drew were clearly pointed at Washington: There was no necessary con-
tradiction between fighting global warming and aiding economic
growth.
But in August 2001, a Washington Poststory suggested that China’s
performance was not as rosy as implied. The Post cited a Japanese
researcher who had discovered that part of the reported decline in
China’s coal use (and therefore its greenhouse gas emissions) was
bogus: Beijing had ordered many coal mines to close down, and local
officials had reported they had been, but the mines had subsequently
been reopened. It was an old story in China: The massaging of statis-
tics to please bureaucratic superiors has long been routine, and local
officials often pay mere lip service to Beijing’s edicts, especially when
their palms are greased to look the other way. “The mountains are high
and the emperor is far away,” goes the Chinese adage. For its part, the
NRDC revisited the issue and, in a second report, found that green-
house gas emissions fell between 6 and 14 percent from 1996 to 1999,
while China’s economy grew between 22 and 27 percent—still impres-
sive, but considerably less so than originally claimed. In October 2003,
20 Mark Hertsgaard