In three months, there will be a new National People's Congress (NPC), China's highest law-making body that is elected every five years.
The official announcement was made yesterday that the new NPC will start to hold its first session in Beijing as of March 5, 2008. Some of the key tasks of the NPC's forthcoming session will be to decide the new government team.
If I am asked for my opinion on how the government team should be structured, I would definitely want to see changes made to match the nation's, and indeed, the world's need to conserve resources.
What I would like to see first of all is a national committee for long-term development, especially to coordinate the use of land and ocean resources, and efforts to mitigate climate change and protect the environment.
Having such a central government agency may help China have a more integrated and consistent program for sustainable development and for preparing the financial and technological means for that purpose.
Perhaps correspondingly, there could also be a sub-committee for sustainable development in the new NPC Standing Committee, to give guidance to the administrative branch of the government.
I am not sure whether there will be such a specialized agency in 2008. But I believe these tasks will become a more salient part of the central government's work.
In my opinion, having a committee for long-term development is more important than having a ministry of energy, as other Chinese columnists have speculated.
In fact, much of the portfolio of the would-be overarching ministry of energy is actually being taken care of by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), such as proposing policies to the cabinet and processing approvals for major investment projects.
On the implementation level, there are at the same time a fair number of State-owned corporations providing the mainstay of the nation's energy supplies and related services.
Looking back at China's economic development in 2007, the most important change it witnessed concerned energy - or "jieneng jianpai" (saving energy and cutting emissions).
Although China has not pledged any targets to the world on emission cuts, internally, it has become much more assertive in insisting on its own energy and emission standards. Central government officials have already said that jieneng jianpai is a basic State policy. Previously, the same label had only been given to the policy on family planning and slowing down population growth.
Saving energy and cutting emissions is usually considered two sides of the same coin. Because using less energy requires the building of fewer power plants, hence the burning of less fossil fuel. But in practice as well as in theory, the two things alone are still not good enough. It takes a change in the logic of economics such as a different way to calculate costs, and to effectively match economic development with our environmental and climate concerns.
So the planning and supervision of sustainable development requires not only economic officials with their traditional methods, but also experts in land and ocean resources, those in environmental protection, those in meteorological and climate research, and social scientists.
Also, there must be a better coordinated program to promote the commercial use of solutions that reduce the use of energy and other resources.
There must be a more responsive, more rapid process to adopt innovations, including technological evaluation, dissemination of information, training of technicians, revision of standards, and delivery of financial incentives.
E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 12/31/2007 page4)