In recent years China launched a major environmental protection campaign requiring polluting companies to cut or even suspend production on heavy pollution days. But in east China’s Jiangsu Province, the environmental protection chief said recently that a list of local companies who have consistently met environmental standards and performed well will be exempted from the requirement starting this year, Shanghai-based news portal
The Paper reports.
In a separate editorial, The Paper praised the Jiangsu practice. While heavy-handedness is needed to protect the environment, this does not mean one-size-fits-all – some local governments simply require a pollution-discharging company to suspend business while it rectifies the situation, regardless of whether they meet pollution standards or the previous measures have been effective. This hurts the interests of rules-abiding players and makes non-compliant ones even less willing to invest in pollution-fighting technology for their plants.
More targeted measures in protecting the environment – like Jiangsu’s exemption list – are within the scope of the ability of environmental authorities, the editorial says. Moreover companies that follow the rules should be entitled to exemptions from frequent inspections and from the threat of being forced to suspend production.
The news portal goes on to point out that the reason why some local governments resort to a one-size-fits-all approach is they fail to come up with clear rules. The clearer such rules and measures the environmental authority formulates, the more scientific the environment protection assessment carried out at grassroots levels and the less likely environmental law enforcement will take a bad turn in practice.
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