Policy Question:
What actions, if any, should the Chinese government take on fog and haze problem in China, especially the fog and haze in the eastern coast cities? Can innovations in public policies and/or science research help in dealing with this situation?
Policy Maker Client:
In this case, the policy maker is the Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People's Republic of China. The ministry has the authority to promulgate laws and regulations to help improve the situation.
The policy options:
1. Maintain the status quo. In this case, we don't change the current policies. Now, Chinese government actually has very few effective methods to control the fog and haze problem. With the growing of populations and vehicles, it will become an even worse situations in China, and the problem can be expanded to inner cities as well.
2. Promotion of new energy usages. The ministry can promote innovations in public policies to encourage people to use new type of energy, for example, electricity, solar energy, wind energy, etc instead of the old type of energy(coal) to make it more environmental friendly. Car pollution is a big reason to cause fog and haze in China, and to promote the usage of clean resources or hybrid resource based car will have a big impact to the problem.
3. Encourage people to use public transportation instead of driving their own vehicles on the road. The roads in many of China's cities are growing more and more crowded because of increasing number of private vehicles. Utilizing public transportations, for example, bus, light rails, trains can not only reduce the amount of traffic in the road, but also make the traffic more smooth. People can also benefit from usage of public transportations, because the price is cheaper and they can avoid uncertainty of traffic to get destination on time.
4. Building more plants and trees in the city. The forest coverage rate in most of Chinese cities are relatively low compared with other countries. Government can encourage people to grow more plants and trees in the city. Trees and plants can make a big contribution to the environmental friendly city, because they consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen. In the same time, government should publish laws and regulations to forbid the excessive cutting of forests in China.
Hi Bin Feng,
ReplyDeleteYou seem to have given quite a bit of thought to your policy options. I hope my suggestions below may be of use to help you refine the options.
1. Your description of the maintenance of the status quo is very one-sided. What are some of the pros of doing so? While you rightly point out that it's not a preferred solution, choosing to maintain the status quo could be beneficial for the most obvious of reasons - no additional costs by the government.
2. With your second option, you seem to be hinting at the policy options to deal with air pollution specifically arising from energy generation. That's only one angle of air pollution that is dealt with. I feel like this could instead be the focus of your analysis - how to promote green energy use in China. Because options 3 and 4 are targeting other angles (e.g. from public transportation). Rather than options, options 2, 3 and 4 simply seem to be naturally synergistic with one another. It appears that this would be a problem considering this is an innovation policy class.
3. Try to tweak your question to have an innovation-centric problem and/or solution. I think it would be great to see the role of policy in promoting innovation or the use of innovations. As pointed out by Professor Stine, I think many of us are not getting the fact that we are trying to focus on innovation policy, rather than policy in general.
I hope this helps!
Hi Bin Feng,
ReplyDeleteIt's good to see that you are concerned with Chinese environment problem. I come from Beijing, which is the worst environment city in China and that's why I am very interested in your policy options.
As I went through your policy options, I think you did a great job in evaluating the current situation and presented your options based on three different perspectives. There is no doubt that these options are useful, but since you mentioned the target location is eastern coast cities, I think it would be better if you specify a single city and then evaluate the three options to that single city. There are so many cities in the eastern coast cities and most of them are facing different environmental problems and may have different actions to solve this problem.
Overall, it looks very good to me! good luck!
Nan