In a year in which severe bouts of pollution have plagued China from Beijing to Shanghai, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the country is seriously lagging behind environmental targets more than halfway through its 12 five-year plan.

The head of China’s top economic planning agency told a regular session of parliament Wednesday that the country isn’t even halfway to meeting its environmental targets for 2015, the official Xinhua news agency reported, underscoring the challenges facing the nation’s leaders in restructuring the industrial-based economy. Xinhua pointed out that the mid-term report was delivered while Beijing was “shrouded in haze.”

Some of the targets mentioned by Xu Shaoshi, chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, include reducing energy and carbon intensity, cutting nitrogen-oxide emissions and boosting clean energy consumption. The last three targets are relatively easy and were introduced only in China’s most recent five-year plan in 2011.

According to the plan, although China wants to reduce energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by 16% by 2015, energy intensity fell just 5.5% in the first two years of the plan, Xinhua said. And while it wants to reduce the amount of carbon produced per unit of GDP by 17% by 2015, carbon intensity was down only 6.6% in 2012 from 2010 levels, it said.

Meanwhile, non-fossil fuels accounted for 9.4% of China’s total energy mix in 2012, up from 8.6% in 2010, Xinhua said. The country’s target is 11.4% by 2015.

Finally, nitrogen-oxide emissions, which affect air quality, rose by 2.8% in 2012 from 2010 levels, Xinhua said. China is targeting a reduction of 10% by 2015.

Mr. Xu blamed “a lack of strong effort to implement industrial restructuring” despite a nationwide campaign over the past two years to eliminate outdated and inefficient capacity in the iron, steel, thermal-power and cement sectors, Xinhua said. He also said that China’s economy grew faster than expected in 2011 and 2012, but industrial reform didn’t move fast enough, with enterprises also slow to reduce energy consumption and curb emissions.

Mr. Xu said the country will ban new energy-intensive projects in areas where energy consumption is already out of control and pledged to “deploy more legal and economic means” to cut pollution.

Xinhua said China may impose a consumption tax on “energy-intensive, high-polluting products” and expand its resource tax to include all natural resources, including air and water.

But the reforms can’t come fast enough.

Xinhua said that due to serious air pollution in the industrial hub of Hebei province, the central government has proposed cutting steel output capacity by 60 million metric tons, cement production capacity by 61 million tons and glass production by 30 million weight cases. On Wednesday, some cities in the province, including the capital of Shijiazhuang, recorded levels of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5—which is considered particularly hazardous—of more than 1,100 micrograms per cubic meter. That level is more than 31 times the limit of 35 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets for an average 24-hour period.

On Thursday, some members of China’s parliament debated lowering the targets, Xinhua.

The country should try “all possible means” to catch up in the next two years said Peng Sen, the NDRC’s vice minister, according to Xinhua. Mr. Peng said local governments should slow economic growth in favor of protecting the environment by reducing GDP targets, some of which have been set higher than the national target.

Another parliament member, Hubei province Vice Gov. Gu Shengzu, said lowering the targets would send the “wrong signal.”

“The indices and targets are not the most important. In the end, only if people see the improvements is our task fulfilled,” he said, according to Xinhua.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/12/26/china-far-from-meeting-environmental-targets/