Written by Ryan McGuine //
Beijing became the only city in the world to host both a summer and winter Olympics when it opened the 24th Winter Olympics last Friday. The Games put on by Beijing in 2008 were exactly the kind of thing all host countries hope for — China used the Games to demonstrate its technological and economic might on a global stage, pairing dramatic pageantry with impressive organization to cement its role as an emerging superpower. The country no doubt hopes the outcome of this year’s Games will be similar, despite diplomatic boycotts by numerous countries seeking to draw attention to China’s long-running pattern of abuse against the Uighur ethnic group.
Between 1896 and the 1960s, most of the Olympic Games were held in Western cities with relatively large economies and advanced infrastructure. However, with the advent of television broadcasting, the potential revenues from hosting skyrocketed and countries sought to out-spectacle one another in their bid to host. Since then budget overruns have become the norm, fewer countries are bidding to host, and those that do are often non-democracies. But countries must anticipate some benefit or none would apply. For example, consultants often talk up short-term benefits like job creation or tourism boosts. Hosting also offers countries the opportunity to showcase their infrastructure and managerial capacity. Indeed, there is even evidence that merely bidding to host can have lasting beneficial effects on a country’s exports.
China is once again hoping to use the Olympics as a showcase for a global audience, this time as a full global superpower, rather than an up-and-coming one. Among its focus areas will be COVID-19, 5G infrastructure, and rapid medical response for athletes. However, this blog is focused on sustainability and China plans to use the Games to emphasize the environment, so let’s dig into some of their initiatives. Most directly, hosting the Olympics for a second time allows Beijing to reuse over half of the venues needed to put on the Games. Doing so reduces the amount of carbon-intensive building materials that are needed. Cement accounts for around 3% of global carbon emissions while steel accounts for 7%, and China consumes about 60% of the world’s cement and 55% of the its steel.
After becoming globally infamous for its poor air pollution, China has made major progress over the last decade. The year 2021 was the first time that Beijing met targets for hazardous air pollutants that it set for itself in 2013 — still nearly seven times WHO-recommended levels — a milestone that most watchers thought would not happen until around 2030. It is common for measures of environmental health to improve as countries become wealthier, but China deserves credit for actively working to reduce coal use and boost renewable generation. The country also plans to “offset” some of the carbon emissions from the Olympics by planting trees, although the practice is dubious at best. Beyond structural changes, China is also taking measures to cut air pollution temporarily like encouraging businesses to increase steel inventories before the Games, and adjusting traffic patterns during them.
In order to maintain ice in indoor arenas and on sliding tracks, China is using carbon dioxide for refrigeration. While most refrigerant will circulate in tubes continuously and not reach the atmosphere, leaks do occur, and carbon dioxide is both nonhazardous and environmentally benign. While it may feel strange to dismiss carbon dioxide emissions when so much of the climate conversation is about reducing them, fluorinated gases, once the most prevalent refrigerants, are thousands of times times more efficient at trapping heat in the atmosphere. At warmer ambient temperatures, ammonia is actually a slightly more effective refrigerant because carbon dioxide’s fluid properties change around 88°F. However, Beijing’s frigid winter weather renders that unlikely, and fugitive ammonia can be toxic, so carbon dioxide was ultimately chosen.
Finally, China will use hydrogen to power 600 vehicles during the Games. In the long run, hydrogen is an unlikely candidate for low-carbon vehicle transportation. There are a myriad of ways to produce hydrogen, electrolysis powered by renewables being the cleanest, but conversion losses and inefficiencies along the way make it more efficient to simply use that electricity directly in electric vehicles. Despite that, hydrogen is a strong candidate for certain applications that are hard to electrify like petrochemicals and air transportation. China is building some of the largest hydrogen production facilities in the world, and each new plant is a valuable technical and financial learning opportunity on the road to net-zero.
Exhibitions of technological possibilities like the Olympics can be powerful drivers of innovation. But the beneficial effects of exhibitions require peer interactions, which will be in short supply due to Beijing’s strict COVID-19 protocols. At the end of the day, the most important sustainability stories from the 24th Winter Olympiad are China’s use of large amounts of power and water from an arid region to make up for Beijing’s lack of natural snow, and its deforestation of steep mountainsides within a nature reserve. Challenges to environmental progress in the developed West too often come from an overabundance of societal input, but China is a good reminder that a Leninist government with a broad license to take unilateral action is no suitable alternative.