[Text: Observer Network columnist Tokamak Crown].
One. In the blink of an eye, it's the season of freezing again.
In the past few years, every winter, the news that residents in North China have been blocked from heating always appear on time. Every season, the author will also deliberately collect relevant information to see if the long-standing problem of residents' heating obstruction can be improved over time.
However, to the author's regret, this year, the relevant news has appeared as usual.
Not long ago, there was a news on the Internet, probably that the staff of Xingguo Town, Zanhuang County, Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, in the name of the so-called confiscation of inferior loose coal, entered the house and collected a ton of heating coal stored in the home of a local septuagenarian villager. The process was captured by cameras in the villagers' homes and circulated widely online.
* Screenshots. The local town originally refuted the rumor that the coal had not been confiscated, but it was clearly recorded that several staff members carried the coal of two villagers with their pockets. In response to the reporter's question, the local propaganda department replied, "Only part of the loose coal (about 6-7 catties) was taken away for testing and tracing the source."
The local ** said, "If villagers want to buy coal for heating in winter, they can buy clean coal with ** subsidies in the town." However, the reporter visited and learned that the villagers buy clean briquette, are to hand over the money to the village, "the village uniformly pulls clean briquette, and then notifies each family to pull back to their own homes, as for which clean briquette, the villagers have no choice", "clean briquette is really not good to burn, there is no firepower, it will be extinguished when it is burned." ”
The CCTV report also mentioned a follow-up: on December 6, the village sent 100 catties of clean briquette to the news party, but it was refused;Subsequently, the old man's relatives brought in some clean briquettes to cover the original loose coal.
Loose coal piled up in the corner of the courtyard of the old man surnamed Liu (Photo: CCTV).
This operation, friends who have grassroots work experience should have seen it for a long time. When the higher-level departments put forward some excessively urgent or even unrealistic demands, and there are extremely strict standards for the implementation of these demands, the grass-roots workers tend to put on a "good show" with the people through a subtle mutual understanding and tacit cooperation to cope with the higher-level inspections.
For example, there used to be such an incident on the author's side:
The local ** prohibits villagers from drying dried fish along the road, and sends grassroots staff to inspect and supervise. The problem is that small fish must be dried as soon as possible after they are caught, otherwise they will rot. This kind of request was obviously thought up by the local ** patting his head, but the superiors had an order, and the grassroots staff did not dare not listen, so they had to run to the villages in the middle of the night before the inspection, and inform the villagers to check the next day, so that everyone could temporarily put away the fish, and then take it out and continue to dry it after the inspection.
This kind of behavior, to use a local saying on our side, is called "cat".
The author believes that this incident is far more than the dispute between clean coal and loose coal, but also issues such as straw burning, coal-to-gas, and coal-to-electricityIt is far from being limited to Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Shandong, Henan and other places also have such problems.
In other words, the confiscation of loose coal is essentially part of a series of derivative problems caused by the long-lasting rural air pollution control work in North China.
For example, the coal-to-gas switch, which is the subject of fierce controversy every year, has the widest impact, the greatest impact on rural residents in northern China, and the longest fermentation time. In a sense, it can be said that if we understand the issue of switching from coal to gas, we will also understand the work of rural air pollution control in North China.
Data map**: Xinhua News Agency.
Two. It has been 10 years since Hebei Province's coal-to-gas switch began on September 10, 2013.
In that year, the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan (commonly known as the "Ten Atmospheric Measures") was issued, which was the first relevant document on China's coal-to-gas policy and the starting point of coal-to-gas work. After the release of the "Ten Atmospheric Measures", the country began to gradually implement the coal-to-gas policy. Hebei Province, as a key area for coal-to-gas conversion, saw negative growth in coal consumption for the first time that year.
Since the "Ten Atmospheric Measures" set the goal of completing the prevention and control of air pollution by 2017, under the pressure of assessment, the competent authorities at all levels have exhausted all means to vigorously promote the implementation of the "Ten Atmospheric Measures".
By 2016, as the time limit for the "Ten Atmospheric Measures" was nearing the end, the implementation of the "Ten Atmospheric Measures" began to speed up in an all-round way. Hebei Province not only completed 31870,000 households have been converted from coal to gas and from coal to electricity, and 18 counties have been designated as coal ban zones.
In the same year, a number of ministries and commissions jointly issued the "13th Five-Year Plan for Natural Gas Development" and the "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Air Pollution Prevention and Control Strengthening Measures", which further increased the pressure on the implementation of coal-to-gas conversion in Hebei Province.
2017 is the final year of the "Ten Atmospheric Measures", due to the unsatisfactory progress of the coal-to-gas work, many ministries and commissions and provincial and municipal governments jointly issued the "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Surrounding Areas 2017 Air Pollution Prevention and Control Work Plan" in February of that year to promote the progress of the work.
In August of that year, the new document was issued again, and the "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei 2017-2018 Autumn and Winter Air Pollution Comprehensive Control Action Plan" was announced, which listed two municipalities directly under the central government and 26 northern cities (commonly known as "2+26") as the first batch of implementation scope of the winter clean heating plan in the northern region, requiring a total of 3.55 million heating users in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong and Henan provinces to complete the renovation of coal-to-gas and electricity-to-gas facilities in the short term.
The short-term centralized release of this series of documents has increased the pressure on the progress of coal-to-gas conversion, so in 2017, many provinces and cities, including Hebei Province, have successively made leaps and bounds in the work of coal-to-gas conversion.
In Hebei Province, the document required Hebei Province to complete 1.8 million coal-to-gas conversion projects, a figure that exceeded more than half of the total amount of transformation set for "2+26" in the document.
Correspondingly, however, the financial resources available to Hebei Province to implement the policy are extremely limited.
In May 2017, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and the National Energy Administration jointly issued the "Notice on Carrying out the Pilot Work of Financial Support for Clean Heating in the Northern Region in Winter", which stipulates that for a period of three years, 1 billion yuan will be provided annually for municipalities directly under the central government, 700 million yuan for provincial capitals, and 500 million yuan for prefecture-level cities for the implementation of coal-to-gas projects12 pilot cities were identified as financial support objects, with a total amount of 7.3 billion yuan, of which five were identified as pilot cities for financial support in Hebei Province, including Shijiazhuang, Tangshan, Baoding, Langfang and Hengshui, with a total of 2.7 billion yuan - this amount only accounts for 36 percent of the total financial support9%。
At the same time, in order to promote the implementation of the project within a limited time, in August 2017, the Ministry of Environmental Protection issued the "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Surrounding Areas 2017-2018 Autumn and Winter Comprehensive Air Pollution Control Action Strengthening Supervision Plan", which put forward strict supervision and accountability requirements for coal-to-gas projects. As a result, under the dual pressure of inspector accountability and task assessment, the efforts to promote coal-to-gas conversion in various places have skyrocketed again.
Time is tight, the task is heavy, the funds are small, and the supervision is strict, so they began to increase the weight layer by layer;The result of layer upon layer of increase is layer upon layer of accountability;The result of layers of accountability is sporty governance.
The result of the sports governance is: Hebei Province has overfulfilled the transformation task required by the ** document - the document only requires Hebei Province to complete the transformation project of 1.8 million households, but in fact, Hebei Province has completed 25370,000 households were renovated, more than 7370,000 households.
Interestingly, although this final result is much higher than the index requirements of the first document, it is actually lower than the indicators set by Hebei Province itself - Hebei Province summed up the policy goals of coal-to-gas and coal-to-electricity policies issued by various prefecture-level cities, and finally obtained a total scale of 2.56 million households, accounting for 72% of the total target of 3.55 million households in the six provinces and cities proposed by **.
Only got 369% of the financial support, but set a target of 72% for themselves, the consequences of this "small horse-drawn cart" were manifested at that time: the result of the over-implementation of the renovation project was the extreme shortage of supporting facilities and the serious lack of facilities, followed by the shortage of natural gas, the facilities were unusable due to cost savings, and the problem of large-scale winter heating in Hebei was difficult.
In 2017, due to the difficulty of heating, Hebei Province caused hot incidents such as "primary school heating delay, students running in the middle of winter to keep warm", "the hospital issued a distress letter, requesting not to limit gas", "villagers basking in the sun for heating" and other hot incidents. It was from that time that the author began to pay attention to the problem of winter heating difficulties in North China.
Screenshot of China Youth Daily's 2017 report.
In this dire situation, on December 4, 2017, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) issued an urgent document entitled "Letter on Requesting Comprehensive Management of Loose Coal to Ensure the Warmth of the People in the Winter", which directly slowed down Hebei's air pollution control work and allowed coal to be burned. Thus, this farce, which lasted for several months, came to an end.
But that's not the end result of the problem. Due to insufficient funds, over-implementation of renovation projects, and lack of comprehensive planning of transformation work, the coal-to-gas conversion work in Hebei Province has been a mess in the following years, and various problems have emerged one after another.
For example, due to the lack of effective and comprehensive research in the design stage of coal-to-gas projects, the facilities in rural areas are not only under-constructed, but also of uneven quality, and some project standards are not uniform.
Due to the scattered distribution and complex house types of rural houses, it is extremely difficult to construct low-pressure pipelines at the end of natural gas. There is a lot of social resistance, coupled with the lack of funds, so the number and location of natural gas pipelines are relatively chaotic, often on the streets and alleys of the outer walls of the house in all directions, eaves and walls, across the streets and alleys, and communication and power supply lines or intersect or parallel, there are no small safety hazards.
Due to the shortage of funds, the stall is too large, in order to save construction costs, the installation of the pressure regulating box is often the first consideration of cost saving, which is very easy to damageThe reserved safety distance for pipeline erection does not comply with the statutory norms, and the support frame is arbitrarily set up in order to build the current structure of the house, and the house is chiseled through the wallLack of anti-corrosion treatment and routine maintenance of pipelines, in many places there are large areas of facilities that have been completed, but the operator is still not determined, and in many places even the most basic pipeline maintenance, regular maintenance and troubleshooting work cannot be effectively guaranteed.
For another example, due to the tight time and heavy tasks of the coal-to-gas policy, the huge market, and the limited number of manufacturers and technical personnel, some areas are facing a shortage of technical personnel and equipment, so in order to complete the task, many construction personnel who have not undergone systematic training are rushed to fill in the post, and there is a lack of effective supervision of the quality of the projectMany construction units and design units speculatively entered, and the quality of some projects was not up to standard, and the safety awareness of users was not cultivated in time, so failures occurred frequently.
In addition, in the early stage of the project, the relevant departments have to eat more than they can in order to complete the targets, which has caused a huge burden on the local finances and led to no money available for the follow-up construction workIn order to complete the air pollution control index, when the natural gas heating facilities have not been completed and put into use, the original coal-fired heating facilities will be dismantled in a "one-size-fits-all" manner, and at the same time, the burning of straw and the ban on the sale of loose coal will lead to the lack of residents' heating needs in winterThe dispersion of residential areas has led to high construction costs for supporting facilities (such as pressurized stations, pipelines, peak shaving facilities, temporary storage facilities, etc.), and some areas have simply not built or built less under the lack of funds, and some household facilities have become ineffective.
In addition, gas supply companies are faced with heavy gas supply demand, and scattered and fragmented infrastructure has led to high operating costs, requiring residents to limit the price of domestic gas supply, and the promised subsidies are difficult to be in place in a timely manner, so the more gas supply enterprises supply, the more losses, simply stop or limit supply.
The suspension and restriction of supply by enterprises, in turn, has led to repeated contradictions between local natural gas enterprises and upstream gas source enterprises due to insufficient contract volume and inverted gas prices - because the contract signed is insufficient, the cost of gas source procurement has exceeded the sales for a long time, and the subsidies are not in place, and the LNG (liquefied natural gas) cannot afford it, and it is difficult to supplement the peak gas consumption, so local natural gas enterprises are often difficult to operate and struggle.
Construction workers install outdoor gas pipelines (data map Xinhua News Agency).
There is another problem. The procurement method of "first collection and then return" is adopted between local natural gas enterprises and upstream gas source enterprises - simply put, after the end of the heating period, the two parties will return the gas price difference after verification according to the number of local coal-to-gas users - but in this process, the return amount is determined by the third-party agency designated by the upstream company, and the two sides often have a deviation in the number of coal-to-gas users, and the return payment is often disputed because of this, resulting in a long capital cycle and untimely return, plus ** Upside down, local natural gas ** enterprises are losing money while supplying, and they are becoming more and more unwilling to do this loss-making business.
Moreover, gasification projects need to have scale effects to dilute the per capita investment costs. The urban natural gas business can offset the inversion caused by residential gas through industrial gas and commercial gas, while the population density in rural areas is much lower than that in cities, residential areas are scattered, the project cost is more, the gas consumption is less, and there is also a lack of industrial and commercial market hedging, and the gas consumption is limited, and the cost of local natural gas enterprises is difficult to recover, which further reduces the subjective initiative of gas supply to rural areas.
The upstream gas source accuses the downstream of not signing the contract, usually does not buy gas, and when there is no gas, it comes to make a fuss about gas;The downstream complains about high gas prices, heavy burdens, long capital cycles, and the more you supply, the more you lose. The two sides blamed each other, the business stalled, and people's livelihood was greatly affected.
As a result, we have seen that the implementation of Hebei's coal-to-gas conversion has been problematic almost every year for many years. Langfang, Baoding, Handan, Xingtai, Cangzhou and other villages have varying degrees of heating outages, such as sleeping in the middle of the night and being frozen awake or stopping the fire in the middle of the day. It is no wonder that local residents have no good words when it comes to switching from coal to gas, and in many cases they can only honestly burn back coal, which in turn involves the above-mentioned dispute between clean coal and loose coal.
The whole thing was in an awkward impasse over this.
Three. We must make clear again and again such a basic premise: the purpose of environmental protection is to improve the living environment, in the final analysis, it is to serve people themselves, and food and clothing are the most basic needs of people, and only when this basic need is satisfied, can there be room for other problems.
It is hoped that the departments concerned will be more cautious and tolerant in dealing with such issues. The winter heating problem in North China, including coal-to-gas, is in deep trouble, and it cannot be completely properly solved in the short term, and the winter heating demand is imminent, and the people burn coal for heating, and the official clean coal is embarrassing to use, so they can only buy loose coal, which is actually a chain of cause and effect.
Although it may not be compliant, it is obviously understandable that local people buy loose coal for use. Instead of using valuable administrative resources to go to villages and confiscate villagers' loose coal, it is better to supervise the quality control and quality problems of clean coal production enterprises, or seize the time to deal with the coal-to-gas problem that has not been properly solved for many years.
If we want to completely solve the problem of loose coal, we should start from the root cause of the problem, and should not "have a headache and a foot pain", let alone "a headache and a sore foot".