Untangling the web of China’s energy future

This is the third in a series of profiles of our MIT Energy Fellows—graduate students who are supported by MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) members to participate in faculty-led research and become part of a long-term community of students and alumni. More information is at the MITEI Energy Fellowships site.

When Nicholas Martin describes the powerful forces interest groups and big business exert on governmental efforts to regulate energy usage, it sounds like Washington. He’s actually talking about Beijing.

Martin, the recipient of a Ford-MIT Energy Fellowship at MIT and a first-year doctoral student in political science, hopes to investigate how energy efficiency regulation in China is formulated and implemented.

“The Chinese policy-making process remains very opaque to outsiders, yet we also know that an awful lot has changed since the 1980s,” Martin said. “New players--the media, foreign businesses, and even foreign and domestic NGOs--now enjoy at least occasional involvement, while the old interests--big state-owned enterprises and ministries, local and provincial governments--have acquired new powers and resources,” he said. “At the same time, the complexity of the policy challenges the state must address has increased dramatically.”

In spite of the skyrocketing growth of cities like Beijing and Shanghai, China is still very poor, he said, and governmental capacity to address social and environmental problems created by rapid development is limited. “People need jobs, they need to earn money, and they need energy,” he said. “One of the more fascinating stories unfolding today is how the Chinese, given these constraints, are showing a lot of concern and initiative over their energy and environmental crisis and are trying—and succeeding—in making a difference.” 

Martin hopes to explore questions such as how Chinese interest groups lobby, how competing interests are balanced and how policy implementation is (or is not) monitored and enforced in the localities. “I think energy efficiency regulation provides a useful lens through which to analyze these questions,” Martin said. “They also go to the heart of China's ability to address pollution and CO2 emissions.”

The German-born scholar, recipient of numerous awards and prestigious internships, is uniquely qualified to undertake this challenge. But he has to admit that his first adventure in China was a bit foolhardy.

Speaking “not a word of Mandarin,” he took a position at age 18 at a foreign language middle school in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, where he was supposed to learn Chinese in exchange for teaching English. He had been steered to the job while a student at Red Cross Nordic United World College in Norway, which, he said, “aims to bring students from all over the world together to foster world peace.”

Martin was expected to teach English conversation to all 500-plus students at the school. In classes packed with as many as 40 kids, he tried to capture the students’ interest by telling them stories and getting them to speak about the topics in small groups.

Sometimes the strategy worked; sometimes his classroom “erupted in anarchy,” he recalled.

Since that first “trying and exhilarating” visit, he has had more opportunities to spend time in China. His experiences have fueled his passion for the country, and now, he says, he hopes to do something more concrete for China than help its adolescents chat in English. “It’s a vast country where you see the problems of a developing nation very concretely through the pollution, the social inequality, the poverty,” Martin said.

After his teaching stint, Martin studied history at Cambridge University in the UK and Chinese language and politics at Oxford, Peking and National Taiwan universities. “I was always really fascinated by past societies and cultures, and I wanted to know more about how societies and political systems work and operate,” he said. “History seemed best way of combining these three areas of interest.”

Martin now seeks to address global climate change on local, provincial and national levels in China. “MIT seemed like the best place to do this,” said Martin, who grew up in Darmstadt with his English father and German mother. He once practiced a Korean form of martial arts and has taken up Tae Kwon Do at MIT. He also enjoys classical music and outdoors activities such as hiking and fishing.

With his advisers, Martin will examine China’s energy-related industrial and innovation policies. Working with Edward S. Steinfeld, associate professor of political science, director of the MIT-China Program and co-director of the China Energy Group at the MIT Industrial Performance Center, Martin will get a first-hand look at China’s institutional and political decision-making.

“You have this myth in the west of China as a super-polluting giant who just doesn’t care about the environment, and simply wants to maximize economic growth,” Martin said. It’s a dangerous myth, he said, because it becomes “an excuse for our own inaction. People question why we should save energy when countries like China and India are using more and more.”

He thinks there is “some hope for positive change. While the problems are huge and the constraints on policy-makers considerable, I think there is real awareness and concern in China today over the scale of the environmental crisis and a political will to address this. People do not like living next to a polluted river and drawing their drinking water from it,” he said.

To help bring about that change, Martin plans a career in academia. “Addressing climate change requires technological innovation, but it also has a substantial political component: ultimately, technologies must get implemented, and that involves choices--and costs. That’s where social science,” he said, “can play a vital role.”

—Deborah Halber, MITEI correspondent