The unprecedented move by the national environmental watchdog to halt approval of all projects by major power plants and four cities for their poor environmental performance shows its muscle, but the agency alone will not be able to enforce its writ.

This is the nut to crack in China's drive to clean up its environment.

The State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) has become ever bolder in implementing the country's environmental policies, evinced by the "environmental storms" in the past two years.

Such boldness is what China urgently needs, as it strives to strike a balance between economic growth and environmental sustainability, a new way of development that must shake off the past environment-ignoring mode.

The SEPA has thus won support from both the public and the central leadership. But its limited power means it often has to depend on the concerted action of other departments to get its way.

In the latest move, the SEPA can put new projects by offending companies and cities on hold unless all industries operated by them have proper approval from the agency.

But it does not mean the automatic stopping of relevant projects. The SEPA does not have the power to directly halt the continuation of those potentially polluting projects.

Past experience shows that many such projects, which often involve the investment of billions of yuan, manage to go ahead despite environmental orders to stop them.

Companies have been known to install cleaning facilities to pass the environmental impact assessment then keep them shut to save costs.

As steel prices were on the decline last year, industrial insiders said that steelmakers had suffered from slumping profits and that the costs saved from idling their environmental facilities had become meaningful.

The latest environmental figures show that the SEPA alone can no longer hold back the worsening situation.

China missed its 2006 goals of reducing energy consumption by 4 percent and reducing emissions of pollutants by 2 percent.

It is not because the SEPA failed in its duty. It is because the agency alone is not powerful enough.

(China Daily January 12, 2007)