----They have a 30 percent savings rate, they are stimulating their economy with cash. We are doing it with borrowed Chinese money, because the little bush hole wouldn't raise taxes to pay for his wars he hid off the books.
They pay for big ticket items with cash, we can't even buy on credit. Once they have renewable energy and we are wasting our last dollars on oil, the project for a new american century will have succeeded in handing the middle east to Iran and the world to China. Great record wingnut mush skulls, your guy bush put two oil companies and one entire country in the toilet.------
03.06.2009
How Serious Is China's Clean-Energy Push?
Since the Bonn climate talks are in the news, and much of the focus has been on China, it's worth looking at the country more closely. The conventional view is that China's an out-of-control pollution monster, building two dirty coal-fired plants each week, capable of single-handedly finishing off the planet with its fast-growing greenhouse-gas emissions. That's all true, but there's another side here: China's also taking breathtakingly large steps on the clean-energy frontat least on paper.
Over at the Center for American Progress, Julian Wong and Andrew Light tally up the recent developments. China spent $12 billion on renewable power in 2007second only to Germanyand is planning to spend some $223 billion (not a typo) on new clean-energy development in the next decade. That's in addition to bolstering efficiency and setting goals to reduce the amount of carbon per unit of GDP. Chinese officials are also drafting new fuel-economy standards even stricter than those just outlined by the Obama administration, and the country has been slapping a large, 40 percent excise tax on SUVs and other gas-guzzling cars. Not to mention the country's spending some $1 trillion between now and 2020 upgrading its railway network, and is planning to produce some 500,000 hybrid cars and buses by 2011.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal brings word today that China is unveiling a feed-in tariff for solar power, in which utilities will pay energy producers an above-market rate ($0.16 per kilowatt-hour) for new solar generation, in order to increase the amount of solar power in the country to 20 gigawatts by 2020about three times as much as was installed worldwide in 2008. (My hunch is that the tariff will enable them to surpass this goalsee this piece I did for Audubon a few months ago on how feed-in tariffs work and why they've encouraged far-faster-than-expected growth in Germany's wind and solar industry.)
In any case, none of this negates all those dirty coal plants cropping up, which still supply three-fourths of the country's electricity. China is still the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and those emissions are climbing rapidly upward. Also, while Beijing may be issuing plenty of eco-friendly laws, they don't always get enforced in the provincessee this old TNR piece for more on that. But the larger point is that China's central government does take this climate problem quite seriouslythey've arguably taken stronger action than the United States thus far (that would change if the Waxman-Markey climate bill was signed into law).
Still, that won't make international talks easy. Earlier today, U.S. envoy Todd Stern* said of countries like China: "Theyre doing a lot already, but theyre going to need to do more actions and commit to them and be able to quantify them." As mentioned below, it's doubtful that developing countries like China and India will agree to mandatory reductions in the next decade, but they can agree to formalize some of what they're already doing and meaningfully slow the growth of their emissions, which would be a major step in itself, and a contentious one.
P.S. Kate Mackenzie of the Financial Times has more on the difficulties cropping up in talks with Chinaincluding the question of whether the United States should share intellectual property with China to foster the spread of clean tech. (It's a thorny subject, as you'd expect.)
--Bradford Plumer
Posted: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 5:10 PM with 1 comment(s)
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan
I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
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