Apparently China is more determined to take on the challenges in renewable/green energy than most people outside China thought ... China’s green leap forward By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ August 10, 2009 edition Beijing Behind the notorious clouds of filth and greenhouse gases that China’s industrial behemoth spews into the atmosphere every day, a little-noticed revolution is under way. China is going green. And as the authorities here spur manufacturers of all kinds of alternative energy equipment to make more for less, “China price” and “China speed” are poised to snatch the lion’s share of the next multitrillion-dollar global industry – energy technology. Chinese factories already make a third of the world’s solar cells – six times more than America. Next year, China will become the largest market in the world for wind turbines – overtaking America. This fall, a Chinese firm will launch the world’s first mass-produced all-electric car of this century. And where are American utilities buying the latest generation of “clean coal” power stations? China. “The Chinese government thinks of renewables as a major strategic industrial option” that will help fuel this country’s future growth, says Li Junfeng, deputy head of energy research at China’s top planning agency. “We will catch up with international advanced technology very quickly.” China will likely remain the world’s worst polluter, emitting more CO2 than any other nation, for the foreseeable future. Its reliance on cheap coal to generate the bulk of its electricity makes that almost inevitable. At the same time, however, “this country is installing a one-megawatt wind turbine every hour,” points out Dermot O’Gorman, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Beijing. “That is more encouraging than the one coal fired power station a week” that normally dominates foreign headlines. Indeed, China is pushing ahead on renewable technologies with the fervor of a new space race. It wants to be in the forefront of what many believe will be the next industrial revolution. If it succeeds, it will hold far-reaching implications for the planet – affecting everything from Detroit’s competitiveness to global warming to the economic pecking order in the 21st century. “The rest of the world doesn’t even realize that we are very likely ceding the next generation of energy technology to the Chinese,” says Todd Glass, an energy lawyer with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati in San Francisco. A 20-MINUTE DRIVE from the Great Wall, along the south shore of the Guanting reservoir, straw-hatted peasants tend their corn crop as the elegant blades of windmills spin idly above them in the gentle breeze, farming the wind. more here
China has been choking on smog for decades. They knew it was unsustainable, so they invested heavily in green technology. Yep, green energy production will be a boon to China's economy like the creation of the Internet by the USA. It's a shame, we will be the 2nd banana and end up licensing and buying most of the technology from China. It's all because the previous administration was trying to protect their friends in the fossil fuel industry.
I was listening to something on NPR the other day about the American cap and trade proposals which ventured off into about how many "green" projects in China are financed by Europeans purchasing carbon offsets, and what a boon they've been for environmentally friendly construction in China. In other words, the Europeans are spending a ton of money to help China get green, so they don't have to feel guilty about not doing it themselves.
China has, what, 4 times our population,yet they'll be producing a tad over 25% more renewable energy than the US. Per person that's still not that much. Per person China's energy usage is going to increase in the decades to come and this renewable energy will help, but it won't be able to keep up with the demand and they'll still rely heavily on fossil fuels just like most of the world. Personally I'm pretty curious how we're going to handle things when the fossil fuels start to run low. It won't happen in our lifetime as there is TONS of oil left in the wells we drill for currently(we leave about 30-50% of the oil in the resevoir i believe), we can't efficiently get it all out with current technology...but our dependence on petroleum will push companies to find ways to extract these resources. What we need is some sort of breakthrough in renewable technology b/c right now it's still expensive and inefficient.
Makes one wonder why European (or foreign, in general) investors are attracted to China. Maybe that's the one place in the world where you can actually get things done without all the political bullcrap you read/hear daily in the news?
China should be ruled by an omnipotent emperor, then I would invest kazillions of dollars, because I could be rid of the political bullcrap here.
Are you seriously arguing that the US is a theocracy due to a line from the pledge of allegiance (which, by the way, I hate and should be taken out, in fact I hate the pledge entirely). But don't you agree, that if China were ruled by an omnipotent emperor, it would be easier to do business there? I think it would. I mean you know who to impress. He says yes- ok. He says no- no way. There's no MOFCOM or local party bosses you have to impress - in short, most of the political bullcrap is gone.
Nope, if China were ruled by an omnipotent emperor, like Mao, then keeping the status quo would best serve the emperor and his rules. Going green would have been too much of a challenge.
Back to the topic, Sammy, why do you think Obama admin couldn't move his green energy agenda forward? Inherent political gridlock is a good answer?
Yes, that's a feature of democracy - it does allow for more gridlock than an unelected authoritarian one-party state. But we live with it. And actually so do you, don't you - why is that?
The Recession’s Real Winner China turns crisis into opportunity. Published Oct 17, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Oct 26, 2009 One year ago, the leading governments of the world saved the global economy. Remember October 2008: Lehman Brothers had disappeared, AIG was teetering, every bank was watching its balance sheet collapse. Around the world, credit had frozen and trade was grinding to a halt. Then came a series of moves beginning in Washington—bank bailouts, rescue packages, fiscal stimuli, and, most crucially, monetary easing. It is not an exaggeration to say that these measures prevented a depression. But the crisis has still fueled a major slowdown that has affected every country in the world. The great surprise of 2009 has been the resilience of the big emerging markets—India, China, Indonesia—whose economies have stayed vibrant. But one country has not just survived but thrived: China. The Chinese economy will grow at 8.5 percent this year, exports have rebounded to where they were in early 2008, foreign-exchange reserves have hit an all-time high of $2.3 trillion, and Beijing's stimulus package has launched the next great phase of infrastructure building in the country. Much of this has been driven by remarkably effective government policies. Charles Kaye, CEO of the global private-equity firm Warburg Pincus, lived in Hong Kong for years. After his last trip to China a few months ago he said to me, "All other governments have responded to this crisis defensively, protecting their weak spots. China has used it to move aggressively forward." It is fair to say that the winner of the global economic crisis is Beijing. (Click here to follow Fareed Zakaria.) Almost every country in the Western world entered the crisis ill prepared. Governments were spending too much money and running high deficits, so when they had to spend massively to stabilize the economy, deficits zoomed into the stratosphere. Three years ago, European countries were required to have a budget deficit of less than 3 percent of GDP to qualify for EU membership. Next year, many will have deficits of about 8 percent of GDP. The U.S. deficit will be higher, in percentage terms, than at any point since World War II. China entered the crisis in an entirely different position. It was running a budget surplus and had been raising interest rates to tamp down excessive growth. Its banks had been reining in consumer spending and excessive credit. So when the crisis hit, the Chinese government could adopt textbook policies to jump-start growth. It could lower interest rates, raise government spending, ease up on credit, and encourage consumers to start spending. Having been disciplined during the fat years, Beijing could now ease up during the lean ones. And look at the nature of China's stimulus. Most of U.S. government spending is directed at consumption—in the form of subsidies, wages, health benefits, etc. The bulk of China's stimulus is going toward investment for future growth: infrastructure and new technologies. Having built 21st-century infrastructure for its first-tier cities in the last decade, Beijing will now build similar facilities for the second tier. China will spend $200 billion on railways in the next two years, much of it for high-speed rail. The Beijing-Shanghai line will cut travel times between those two cities from 10 hours to four. The United States, by contrast, has designated less than $20 billion, to be spread out over more than a dozen projects, thus guaranteeing their failure. It's not just rail, of course. China will add 44,000 miles of new roads and 100 new airports in the next decade. And then there is shipping, where China has become the global leader. Two out of the world's three largest ports are Shanghai and Hong Kong. China is also well aware of its dependence on imported oil and is acting in surprisingly farsighted ways. It now spends more on solar, wind, and battery technology than the United States does. Research by the investment bank Lazard Freres shows that of the top 10 companies (by market capitalization) in these three fields, four are Chinese. (Only three are American.) It is also making a massive investment in higher education. "For the last decade, as China's economy kept growing at unprecedented rates, most Western analysts kept discussing when it would crash," says Zachary Karabell, the author of a smart new book, Superfusion, on the Sino-U.S. economy. "Now with China surging ahead through this crisis, all they can discuss is, when will China stall? It's as if they see the facts, but they can't quite make sense of them." China's strange mixture of state intervention, markets, dictatorship, and efficiency is puzzling. But it's time to stop hoping for China's failure and start understanding and adapting to its success.
I don't think I perhaps explained clearly. The issue with the Europeans is that they have two options - they can tear down their existing infrastructure, refit, and rebuild for green energy to reduce their carbon emissions. But if they don't want to do that, according to their laws, they can continue to keep using their crappy, legacy pollution generating infrastructure and pay someone else to make green infrastructure somewhere else in the world, which would "offset" their stinky, pollution emitting CO<sub>2</sub> producing power plants. Because the Chinese don't have existing infrastructure to tear down, it is more cost effective to pay for the new Chinese power infrastructure, than tear down all their own crap and rebuild it from scratch. China is the recipient of the funds because the power grid is adding new capability. The Europeans don't actually own the things purchased as offsets, so it isn't a issue of whether it is a good investment or not. It is just them paying someone else to do what they don't want to do - like the way rich kids in the 19th century used to be able to pay to not have to be eligible to be drafted to go to war.
There are times when merits of authoritarian system outweigh feel-good but can't-get-anything-done democracy. Left unchanged, few things are absolutely better than the rest. Democracy doesn't appear to be one of those things.
Sammy, you sound like one of those "I'd-rather-go-hungry-than-eat-meat" PETA models, but not nearly as cute.
A lot of the green projects in China would been done regardless of the offsets, getting paid for doing something you are going to do anyway is just bonus. You could argue if those euros are being spent effectively, this how Al Gore stays carbon neutral.
