Word: china
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...however, climate change for China has become the elephant in the room - an issue the country has to manage diplomatically as well as deal with substantively (two things that are emphatically not, from the government's standpoint, the same). Western environmental scientists and activists - who had directed most of their attention (and ire) at George W. Bush's U.S. - finally began embracing reality: China, with 1.3 billion people grasping the higher living standards that industrialization and market economics have brought, had only just begun to spew CO2 into the atmosphere, and it was already the No. 1 emitter. If climate...
Diplomatically, China began laying down public markers in advance of this December's U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen, which activists hope will succeed where Kyoto failed: getting governments to agree on enforceable reductions in carbon emissions. Earlier this summer, Beijing said it would commit to outright reductions of its CO2 emissions more than 40 years from now - by the year 2050. That two-generation time frame, which disappointed some critics, reflects a central reality in China. A lot of its leaders (not to mention its citizens) are deeply distrustful of the extreme rhetoric coming from the West...
...Tuesday at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, Hu made a widely anticipated speech on climate change, finely calibrated for diplomatic effect. He was nothing if not cautious, saying - accurately - that China was in the process of increasing its energy efficiency, reducing the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP. Indeed, China's energy efficiency has improved in each of the past two years, a trend likely to continue, because a huge surge in investment in energy-intensive industries like steel and cement in the early part of this decade has run its course...
While some observers were buoyed by Hu's statements, many environmental groups were disappointed. Most critics, however, have to temper their criticism. The irony is that China actually is developing renewable-energy sources faster than any other country in the world. Hu vowed yesterday that by 2020 renewable sources will account for 15% of China's total energy output - and there are industry analysts, both foreign and domestic, who believe that figure is probably conservative. The problem is that China is at the same time still investing massively in coal-fired electricity plants, the primary source of CO2 emissions...
...Read how China could turn green...