For a long time people like George Bush have been using the ‘but what about China’ excuse as a reason for us not acting on climate change in the developed world.
Just this week Odin Knudsen, managing director for JP Morgan & Chase has said “Chinais making tremendous progress. It’s in China‘s interests and they want to be energy efficient.”
Admittedly Asia’s emissions have grown from 10% to 25% of global emissions in the last 30 years. But on a per capita historical basis Asian and other developing countries are still way behind countries lie the US and UK.
But countries like China see the writing on the wall (no pun intended). The UN calculates that food production will fall by 30% by 2050 in China due to climate change. China is the least resources rich country per capita in the world. Their rivers are almost ‘dead’ and they have terrible pollution and desertification problems.
Now China is leapfrogging many more developed nations to build huge amounts of renewable energy and energy efficiency.
This also bodes well for the successor to Kyoto due to be agreed by the end of 2009. Such a deal will need to include countries like China as well as the US and the word on the street is that this is certainly likely.
This is good news for the world. Its a shame the UK is not at the forefront of environmental technology which countries like China so badly need. Lack of Government foresight and support has left us way behind countries like Denmark and Germany. Perhaps it not too late – the UK has some of the world’s best science and engineering capability and could yet become a global player in the green energy revolution but this will need the kind of policy incentives QOL has proposed.
No related posts.