China Considers Array Of Carrots And Sticks On Energy & Climate - Reuters

[hatrack]

BEIJING- China is planning both incentives and harsher penalties to push companies and local governments to meet energy saving goals that Beijing fears may not be achieved amid strong economic growth, state media said on Sunday.

The revised regulations would strengthen enorcement and supervision, and include both incentives for saving energy and punitive measures against waste, said the state news agency Xinhua, which interviewed an unnamed National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) official.

The Financial and Economic Committee of the National People's Congress, or legislature, and the NDRC, the country's top economic planning body, are joining forces on the regulatory changes, which are expected later this year, the agency said. However, no details of any planned changes were revealed.

Beijing wants to reduce the energy usage of its booming economy by 4 percent this year and 20 percent by 2010, aiming to reduce a growing reliance on imported oil and the environmental impact of dirty-burning coal. But with gross domestic product (GDP) rising 10.9 percent in the first half of the year, pushing up energy usage by 0.8 percent for each unit of GDP, the prospects of reaching efficiency goals are dwindling.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/37542/story.htm

[GeorgeGist]

1. It would appear...

that China maybe screwed.

'China's problems extend beyond low industrial standards to wider issues including an ageing, creaking electricity grid and poorly constructed housing that loses excessive amounts of heat in winter or requires extra cooling in summer.

China's energy use for each dollar of GDP generated is 3.4 times the world average, according to Xinhua.'

[NNadir]

2. This same unit, GDP per dollar, is not so wonderful in the United States.

Although China has a rate that is almost 6 times higher than the United States, it has a rate that is 11 times higher than France.

Very clearly the United States is hardly a paragon of carbon intensity holiness. We don't hold a sooty candle to France.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1gco2.xls

When one considers the Chinese case and the US case side by side in per capita terms, it's pretty stark.

China obviates the Devil's bargain that the West seems to propose to offer. Nobody complains about Chad - which has a low carbon intensity and like Chad, starts with a "Ch." Nobody complains about Chadian goods flooding our country, or about Chadian engineers working for low wages. Until the oil resources there are developed, nobody gives a fuck about Chad. They can all starve to death in whatever fucking plagues, or whatever fucking wars, or whatever fucking famines they're having and that we're too busy to contemplate. No one will ever join Greenpeace to protest the environmental impact of Chad. Their carbon intensity is a 0.08 metric tons of carbon dioxide per 1000 dollars of GDP, lower than China, lower than the US, lower than France, lower than Norway, lower than Germany.

Is it because the Chadians live in a renewable nirvana? Well it is true that almost everything in Chad is produced by renewable means, mostly human and animal muscle. It is true that they burn a little wood too, or at least a little plastic from the cases the AK-47's come wrapped in, but mostly their forests are gone. They were burned to boil roots generations ago.

But the real reason Chad's carbon intensity is so low is that they are desperately impoverished in Chad.

It is all well and good to complain about China's environmental impact - which is vast by any objective analysis. But the main reason for China's environmental disaster involves a decision not to be poor anymore.

Could China have taken a different path? Maybe...but then again, maybe not.

When I was a college freshman, there were lots of people who toted around around Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, some who no doubt thrilled at the ideas that put Deng Xiaoping in chains because he sought a less than revolutionary accommodation with the West. Many of these people could wax romantic for hours on the evils of the "Capitalist Roaders" - I was known to participate in such conversations myself.

At the end of the day, though, nobody in the US who did these things were eating the meals provided by the Great Chairman, nobody was living in the living quarters he provided, and nobody was seeing their parents hauled away on the grounds that their grandfather's had been landlords. We were driving into the city to get the latest Grateful Dead bootlegs, or drinking imported tequila and smoking imported dope.

Nobody in the west was picking up the bodies from the 1976 serial dam collapses that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the space of a few hours in China. Nobody at my university with or without a copy of Chairman Mao's writings was living in mud, exposed to disease, to starvation, to harangues backed by violence.

Let's remember this: The Chinese started this tragic process with nothing. No one was screaming to help them. To the extent we thought about China in this country, it was mostly to think about how we might blow them up. It is hardly surprising that they more or less tell us and our environmental movement to fuck off. Many of the dressing up in bunny suits at Greenpeace shows are wearing Chinese shoes and fabric made in China.

They don't mention this at the Greenpeace stunt shows.

[Viking12]

3. Do you have some proof...

or is this more stuff you made up?

Many of the dressing up in bunny suits at Greenpeace shows are wearing Chinese shoes and fabric made in China. They don't mention this at the Greenpeace stunt shows