CHINA THE NEW GREEN

Somebody should tell the coal exporters that China may not want the stuff in the future. Maybe they get global warming.

Still it is going to be tough if the solar flares create a cloud cover such that there is global colling and less solar radiation. So perhaps the charts and diagrams Steve Fielding brought back from the Heartland Meeting might be valuable yet. Now Steve needs to fly to Beijing – an increase carbon footprint not withstanding – to present his charts and proof to the Chinese Government, and saves Australia’s coal exports and exporters.

Julian Borger and Jonathan Watts inThe Guardian reports:

China is planning a vast increase in its use of wind and solar power over the next decade and believes it can match Europe by 2020, producing a fifth of its energy needs from renewable sources, a senior Chinese official said yesterday.

Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice-chairman of China’s national development and reform commission, told the Guardian that Beijing would easily surpass current 2020 targets for the use of wind and solar power and was now contemplating targets that were more than three times higher.

In the current development plan, the goal for wind energy is 30 gigawatts. Zhang said the new goal could be 100GW by 2020.

“Similarly, by 2020 the total installed capacity for solar power will be at least three times that of the original target [3GW],” Zhang said in an interview in London. China generates only 120 megawatts of its electricity from solar power, so the goal represents a 75-fold expansion in just over a decade.

“We are now formulating a plan for development of renewable energy. We can be sure we will exceed the 15% target. We will at least reach 18%. Personally I think we could reach the target of having renewables provide 20% of total energy consumption.”

That matches the European goal, and would represent a direct challenge to Europe’s claims to world leadership in the field, despite China’s relative poverty. Some experts have cast doubt on whether Britain will be able to reach 20%. On another front, China has the ambitious plan of installing 100m energy-efficient lightbulbs this year alone.

Although not mentioned in the article the intermediate technology represented by solar energy, provided it can be mass produced to lower unit costs, probably makes sense for use by the millions of people who live in rural villages. Having viable villages, would then reduce the population pressures on the urban areas.

It is possible that Chinese policy is not just address carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere but also the distribution of quality of life.

India is another country that like China has similar population problems with less traditional energy resources.

It occurs to the principle should be that innovation for third world circumstances should occur in the third world (otherwise the poor countries, for whatever reasons, including imperialism) to avoid importing technologies and implicit cultural assumptions from other societies. The more intermediate or straight forward the technology the less likely it is to contain cultural baggage and the more adaptable to immediate circumstances. Ownership and control must be implicit. This principle is violated when crop seeds are subject to genetic modification and patented by transnational corporations, and then offered sale at each planting. The fruits of human scientific discovery within reason should be made available to all. Scientific discovery is part of the human commons.

ELSEWHERE:

Stay at home Steve, there is no problem with China. Gary at Public Opinion points out that the Chinese are still likely to want to import coal and will continue to be the world’s largest carbon emitter. Fairness and the need to reduce global greenhouse emissions does not come into it. The problems turn out to be not as easy as some of us would sometimes like to think.

John Quiggin comments on the clean industrial economy and the deep economic change implied by the challenge of global warming. The clean coal technology of carbon capture and sequestration has yet to prove it is an option. My suggestion that the new technology could improve the quality of life of the world’s poorest people is given support.

As reported by David Allen and Susan Goldenberg in The Guardian in the lead talks for the Copenhagen Climate Summit, the United States is not now insisting the China and other developing countries cut their greenhouse emissions to those of developed countries provided they take other measures, such as improve energy efficiency standards and take up renewable energy. Is this a good outcome, with the object of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in mind?

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