About a month ago, the report came out saying that China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest polluter. It is producing the most CO2, the main greenhouse gas and this is probably bound to increase. On the other hand, China could soon become first in using the renewable energy! How is that possible?
China mostly relies on coal for its energy: 75% of it. With the fastly growing economy and the need for coal becoming greater and greater, China's production of CO2 is bound to rise even in the future. Compared to USA which last year produced 5800m tonnes of CO2, China produced 6,200m tonnes. This was not expected to happen so soon.
These new figures only include CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement production, but not the sources of other greenhouse gases (for ex. methane from agriculture and nitrous oxide from industrial processes). They also exclude other sources of CO2 - aviation, shipping industries, etc. But the data approximation is sure enough, the scientists from Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency say.
But on the other hand, Chinese government is really doing much to pollute less. Actually, it is trying to make China a world leading nation in using a renewable energy.
They are closing old and environmentally harmful coal-fired power plants and replacing them with new and more efficient coal generators. While China can not escape relying on coal to fuel its rapid economic growth, the government seems to understand that they need to invest in clean energy.
If it will go as planned, China will reduce the amount of energy used to produce a unit of economic output by 20% over two years. The government has also told the 1,000 largest energy-consuming companies to cut their power consumption even more than that, according to a recent report. In 2006, approx. 16 % of China's electricity aready came from renewable sources. The goal is to increase the proportion of renewable electricity to 23 % by 2020.
The estimates show that, while China invested over $12 billion in renewable energy in 2007, (second only to Germany), it needs to invest $398 billion all together to reach its 2020 renewable energy goals, which means $33 billion a year on average.
Wow! It seems that China can not avoid the No. 1 place in the World, be it for good or for ill, in many things. It is simply huge. Olympics are over, but the race to become the most Eco friendly Country doesn't have just moral motivations. The economic growth of the future will be tightly connected with renewable energy and energy efficiency.
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2 comments:
Hopefully they are aware of greenhouse gases pollution and will manage to get ahead of forecast...
Yes. I have just read an opinion that Chinese big eco plans to invest in renewable energy etc. are more on less only on paper, and not much is done ti implement this in reality. I do not know, will have to research more on this and then I will write a new post.
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