After news that China is slated to overtake the U.S. in greenhouse gas emissions, China is responding, according to the Christian Science Monitor:
With China’s carbon footprint expected to outsize America’s within a year, officials in Beijing appear to be backing away from their view that global warming is a Western problem that developed countries must solve.
While still insisting on their right to industrialize hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, Chinese leaders are showing the first tentative signs of readiness to accept mandatory emissions-reductions targets. And they are setting themselves all kinds of green goals.
As the world’s No. 2 greenhouse-gas culprit – closing in on the 6 billion tons of CO2 produced by the US annually – China is under pressure both from other nations and from its own scientists’ predictions of a potentially catastrophic future if global warming is not curbed. [Full text]
– See also “China must keep energy, emission ‘promises’ -Wen” from Reuters.
