{"id":29841,"date":"2008-12-16T14:38:42","date_gmt":"2008-12-16T21:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=29841"},"modified":"2008-12-16T14:38:42","modified_gmt":"2008-12-16T21:38:42","slug":"can-china-go-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2008\/12\/can-china-go-green\/","title":{"rendered":"Can China Go Green?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Robert Collier<\/a>, a visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley who is writing a book and China and global warming, has written a guest post on the Climate Progress blog answering the question, “Can China go green?<\/a>“:<\/p>\n \nAfter Saturday\u2019s sputtering end of the U.N. climate talks in Poznan, Poland, it\u2019s clearer than ever that the fate of the post-Kyoto negotiations will depend on whether China can be coaxed to adopt some sort of carbon emissions limits. But as this tug of war plays out in the next year and beyond, what\u2019s most important is not what China says on the diplomatic front but what it does on the home front.<\/p>\n The news on that score is mixed at best. On Friday, the central government admitted that the country is sliding backward in its crucial benchmark for its campaign to increase energy efficiency throughout the economy. The National Development and Reform Commission, China\u2019s super-cabinet agency for economic policy, announced that energy consumption per unit of GDP (what the Chinese call \u201cenergy intensity\u201d) fell 3.46 percent over the first three quarters. That\u2019s well below the goal of a 20 percent reduction from 2006 to 2010, which would require 4 percent annual reduction. In fact, 2008 will be the third successive year to fail to reach the benchmark. (The figures for 2006 and 2007 were 1.79 percent and 3.66 percent respectively.) Even worse, the pace of improvement slackened notably during this year\u2019s third quarter, with energy intensity falling only 0.58 percent.<\/p>\n All of this is especially bad news because the energy intensity campaign has been the Chinese government\u2019s single most prominent initiative related to global warming.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Robert Collier, a visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley who is writing a book and China and global warming, has written a guest post on the Climate Progress blog answering the question, “Can China go green?“: After Saturday\u2019s sputtering end of the U.N. climate talks in Poznan, Poland, it\u2019s clearer than ever that the fate of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[132,6],"tags":[6679,2836,2096,1018],"class_list":["post-29841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-crisis","category-sci-tech","tag-climate-change","tag-energy-conservation","tag-energy-demand","tag-sustainable-development","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\n