Why Hasn't China Gone Green?

 

A special Labor Day essay!

China is the world’s biggest investor in and producer of green energy. Their participation in solar and wind energy is nothing short of breathtaking. They would seem to be a model to the rest of us of how an economy can go green.

They are, however, also the world’s biggest investor in and producer of dirty energy, in particular coal. In addition, they notoriously pollute the environments of their own billions of expendable citizens.

They are the best and the worst. What is going on here? May I speculate?

First, they know that green energy is the unavoidable path of the future. Civilization will collapse into a dark ages pile of wiggling failures if we do not embrace renewable, clean energy. They know this as much as anybody. They do not deny it, unlike the executives of American coal and oil corporations. Accordingly, China (led by its top-down imposition of economic priorities) leads the world in technological innovation of green energy. Someday, they are poised to lead the world.

Second, they also desire to bury the United States. I do not mean in a nuclear or violent way. But they want to bury us as a serious economic competitor. They plan to do this by out-producing us. They appear to be successful. They sell much much more to us than we sell to them. They will do this by using clean energy or dirty energy, whatever is at hand. Once they have buried us, they will be glad to switch to green energy, and at long last let their gasping, sick citizens breathe freely and let the skies become clear.

They are walking a tightrope, but they have done so many times before. They appear confident that they will lead the post-American world into a green energy future.

The Great Leap Backward

Donald Trump has promised to make America great again. He is doing this in several ways. He just announced a funding cut (over a billion dollars) to the National Institutes of Health. We can go back to the days when if you get sick, the doctors won’t know what to do, and you can just go home and die.

Another way Trump is making America great again is by sending us back several decades to the time when all of our energy requirements come from coal and oil. I am sure that the massive campaign contributions from coal and oil companies is simply a coincidence. Most industry and most people want clean energy, but the coal and oil companies do not. America is one of the leaders in developing new clean energy technology. This is about to end, and doesn’t China know it. China is actually happy about Trump’s decision because it means that China will become the supreme leader in the energy of the future. It is almost like a president saying that we will resist this new internal combustion technology and focus our regulations to ensure that horses continue to dominate our transportation sector.

But clean energy technology has an irreversible momentum. There is no way to stop it, no matter how much Trump tells us that solar and wind energy are from the Devil. People want it, industry will continue to invest in it despite federal government threats. In addition to being good for the Earth, it is superior technology. This point was made in an article published in Science by someone you’ve all heard of.

The climate denialists—among whom there are very few scientists—will now have a meeting at which they will proclaim that all scientists who study global warming are traitors to America. The meeting will be chaired by Texas Republican representative Lamar Smith, who is famous for having said that he saw no evidence for global warming. The democratic staffers piled up papers of evidence in front of him, but he didn’t even look in that direction, so he still has not seen the evidence. Just about the only scientist they can find to defend the denialist theory is John Christy, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Christy has made it clear that his opposition to global warming science is based on his reading of the Bible—which, by the way, he is reading incorrectly. Here is a report from Science magazine about this upcoming meeting.

Thank you, President Trump, for leading us boldly into the twentieth century. Next up, the nineteenth century!