A solar thermal power station at the Dunhuang Photovoltaic Industrial Park in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, in October.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/BloombergChina Slowdown Pushes Top Polluter Towards Emissions Peak
Weaker economic growth and a surge of clean energy are combining to deliver a watershed moment in the global warming fight.
For nearly forty years, Liu Fuguo worked at the belching coal-fired power stations that helped fuel China’s astonishing economic rise. That surge also transformed the nation into the world’s largest polluter, delivering an unprecedented acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions that has steered the planet toward a calamitous climate path.
As an engineer at plants from Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia, it never crossed the 60-year-old’s mind that he might one day switch — with China — from a reliance on fossil fuels to embrace clean energy. In the northwestern Gansu desert on an October afternoon, however, Liu stood at the center of one of the most complex arrays of solar power ever constructed, in a vast, circular field of about 12,000 mirrors harnessing sunlight.