Climate Change Hangs on China’s Embrace of Markets
Falling cost of renewables may tip faction debate away from coal, but there’s zero time to waste.
Many, many more of these, please.
Photographer: Xu Conguun/Visual China Group/Getty
For all the good intentions of the governments gathered in Madrid, a humbling reality hangs over the latest climate change conference. The effectiveness of what is agreed and done will ultimately stand or fall on the actions of just one country: China.
It was the rise of China and to a lesser extent India, with their associated energy demands, that has overwhelmed the emissions reductions chalked up by richer nations. Yet China’s headlong development of renewables has also helped make wind and in particular solar power the lowest-cost generating technologies almost everywhere.