Coal-hungry China's low-carbon ambitions are to its economic advantage as it jostles for position at Copenhagen with the US
China's intentions to set new and ambitious targets for renewable energy, revealed in the Guardian yesterday might come as a surprise. It is China's dependence on coal that has claimed our attention, and China's status as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases make its image as a climate change criminal hard to shed. But despite its poor reputation for climate policy, a quiet revolution is underway as China positions itself for a low carbon future.
China and the US are the two elephants in the climate change room, the two economic powers that between them account for half of the world's annual emissions of greenhouse gases. Both have been judged major obstacles to the global effort to reduce emissions, and each has used the other as its prime excuse: US conservatives argue that the US should only reduce emissions once China and other major developing countries have also pledged to do so. China insists that the problem was created by rich countries and they have the means and the responsibility to fix the problem.
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