"While China aims to hold the patents on tomorrow's clean technologies, the US remains in the climate change dark ages
China has finally put some numbers to its climate plans, a significant move in the multidimensional elaborate game of the Copenhagen climate summit. [...]
The announcement was greeted with a muted sigh of disappointment. The target will not bring a reduction in China's emissions: reducing carbon intensity means only that carbon emissions will grow at a slower pace than the economy – in theory allowing for growing prosperity without mounting damage.
[...]
There is little doubt that, had the US acted, China would have felt obliged to raise its own game. [...] There are, though, important underlying differences. In the last three years the Chinese have taken important strategic decisions on climate change: they have recognised that it threatens China's future prosperity, that low carbon technologies are the key not only to climate security but to technological leadership, and that, if there is to be a future, it has to be green.
None of these insights are evident in the US, outside the relatively small circles of activists, scientists and policy makers whose arguments are routinely drowned out by the tendentious noise of Fox News. A sclerotic political system, in which legislators depend for election funding on fossil fuel and other lobbies, risks replicating on a national scale the fate of General Motors. [...]
China is investing in its vision of the future: Beijing wants to move the economy up the value chain and aims to hold the patents on tomorrow's clean technologies. Chinese officials are working out how to use China's unique advantages to achieve that ambition – the ability to deploy new technologies rapidly, the capacity to experiment at scale with major projects in nuclear and coal and the political habit of planning strategically, setting national goals that its bureaucracy is forced to accept.
[...].
But for China, though the outcome in Copenhagen may affect the pace of change, it will not change the underlying strategy. [...]"
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