If you look beyond the North American rhetoric, China is walking the cleantech talk
I’ve always thought it was amusing how politicians in the U.S. and Canada talk about China as if it’s this backward nation that produces energy from nothing but coal, and how poor China needs help from the West to clean up its act. Uh, yeah, well, perhaps we’ll need help from China to clean up our act.
The Wall Street Journal has a good story here that puts the whole issue into perspective. It’s not that China doesn’t have its problems, and it could certainly benefit from some homegrown innovation, but there’s no question that China’s manufacturing might is beginning to expand into cleantech and the country is taking the economic opportunity — against the backdrop of climate change — very seriously. It should not be underestimated. Solar. Wind. Electric bikes. Electric cars. Batteries. Carbon capture. Watch out…
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
December 16th, 2009 at 11:14 am
But it makes is feel so much better about ourselves when we know how evil and filthy China is!!!!
Whether China, India or your next door neighbor is “environmentally unfriendly” or not is irrelevant but often used in discussing environmental policy. IMO, this logic stopped making sense around the age of 8.