China

For the first section of my blog let me concentrate on two of the biggest entities when it comes to our overarching challenge of confronting climate change. These entities are China and the United States, who together account for over half the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The approach that these two countries therefore take towards combating climate change will have an enormous bearing on the world as a whole.

The reason why I want to concentrate on these two countries is that over the past three months I have had the privilege of traveling through both of them. In China I undertook a self-funded tour to gain greater insight of how the green economy was being advanced in that country. This tour was in fact part of my much needed and long overdue research for my Masters dissertation on the subject. I will spare you some of the boring details, as these will be in my thesis anyway, and just share with you my overall impression of China.

After traveling to Beijing, Baoding, Shanghai and Suzhou and visiting Solar companies, wind energy associations, International NGO’s, technology parks and many other entities I was left with the distinct impression that China is either going to push the world on to a sustainable technology path or it is going to push us ever faster down the path of global destruction.

Everything in China happens on a grand scale and when they put their mind to it they can accomplish something in a very short space of time. Take wind energy for instance, fifteen years ago they were nowhere in the global production of either wind generated energy or in turbine manufacturing. Now they have 21GW of installed wind energy, which is equivalent to half of South Africa’s total installed energy generation capacity, and they have four globally leading wind turbine manufacturers. They achieved their wind energy target for 2020 in 2010 and they are now setting a new target for 2020 of 150 GW of wind. Compare that to South Africa where we have only reached 5 percent of our 2013 renewable energy target, which is a tiny fraction of China’s numbers. 150GW is just short of four times our total installed energy capacity in South Africa!

This would all seem very impressive until one finds out that China expects their total energy capacity by 2020 to rise to just over 1150 GW. This means that as rapidly as they are bringing renewable energy on stream they are building coal fired power stations just as fast, adding to the global concentration of greenhouse gases. As one university professor told me, there is a difference between building a green economy and a green society.

At the moment China’s interest in renewable energy seems to come more from the need for greater energy security and the desire to become a global exporter of these technologies rather than the need to reduce greenhouse gases. There is a change underway though, and as China looks to build up its domestic market we could see technologies such as solar panels being used to a much greater extent domestically rather than simply exported. China is already the largest user of solar water heaters in the world and the fact that environmental concerns was recognized in the 11^th Five Year Plan as the greatest constraint to their future economic growth reveals that China will continue to grapple with the complex challenge of sustainable development. Let’s just hope that they can work it out for both their sake and the rest of us!

Lance Greyling