This article on Steven Chu, the new Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) — note: I am a consultant for the DOE — provides an interesting perspective on China’s attitudes about climate change. Is it possible that, despite its rapid expansion of “dirty” coal power and its polluted cities, China is more serious about climate change than the US? Particularly, are China’s leaders more willing and able to respond to the threat than the US’s divided political system, where many of our politicians still deny that climate change even exists?
Excerpt:
The clear message Chu took home from China was that its leaders are dead serious about climate change and clean energy. They won’t accept an emissions cap before we do — understandably, since our per capita emissions are still four times higher — but they’re preparing for a carbon-constrained economy. They already have cars that are more fuel-efficient than ours, and they’re developing more-advanced transmission lines. They’re still building a new coal-fired plant almost every week, but two years ago, they were building two of them every week. They’re making a huge push into wind and solar and should be the world’s largest producer of renewables by 2010. “Every Chinese leader I met was absolutely determined to do something about their carbon emissions,” Chu said. “Some U.S. policymakers still don’t think this is a problem.” (Read “One Voice in a Billion: Changing the Climate in China.”)
In fact, GOP leaders have said that global warming is a hoax, that fears about carbon are “almost comical,” that the earth is actually cooling. When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years — and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: “See? It’s gone down! The earth must be cooling!” But then he got serious, almost plaintive: “You know, it’s totally irresponsible. You’re not supposed to make up the facts.”
Welcome to Washington, where a Nobel Prize winner’s opinion is just another opinion, where facts are malleable and sometimes irrelevant. It’s tough to be Mr. Outside in a town where policy happens on the inside. Congress is blocking Chu’s plan to create eight “Bell lablets” to investigate his game changers, along with his efforts to scuttle hydrogen-car research he considers futile. He’s trying to make DOE’s bureaucracy more nimble, but it still pushed less than 1% of its stimulus funds out the door in five months. And while Chu ends speeches with Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about “the fierce urgency of now” — one of Obama’s favorites — the clean-energy bill is on hold until health care is done. There’s still a broad perception in Washington that dealing with climate change will require sacrifices that Americans won’t tolerate.
The Chinese don’t seem to worry about that. At one point, Chu acknowledged that democracy makes change a lot tougher, although he hastened to add that he’s a big fan of democracy. “We just have to do a better job communicating the facts so the electorate can educate themselves,” he said. Soon he sounded like he was talking to himself again: “Let’s be positive. The facts really do matter to the American people.”
