To Reuters quoting a local scientific report : ” Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods. “
“China faces extremely grim ecological and environmental conditions under the impact of continued global warming and changes to China’s regional environment,”
Given how the situation is dire already, one can wonder how it could be even worse… This sure explains why the People’s Republic is acting so massively on cleantech.
Indeed when I read Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, the pollution was already more than alarming in China. The chapter on the nation’s problems was already truly horrifying. Since then, it has even worsened. How could it be in ten years ?
This can be explained by many factors, but here is the main one : albeit China’s effort on cleantech, it is resorting massively to coal.
As Climate Progress notes :
That country’s use of coal has increased 500% since 1980, made up almost three quarters of Asian consumption, and half of global consumption last year.
(…) Under a do-nothing, business-as-usual scenario, the agency predicts China’s continued use of coal will increase carbon emissions so dramatically, the country’s climate pollution levels will double the U.S. in the next 15 years.
China has been deploying renewables at an astonishing pace. But its use of coal has far outpaced any sort of clean technologies being installed.
This explains why China is going so fast and so big on cleantech : it is for them a question of life or death…