China's Rapid Renewables Surge
calkins
August 02, 2008, 03:01 PM posted in General DiscussionA little off topic, but still relevant article about China's surge in renewable energy:
China's Rapid Renewables Surge
A couple quotes I thought were interesting:
"...if you look at emissions on a per capita basis, we are not the biggest emitters because we have 1.3bn people."
The report suggests that if China's population emitted as much as US citizens, its total emissions would be roughly equivalent to those of the entire planet's human activity.
------------------
The report showed that China was only responsible for about 7% of greenhouse gases emitted in the period before 2002, when more than 90% of emissions from human activity were released.
But since the turn of the century, it added, China's portion has been growing steadily and now accounts for 24% of the global total.
calkins
August 02, 2008, 09:01 PMChina doesn't need to hunt for renewable energy sources - it has already found them...wind power, solar energy, biomass, and other sources. And tax incentives have been implemented.
It still has a long way to go, but the start is what's important.
barryb
August 04, 2008, 12:41 PMHi, Calkins, sorry about my sloppy Saturday thinking. I meant good luck to China in developing reliable, practical forms of alternative energy generation. Good luck finding ways of storing the energy: obviously, solar systems don't work at night; wind turbines are useless on still days, etc.
It seems China has big advantages when it comes to renewables: it has sunny deserts; it can push through projects without years of public enquiries (c.f. the UK has an excellent coastline for reliable tidal power and offshore wind farms, but endless arguments mean they may take decades to be built, if they ever happen.)
Excellent news! This article from MIT cheered me up. MIT scientists have just made a "giant leap": a new way of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using solar energy (like plants do). We can store hydrogen. It's cheap and simple: MIT
(I was depressed thinking about the people and the $1 trillion (more?) blown to bits in the deserts and cities of the Middle East in the drive to secure oil. Thinking about ridiculous schemes to make fuel from food - systems that use more energy than they produce! As for plans to sweat oil out of rock by burning natural gas... aaaarghhhh... )
barryb
August 02, 2008, 07:54 PMGood luck to the Chinese in their hunt for renewable energy. With its enterprise and drive America should have cracked the energy problem, by now... so, what has it been doing instead???... where has its capital gone???... oh well, this isn't the place to get political.
Worth remembering, though, that a large part of China's energy consumption is used by industries that the West has outsourced. So China's pollution is our pollution. Have we cut back to compensate? Not a chance!