This was good news yet still depressing:
As the United States takes its first steps toward mandating that power companies generate more electricity from renewable sources, China already has a similar requirement and is investing billions to remake itself into a green energy superpower.
Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Beijing is starting to change how this country generates energy. Although coal remains the biggest energy source and is almost certain to stay that way, the rise of renewable energy, especially wind power, is helping to slow China’s steep growth in emissions of global warming gases.
While the House of Representatives approved a requirement last week that American utilities generate more of their power from renewable sources of energy, and the Senate will consider similar proposals over the summer, China imposed such a requirement almost two years ago.
This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up.
I just can’t tell you how depressing it is to know that while we fight to get this sort of thing going in the US, one of the two major political parties does everything they can to oppose green energy while chanting “Drill, baby, drill!” Maybe once the Chinese show how profitable and valuable green energy is, the Republicans will notice.
And, it goes without saying, that a portion of the stimulus bill that every Republican voted against for purely political reasons went to green technology.
dr. bloor
Apt title for the thread. Between the vigorish on our debt to China and the fact that they’re going to take over as our Energy Daddies once the middle east runs dry, the US is going to be little more than one of their provinces by the time my son reaches adulthood.
demkat620
That’s the depressing part. You can’t fix a problem when half the country won’t accept that it is a problem.
Some of them won’t accept that oil is a finite energy source.
someguy
Last time I checked, there was only one party that mattered, with a supermajority in the House and a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate. Your beef isn’t with the Republicans. It’s with the Democrats who will kill the bill or turn it into even more of a corporate giveaway.
And I’m not sure that burning shit is exactly ‘green’ power. Seems to me it would produce an awful lot of CO2, not to mention that CO2 and ridiculous amounts of methane produced by famr animals…
Aaron
I think this is another nail in the coffin of the idea that republicans are for a free market. Surely, they are for the free market on their pet projects and other ideologically safe locations.
However, the fact that not a peep is said about the ability of market competition to provide sustainable, green energy in competition with the oil companies (while growing the economy, as well) indicates that the “free market evangelists” are not only wrong in their fanaticism (see Shock Doctrine), but that they only use free market defenses as a political bludgeon against things they don’t like.
IMO, we need to set a two term limit for Congressional Reps. The people we have in now, for the most part, suck
Bill E Pilgrim
I love a mandarin.
Or a koto, that’s a nice sound.
Really when you think about it the fact that a nation that until recently was largely farmers who cleared most of that land by forcibly removing the locals who were there still has huge swaths of not the most forward-thinking and enlightened people isn’t that surprising.
And I’m not talking about China, obviously.
The main advantage that a place like China has in that regard is only that they’ve made that shift even more recently than we did, and then the complicating factor of the revolutions and so on. And of course the ten gazillion thousands of years of rich history.
And now I have to go practice my mandarin. Anyone seen my pick?
Walker
I am sorry. The Chinese don’t scare me. Do you know what Chinese universities are known for? Cheating. Not research. Cheating.
I have peer reviewed a lot research submissions from Chinese universities. 90% of the time, you can reject them by looking at the first reference in the bibliography and comparing them for plagiarism. Getting graduate students is even worse. Unless you have a recommendation from someone in China that you trust, you might as well assume that their entire application packet is a lie. We have had cases where the person we interviewed on the phone (no video — our mistake) was not the person who showed up.
The Indians, on the other hand, are another matter.
Skepticat
But just think, we’ll have a ready source for cheap equipment such as solar panels and wind turbines. Why should we waste our time and treasure on industries like energy technology when we can just buy (more) from China?
The Grand Panjandrum
@Skepticat: Actually most of the equipment the Chinese are using is made here in the US or Europe.
Cat Lady
The slideshow with that article is breathtaking. I think wind farms are beautiful, and I wish the wanking going on in my own state about putting wind turbines in Nantucket Sound would stop. Learn to love them and fast.
burnspbesq
OT, but worth a read:
Larison is on a multi-post rant about Honduras, and I think he is exactly right. The Honduran military acted entirely correctly, under the Honduran Constitution and based on an order from the Supreme Court, in tossing Zelaya out on his ass.
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/07/02/libre-soberana-e-independiente/
Gee, imagine that: the United States on the wrong side of an issue in Central America. That’s NEVER happened before. Oh, wait …
cmorenc
If you want to know why most of our congressmen, and especially Senators, suck…well, there is a compound mix of reasons, but one key reason glaringly towers above all the rest: Do a simple calculation of how much money you have to raise EACH DAY over a year, holidays and weekends included, to accumulate each million dollars you need to spend each election cycle For congressional seats, that’s one million dollars over a two-year period, versus six for a Senate seat, but in the Senate election campaigns strongly tend to be more expensive by a much greater factor than the 3x longer period between election cycles.
The actual numbers?
US House of Representatives: $1370 per day over a two year period per 1,000,000 needed to be raised for an election campaign
US Senate Seat: $457 per day over a six year period per 1,000,000 needed to be raised for an election campaign. When you consider that 10,000,000 is a common threshhold these days to run a viable competitive Senate campaign in even a medium-sized state, that comes out to $9140 each day during their six-year term of office that a Senator must raise in campaign cash to stay viable come election time!
Can you raise an average of $9140 in contributions every single day over six years without giving in to tremendous pressure to de facto sell out to some of your contributors? I think the odds are against that, no matter how good a person you think you are.
So long as this financial dynamic is in place for congressional/senate campaigns, you shouldn’t be surprised at all the corrupt, tepid, counterproductive crap that comes out of the legislative process. It’s built-into the system, and only a relative few (e.g. Russ Feingold) are able to prevail against being fatally compromised by it.
Martian Buddy
@Aaron: If what the people from California have been saying in the budget crisis threads is any indication, they’d suck worse with term limits in place. Not only would the wingnut districts keep sending wingnuts to congress, but the overall quality of legislation would drop (partly due to inexperience and partly due to the constant turnover that two 2-year terms would lead to.)
cyd
A moment’s reflection should convince you that burning farm waste should be more or less carbon-neutral. Plants extract carbon from the atmosphere, and turn them into biological molecules via photosynthesis; the animals that feed on them incorporate these same molecules into themselves. When burnt, this carbon returns to the atmosphere, in the same quantities.
In contrast, when we burn fossil fuels, the carbon which had previously been buried safely beneath the earth is released into the atmosphere.
dbrown
First, China is not a threat to the US.
Aside: in the 1960’s they built 18 land based ICBM’s (single warheads, ours can have 12 – 24) and to this day that is all they have. They just do not desire to threaten us (we have over a thousand.)
Sea based – they have two subs that carry two missles each (single warheads) … our subs carry 24 (18 warheads each) and we have over twenty such subs.
As for China going green they are helping us like no tomorrow – think; every dollar of oil they do not buy is CO2 not in the air and oil that allows the supply to stay ahead of demand – read less costly oil for us.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
More likely, the Republicans will just start comparing anyone who supports green energy to Mao instead of Hitler.
.
media browski
JC,
This is not unlike the space race. Early on, the Soviet’s command and control space program was kicking our capitalist @ss. But eventually we over-whelmed them. Not with NASAN but with the flourish of innovative companies that bid for NASA contracts.
Same thing is happening right now with renewables. I’m sitting here inthe back of the conference I’m running this week on tech innovation in the electric industry where we’ve had groups coming in talking about the thousands of MW of wind coming online in tx and the northern plains, carbon seq tech, SW solar, and the smart grid that will better manage it. All that was missing was a clear signal from regulators, leadership from the whitehouse. It’s happening, and anyone who thinks the Chinese will maintain their lead needs to take another look at the history of technology.
cyd
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Actually…
JD Rhoades
The Republicans violently reject reasonable policies for no other reason that “that’s the way it’s done in Europe, and we’re not Europe.”
Why would it be any different with China?
Docrailgun
The kids are already learning Mandarin… “Nihao Kai-lan” on Noggin
JK
How do you say “Drill, Baby, Drill” in Mandarin?
Mike in NC
Um, no. About as much chance that Mark Sanford will grow a conscience and resign as governor of South Carolinastan.
LD50
The Chinese clearly don’t understand that Al Gore is fat.
grumpy realist
Exactly similar to what I saw in Japan during the 1990s. Japan developing energy-sipping technology like mad because of the high prices of energy, then being able to turn around and sell the technology all over the world. US continually whining about how they were getting shut out of the Japanese markets when the main reason was our technology simply wasn’t up to the level of what Japan had already developed.
The US still has a chance with some of the basic technologies (nanotech, etc.) to leapfrog again, but I doubt it’s going to happen when 1/2 of the US population is still stuck in a “what, me worry?” mode.
No religious nut will ever admit that the US population has the standard of living it has because of stuff developed by people who believe in the scientific method. If the US ever does become a “biblical country” along the lines the Religious Right so fiercely longs for, expect us to have an economy based on goat-herding and subsistence farming, because that’s the level of technology their cultural mindset supports.
Which is why at some point Saudi Arabia is going to collapse, big time. The oil will run out and as far as I can tell, there is little that can take its place. A little bit of agriculture, sand for silicon wafers and placement for solar power grids, that’s all I can see. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have a science and technology base and their culture has kept them from developing one. Furthermore, their culture tells them to throw away half of their possible intellectuals and keep them from possibly contributing anything…..
rachel
@Bill E Pilgrim: “Koto” is a Japanese zither. You probably mean “zheng”.
dr. bloor
@dbrown:
No one is suggesting that China poses a military threat. The logic of your last comment leaves me wondering how you managed to write this in 1952 and send it through time to this thread.
SGEW
Against all expectations, today’s David Brooks column is recommended (somewhat) on this topic, based on the Aspen Super Wealthy Ideas Festavalooza debate between Niall “Chimerica” Ferguson and James “I Lived There, Fool” Fallows (via Fallows, natch).
Alan
The Republicans will use Chinese green efforts as a tool to mock American environmentalists and pro-green Democrats as “crazy socialists” right up until the moment that such policies become extremely profitable for the Chinese — at which point, the Republicans, without missing a beat, will blame the Democrats for a “green technology gap” or some such nonsense which they will blame entirely on our failure to pass green reforms over their filibusters.
To reference an earlier thread, btw, there is a reason so many of us call them traitors.
Enlightened Layperson
Given China’s large (and ever growing) share of world pollution, anything they to to reduce it deserves our unreserved applause.
Wingnuts have long argued against any reduction in greenhouse gases on the grounds that the Chinese weren’t doing anything so why should be. Doubtless they will now change their tone to, we mustn’t reduce, the Chinese are doing it and we wouldn’t want to be like them. I have a great suggestion. Let’s ignore the wingnuts.
Down and Out of Sài Gòn
I am sorry. The Chinese don’t scare me. Do you know what Chinese universities are known for? Cheating. Not research. Cheating.
And so fucking what, Walker? We’re talking here about power generation, not plagiarism. If the Chinese copy German or Japanese or American green technology, it’s no fair to the firms that come up with the ideas – but at least there will be less coal burning smokestacks.