I was riveted by a story in the New Yorker about China’s huge shift towards renewable energy. I’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s pieces in the New York Times about it for a while, but it’s easy to dismiss an opinion columnist as hyping something, even when you kind of agree with him.
A first-person account of the massive investment that China is making, though, made much more of an impact on me. Called the 863 Program (it was conceived in March of 1986), the Chinese initiative hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been dedicated, where in North America, the political will has come and gone, started and stopped:
In 2001, Chinese officials abruptly expanded one program in particular: energy technology. The reasons were clear. Once the largest oil exporter in East Asia, China was now adding more than two thousand cars a day and importing millions of barrels; its energy security hinged on a flotilla of tankers stretched across distant seas. Meanwhile, China was getting nearly eighty per cent of its electricity from coal, which was rendering the air in much of the country unbreathable and hastening climate changes that could undermine China’s future stability. Rising sea levels were on pace to create more refugees in China than in any other country, even Bangladesh.
In 2006, Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place.