China’s drive for wealth means end of our low-carbon dreams (Times, UK)

[jpak]

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article2673579.ece

Hu Jintao wants to make every Chinese twice as rich by 2020. He has done it once – in just five years, income per capita doubled to $2,000 (£983) - and the only obstacle in the Chinese President’s path is the fuel needed to stoke the boiler in China’s locomotive.

The president needs more copper, iron ore, zinc and natural gas. Above all, he needs more coal to keep the power stations humming nicely and more oil for Chinese cars and lorries. China accounts for more than a third of world demand for coal and the price in Australia soared this year as the People’s Republic switched from being an exporter to being an importer. If Mr Hu had a message for the world in his address to the Communist Party National Congress, it was this: we will burn our coal and, if we have to, we will burn yours, too.

What does this mean? Put bluntly, it means that the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions is dead and so is any prospect of persuading Beijing to bind itself to other curbs on carbon emissions. We can stop kidding ourselves that China will sign up to any green thingy that hinders his party’s ten-year plan to get rich quick. Instead, the ravenous demand for minerals and metals will continue and the desperate land grab by Chinese state companies in their pursuit of resources in Central Asia, Africa and Canada will become more politically embarrassing.

Until now, we in the West have been able to sit back and watch the global energy game passively on our Chinese-made flatscreen television sets. We could pretend that wind farms and wave machines could really make substantial contributions, that carbon trading could somehow make the cost of green energy disappear. We did not understand that the real cost of our affluent, energy-intensive lifestyles was being defrayed by sweated labour in a Chinese factory. While the price of clothes, fridges, TVs and toys was plummeting, we could ignore that petrol, transport and even bread and milk were in the grip of an inflationary spiral.

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[necso]

1. Exporting jobs and production

(wealth, technology, etc) from countries with strong labor, civil, environmental (etc) protections to countries without these things is a way to end-run and defeat these protections -- and to put pressure on these protections where they're strong.

And a few words on paper can't change this.

[XemaSab]

2. Boycott China

n/t

[Kolesar]

3. China thinks they can control the world's resources without a gigantic military

While sharing a border with Putinistan.

[hogwyld]

4. They really don't need a large military

All of their control is through currency, and other economic warfare. This will be their century for sure, just like the last century was our/europe's.

[robinlynne]

5. not entirely true. China is now building entire green cities, several of them with

solar energy and more, rooftop vegetable gardens. A fantastic architect/designer from california is designing entire new cities adn building them in china. I can't remember his name. Hey, it's more than the US government has ever done...

[Nihil]

6. I know that there are plenty of toxic places there at the moment ...

... but it is looking like the Chinese are betting on taking a hit now
in order to be miles ahead at the crunch.

They are gambling on getting the new, cleaner, more efficient stuff in a
decade or so while using every inch of old dirty method at the moment
in order to fund (or build) it.

The "gamble" bit is that by throwing the throttle open in this way, they are
bringing the global crunch that much closer so they *might* not make it.
On the other hand, they are also doing their best to make sure that no-one
else makes it either ... so they still win even if the jackpot isn't quite
as tidy as they'd like.

:(

[Bread and Circus]

7. China has more to lose from Global warming than a lot of areas.

A lot of China will end up under water if we get the huge rise in sea levels.