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To be completely fair to everyone else here, it's easy to do something like that in an authoritarian environment. You can build something like Three Gorges beca

To be completely fair to everyone else here, it's easy to do something like that in an authoritarian environment. You can build something like Three Gorges because you don't care about the people jumping up and down saying "No". You can also mandate the use of solar and wind energy in a way that you just can't mandate things in other nations. You don't care about the other branches of the energy sector that might be hurt by your policy of "playing favorites". You can swing a pen and hundreds of thousands in carbon heavy sectors are, all of a sudden, out of work. It doesn't matter to you, because you don't have to win elections. I don't doubt that China is ahead of schedule. In fact, I'd be shocked if China was not in the lead globally on adjusting our energy generation mix. They'll have really clean looking dispatch stacks long before we do in the US, but at what cost? (And I'm not just talking about financial costs here.) That's what we have to keep in mind. The fact is that addressing climate change is usually much more than a technology problem. How easy those non-technology aspects of the problem are to overcome greatly depend on what you are willing to tolerate from the authorities charged with addressing the climate change issue.

mempko 8y ago
What a bunch of nonsense. China is responding to it's people's concerns. If the US had a functioning democracy, it would also have dramatically reduced carbon emissions.
mcv 8y ago
Maybe it is easier to address various problems in an autocracy, but there's still way more that democracies can do to tackle these and other problems. In fact, there are plenty of democracies that are doing a lot to curb carbon emissions or fight other problems. And in the end, reducing carbon is just another problem that requires political action. I suppose it's true that in an autocracy, there are less people that need to be convinced that something is a problem before something can be done, but it's not like democracies are doomed to indecision. We have been able to take action before, we can take action on this. It's not that hard. But we do need to stop making excuses.
dnomad 8y ago
The idea that this is how China works, that the President issues a dictate and a billion plus people just immediately jump to it with no questions asked, is pure racist nonsense. It gets spouted and accepted uncritically on HN because but it has no basis in reality. In fact what's become clear in just the last five years is that the environment is a huge issue in China and the government is primarily responding to the people's demands for cleaner air etc. Polls of the population [1] have been revealing for a while that it's a primary concern, only behind corruption and price inflation. More importantly most of the environmental efforts here aren't directed by some central authority in Beijing, instead what you have are the regional municipalities like Shanghai aggressively targeting metrics much, much tougher than those imposed by Beijing. HN's view of China is truly toxic and even on positive articles we get this sort of fantasy commentary (also see the majority of comments below) but the Chinese investment in pollution reduction is really good news and puts to shame what's happening in the US where, just today, coal regulations were wiped out. We can only hope that more countries will follow this model. [1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-on-the-rise-in-china/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-o...
siruncledrew 8y ago
A bigger, longer-lasting change on cutting pollution would be educating the public and encouraging appreciation for the environment. And not throwing raw garbage into rivers.
- konschubert 8y ago
  Yeah because that worked so well in the last decades /s
sigi45 8y ago
So USA is not smart enough to get this going. Ok
- thrden 8y ago
  not that its not smart enough, just that it has to listen to alternative groups. Nuclear power would be one way current technology could drastically reduce C02 Emissions, yet well intentioned, intelligent actors oppose the proliferation of such plants. While China could simply ignore those groups, the US is required to give them a voice in the political process.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
That doesn't seem to be being fair to anyone at all, China or Western. I'm not seeing indication many governments in the West care about people jumping up and down over their green-lighting yet another fracking project, gas power plant, etc. Or that they're taking the demonstrable environmental issues with plastics, climate change, biodiversity and so on the least bit seriously. Our governments are already playing favourites by frequently subsidising fossil fuels, funding roads but not rail etc. For example, the most recently elected British government happily swung the pen and removed nearly all the feed-in tariffs on sustainable energy. In the process eliminated much of the nascent, and growing, sustainable energy sector in the UK. The most charitable way I can view that is as incredibly blinkered and short sighted.

mempko 8y ago

What a bunch of nonsense. China is responding to it's people's concerns. If the US had a functioning democracy, it would also have dramatically reduced carbon emissions.

mcv 8y ago

Maybe it is easier to address various problems in an autocracy, but there's still way more that democracies can do to tackle these and other problems. In fact, there are plenty of democracies that are doing a lot to curb carbon emissions or fight other problems. And in the end, reducing carbon is just another problem that requires political action. I suppose it's true that in an autocracy, there are less people that need to be convinced that something is a problem before something can be done, but it's not like democracies are doomed to indecision. We have been able to take action before, we can take action on this. It's not that hard. But we do need to stop making excuses.

dnomad 8y ago

The idea that this is how China works, that the President issues a dictate and a billion plus people just immediately jump to it with no questions asked, is pure racist nonsense. It gets spouted and accepted uncritically on HN because but it has no basis in reality. In fact what's become clear in just the last five years is that the environment is a huge issue in China and the government is primarily responding to the people's demands for cleaner air etc. Polls of the population [1] have been revealing for a while that it's a primary concern, only behind corruption and price inflation. More importantly most of the environmental efforts here aren't directed by some central authority in Beijing, instead what you have are the regional municipalities like Shanghai aggressively targeting metrics much, much tougher than those imposed by Beijing. HN's view of China is truly toxic and even on positive articles we get this sort of fantasy commentary (also see the majority of comments below) but the Chinese investment in pollution reduction is really good news and puts to shame what's happening in the US where, just today, coal regulations were wiped out. We can only hope that more countries will follow this model. [1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-on-the-rise-in-china/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-o...

siruncledrew 8y ago

A bigger, longer-lasting change on cutting pollution would be educating the public and encouraging appreciation for the environment. And not throwing raw garbage into rivers.

konschubert 8y ago
Yeah because that worked so well in the last decades /s

sigi45 8y ago

So USA is not smart enough to get this going. Ok

thrden 8y ago
not that its not smart enough, just that it has to listen to alternative groups. Nuclear power would be one way current technology could drastically reduce C02 Emissions, yet well intentioned, intelligent actors oppose the proliferation of such plants. While China could simply ignore those groups, the US is required to give them a voice in the political process.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

That doesn't seem to be being fair to anyone at all, China or Western. I'm not seeing indication many governments in the West care about people jumping up and down over their green-lighting yet another fracking project, gas power plant, etc. Or that they're taking the demonstrable environmental issues with plastics, climate change, biodiversity and so on the least bit seriously. Our governments are already playing favourites by frequently subsidising fossil fuels, funding roads but not rail etc. For example, the most recently elected British government happily swung the pen and removed nearly all the feed-in tariffs on sustainable energy. In the process eliminated much of the nascent, and growing, sustainable energy sector in the UK. The most charitable way I can view that is as incredibly blinkered and short sighted.