photo uploaded by daechang
At a recent panel discussion on China’s green tech boom, it was noted that in a few years China will overtake the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. That led San Francisco venture capitalist Bryant Tong to repeat a provocative point he had read in a Beijing newspaper: If the West relies on China to be the world’s factory, churning out cheap goods that promote our economic prosperity, doesn’t it also bear responsibility for helping China reduce its contribution to global warming from the two coal-fired power plants it brings online every week, in part, to satisfy our consumerist desires? It’s worth putting down your iPod (made in Shenzhen) and closing your Dell laptop (assembled in Xiamen) to ponder. Open a bedroom closet or kitchen cabinet and try to find something not made in China. Remove all the China-produced products from your local Wal-Mart hypermart and you probably could squeeze the rest of the merchandise into a 7-Eleven. With discussions beginning on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, and the need to include China in any future accord, it’s sure to be a topic of growing debate.
Green Wombat 
Yep, once again the West and most notably the US is responsible for all the wrong in the world. Now the Chinese think we are to blame for their headlong rush to industrialize and consume like the rest of the “Western World”. Well, maybe it’s their desire to live a better life, maybe their tired of the super low protein diet and want what we have, because what we have, in our lives is good. It is good to be comfortable in our warm houses in the winter, it is good to have reliable safe transportation and clean food. For sure they are coming from behind and catching up fast, but the kind of power plants they build and the pollution they do to their own land in addition to the tons of carbon they pump out, are choices that they have made, that unfortunately, now with our New 2007 Hind Sight Spectacles is likely causing global problems. Those are their choices to live a good life. Maybe we should go back to whale oil for our lighting needs…. Stop blaming and get to the solutions.