Earth Equity News

Chu in China and Washington. By Michael Grunwald, Time, August 13, 2009. "'What the U.S. and China do over the next decade,' declared Energy Secretary Steven Chu, 'will determine the fate of the world.' Chu had gone to Beijing's Tsinghua University, the 'MIT of China,' to make his half-apocalyptic, half-optimistic pitch about climate change... Chu is Mr. Outside, mixing plain English with arcane data to make the case for twisty lightbulbs, white roofs, geothermal heat pumps, electric cars, advanced research and carbon-pricing. He sounds like Al Gore but with unimpeachable scientific credentials, a nonpartisan aura and a rumpled charm. At 61, he still radiates boyish impatience as well as boyish enthusiasm, with a megawatt smile that appears without warning... The clear message Chu took home from China was that its leaders are dead serious about climate change and clean energy. They won't accept an emissions cap before we do -- understandably, since our per capita emissions are still four times higher -- but they're preparing for a carbon-constrained economy. They already have cars that are more fuel-efficient than ours, and they're developing more-advanced transmission lines. They're still building a new coal-fired plant almost every week, but two years ago, they were building two of them every week. They're making a huge push into wind and solar and should be the world's largest producer of renewables by 2010. 'Every Chinese leader I met was absolutely determined to do something about their carbon emissions,' Chu said... The clean-energy bill is on hold until health care is done. There's still a broad perception in Washington that dealing with climate change will require sacrifices that Americans won't tolerate. The Chinese don't seem to worry about that. At one point, Chu acknowledged that democracy makes change a lot tougher, although he hastened to add that he's a big fan of democracy."