This morning’s Washington Post proclaims “Electrical Inefficiency A Dark Spot for China.” It seems that lighting up the beautiful Bund comes at the expense of blackouts and brownouts in the less glitzy, more industrial parts of the country. But there’s a simple solution:

“A lot of China’s energy security problem could be solved if you improved our domestic efficiency,” said Yan Maosong, an industrial engineering expert at Shanghai University who advises the central government. “From generation to transmission to power usage, in every link of the chain, our energy industry is not very efficient. Top government leaders have not paid enough attention.”

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Stories like this don’t tell themselves.

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Sound familiar?

Also notable was the article’s attribution of China’s wastefulness to it’s hybrid economy — a hybrid between “communist roots and a free-market future,” that is.

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