China
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China to de-stink landfill problem with giant deodorant guns
Residents of Beijing are making a stink about the excessive odors residing around the city’s many landfills, which are rising in number nearly as quickly as the Chinese population. (Maybe the government should institute a “one landfill per couple” policy?) But instead of cleaning up this mess of problems for those down in the dumps, […]
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What can China teach us about electric bikes?
In part 2, I described the extraordinary growth of electric bikes in China, which grew from novelty items in 1998 to almost one e-bike per ten people today. What caused this growth? What can we learn from China about overcoming the Northwest’s four barriers to e-bikes? The economic context of e-bikes is radically different in […]
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Jeff Goodell: ‘It’s a bad idea for geoengineering to be the equivalent of the Pompeii sex room’
Jeff Goodell.To head off the worst impacts of climate change, should human beings deliberately engineer the earth’s climate? Or rather, should they try, with uncertain odds of success and at least some chance of inadvertent catastrophe? Should they even learn how, or would the knowledge itself wreak havoc? These are the sorts of questions journalist […]
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China and India to report their global warming pollution every two years
Both China and India have now reaffirmed that they will report their global warming emissions every two years. The framework of this was agreed in the Copenhagen Accord which outlined that every two years developing countries will report their national emissions inventories and emission reduction actions based upon internationally agreed guidelines (as I discussed here). […]
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Where do things stand on international efforts to address global warming?
It is almost three months after the Copenhagen Accord was hammered out by 28 of the world’s key countries that represent over 80 percent of the world’s global warming pollution and some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (as I discussed here). Given the state of the Accord just after Copenhagen […]
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On rooftops worldwide, a solar water heating revolution
The harnessing of solar energy is expanding on every front as concerns about climate change and energy security escalate, as government incentives for harnessing solar energy expand, and as these costs decline while those of fossil fuels rise. One solar technology that is really beginning to take off is the use of solar thermal collectors […]
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China's changing energy economy
In Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, I have presented a plan to dramatically reduce carbon emissions by increasing energy efficiency and replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. In the push to reduce emissions, all eyes are on China, the world’s most populous country and now also the world’s top carbon emitter. Here are […]
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Making sense of Wal-Mart’s big green announcement
Wal-Mart made big news today with a major commitment to trim its greenhouse-gas emissions. Here’s the context: Over the past five years the retail giant has taken big, splashy steps to save energy, reduce waste, and sell cleaner products, like compact-fluorescent light bulbs. It’s given less focus to the impact of the factories that churn […]
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Getting China wrong
It’s been a long time since Copenhagen. A few weeks after it ended, chatting to a friend about some stupid comments I’d overhead during that long last night, he said that “everyone gets a pass for anything they said during the first week.” The first week after Copenhagen is what he meant — a time […]
