This past spring Tristan Fischer, then chief executive officer of Camco International Ltd., a global firm that helps companies identify and develop projects that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, scoured China's countryside for a new breed of opportunity. Rather than looking for cheap shoes to stock the shelves of big-box retailers, he was searching for carbon-belching smokestacks in need of clean technology to offset carbon emissions and make them available for market trading. Though China has benefited from more than 25 years of rapid economic growth, that progress has also created an environmental nightmare of global proportions, with worse to come in the next 20 years. The country, which gets nearly 70 percent of its energy from burning dirty coal, is on track to surpass the United States as the world's top GHG emitter as early as the end of this year—more than a decade earlier than previously predicted—according to  International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol. In addition to GHG emissions, China has many other environmental problems, including water shortages and poor air quality that threaten public health and industrial output. With finite supplies of carbon-based energy and growing global demand, China will have to find other—and cleaner—sources of energy.

China's large and growing appetite for clean technology will create one of the biggest market opportunities in the next few decades, providing the potential for enormous wealth creation by cleaning up the ecological mess that has come from its miraculous, but dirty growth. Many climate change experts are betting that the solution to the world's environmental problems resides in the technological innovation coming out of Silicon Valley and other high-tech clusters in the United States and Europe. But to fully benefit from such technology, China will have to change its policies and consumer attitudes quickly to speed its adoption of the technology—or face significant economic, social, and public health ramifications. "China says it will obtain 15 percent of its [primary] energy from renewables by 2020," says Mike Eckhart, president of the American Council of Renewable Energy, referring to the goal China first announced in November 2005. "But China has got it backward. If it's not at 85 percent renewable, we're in big trouble." Though China is unlikely to change its renewable energy targets so radically, the central government is highly motivated to address China's chronic energy shortage and severe environmental pollution. Across the board, Beijing is enacting policies that will require huge investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, smart building, clean water, and cleaner coal. These initiatives include:

Read more at the China Business Review

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 11:31 am and is filed under energy, china. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.