In the US: J O K E; in China: J O B S. Thomas Friedman's New York Times column today points out:
While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.
"There is really no debate about climate change in China," said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. "China's leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don't waste time questioning scientific data." The push for green in China, she added, "is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe pollution every day."
And because runaway pollution in China means wasted lives, air, water, ecosystems and money - and wasted money means fewer jobs and more political instability - China's leaders would never go a year (like we will) without energy legislation mandating new ways to do more with less. It's a three-for-one shot for them. By becoming more energy efficient per unit of G.D.P., China saves money, takes the lead in the next great global industry and earns credit with the world for mitigating climate change.
Using low cost capital, supported by the state, Chinese corporations can take control of this emerging and disruptive technology.
"China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world," said Liu. "It has the unique ability to pit low-cost capital with large-scale experiments to find models that work." China has designated and invested in pilot cities for electric vehicles, smart grids, LED lighting, rural biomass and low-carbon communities. "They're able to quickly throw spaghetti on the wall to see what clean-tech models stick, and then have the political will to scale them quickly across the country," Liu added. "This allows China to create jobs and learn quickly."
Here is a case in which an innovative American company can not get the capital to operate in the president's own country...and he wants to keep the jobs here rather than offshoring them.
We (sort of) have those capabilities. At the World Economic Forum meeting here, I met Mike Biddle, founder of MBA Polymers, which has invented processes for separating plastic from piles of junked computers, appliances and cars and then recycling it into pellets to make new plastic using less than 10 percent of the energy required to make virgin plastic from crude oil. Biddle calls it "above-ground mining." In the last three years, his company has mined 100 million pounds of new plastic from old plastic.
Biddle's seed money was provided mostly by U.S. taxpayers through federal research grants, yet today only his tiny headquarters are in the U.S. His factories are in Austria, China and Britain. "I employ 25 people in California and 250 overseas," he says. His dream is to have a factory in America that would repay all those research grants, but that would require a smart U.S. energy bill. Why? ...
Biddle had enough money to hire one lobbyist to try to persuade the U.S. Congress to copy the recycling regulations of Europe, Japan and China in our energy bill, but, in the end, there was no bill. So we educated him, we paid for his tech breakthroughs - and now Chinese and European workers will harvest his fruit. Aren't we clever?
Read the whole thing and ask why the "free market" ideologues have taken control of this argument.
Then, remind Ken Buck and the other Republicans running here that our tax dollars are spent to develop effective technologies which Chinese, government-sponsored firms convert to useful technologies exported to the US. Something is very wrong here, and it is partly due to Republican politicians' refusal to support green energy through tax and fiscal means which would seriously cut the deficit. Or, maybe their solution is to eliminate all government support for education, research and innovation and just create more "innovative" financial instruments? |
