total energy use, hydropower is destined to remain a small share of
the overall energy mix.
Coal therefore is destined to remain a principal source of energy
for China well into the twenty-first century, despite the ominous impli-
cations this carries for pollution in China and climate change globally.
When I left China in 1997, it was widely expected to overtake the
United States as the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter by 2020.
Thanks to its acceleration of energy efficiency reforms, China now
might not pass the United States until 2030. But either way, the addi-
tional carbon certain to be released is significant.
Nonetheless, Chinese officials make no apologies for having
become a greenhouse giant. “Global warming is not on our agenda,” a
senior official of the Environmental Protection Bureau in Chongqing,
the Yangtze River city that is perhaps the single most polluted place in
China, said dismissively when I asked about his agency’s strategies to
reduce carbon dioxide emissions. As if to underscore his contempt for
the issue, the official added an assertion he had to know was false—“All
the pollution produced in Chongqing is landing here in Chongqing, so
it’s not a global problem”—before he declared, “We can’t start worrying
about carbon dioxide until we solve the sulfur dioxide problem.” The
official and his counterparts throughout China considered the sulfur
dioxide problem more urgent because acid rain was landing on them
and causing tangible damage today, while carbon dioxide emissions
threatened merely potential, far-off, worldwide damage.
China has little patience with Western finger-pointing about cli-
mate change, regarding it as a means of constraining China’s eco-
nomic development. That is a paranoid view, but it contains a kernel of
truth. For all its nuclear weapons, grand ambitions, and mobile phone-
wielding businessmen (and women), China remains a poor country.
On a per capita basis, it consumes only 10 percent as much energy as
the United States, the chief culprit among the rich nations whose ear-
lier industrialization had already condemned the world to climate
change. So why, ask the Chinese, should we be held back? Should not
the right to emit greenhouse gases be shared equitably among the
world’s peoples? To the Chinese, global warming is a rich man’s issue,
and if he wants China to do something about it, he has to pay for it. As
22 Mark Hertsgaard