China, World’s Biggest Polluter, Hits Carbon Goals – 12 Years Early

I suppose it's true that in an autocracy, there are less people that need to be convinced that something is a problem before something can be done, but it's not like democracies are doomed to indecision. We have been able to take action before, we can take action on this. It's not that hard. But we do need to stop making excuses.

In fact what's become clear in just the last five years is that the environment is a huge issue in China and the government is primarily responding to the people's demands for cleaner air etc. Polls of the population [1] have been revealing for a while that it's a primary concern, only behind corruption and price inflation. More importantly most of the environmental efforts here aren't directed by some central authority in Beijing, instead what you have are the regional municipalities like Shanghai aggressively targeting metrics much, much tougher than those imposed by Beijing.

HN's view of China is truly toxic and even on positive articles we get this sort of fantasy commentary (also see the majority of comments below) but the Chinese investment in pollution reduction is really good news and puts to shame what's happening in the US where, just today, coal regulations were wiped out. We can only hope that more countries will follow this model.

[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-o...

Ok

Our governments are already playing favourites by frequently subsidising fossil fuels, funding roads but not rail etc.

For example, the most recently elected British government happily swung the pen and removed nearly all the feed-in tariffs on sustainable energy. In the process eliminated much of the nascent, and growing, sustainable energy sector in the UK. The most charitable way I can view that is as incredibly blinkered and short sighted.

"Dabo Guan, a professor of climate change economics at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Guan and his colleagues estimate..."