Based on reading of government documents and the writings of Chinese academics, Olivia Boyd's ANU masters thesis documents the role of three ideas in driving China's current energy and climate policies:
1. The idea of new energy security that stresses domestic, rather than international, sources of energy insecurity.
2. Green development and growing concern over the environmental and resource constraints on economic growth.
3. Low-carbon leadership, which posits a vision of China’s international political and economic influence based on climate leadership and low-carbon markets.
This is roughly what I have argued are China's motivations - for example in my CRWF 8000 lectures on energy and the environment that I gave in October - but I find a lot of resistance to accepting that China is serious about these issues and I based my view largely on conjecture rather than a close reading of the literature. This thesis stands on much more solid foundations.
I saw this paper on academia.edu, which I am finding more and more useful as people are posting interesting papers on it that I otherwise wouldn't see.
Money cannot be used to accomplish sustainability. If used, drainage of natural capital is excessive. Even segregation in society is caused by the control of economic system, driving the whole system to diminishing return of real wealth.
ReplyDeleteIts time to take action about the destroying function of economic-system and capitalism. When doing so, we can make plans for downsize our massive energy using, and accomplish real wealth such as clean air.
Nothing cant be done with fixing bad things with the substitute of money.
Come on, its 2012 not 1500?
I'm not sure about the relevance of this comment to this post....
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