China’s climate awakening
It took a long time for China to wake up to climate change. But in the coming years the country will become a world leader on tackling the causes of a warming planet. To understand why, consider how quickly China has come around on the issue.
In the relatively recent past, many Chinese believed that climate change was a lie made up by developed countries to contain the growth of developing ones, especially China. Even after scientists accepted the correlation between global warming and carbon emissions, many in the government clung to the idea that countries have a “common but differentiated responsibility”—with an emphasis on “differentiated”. Whenever an official was able to resist foreign pressure in international discussions, he was considered a hero. Since industrialisation, the argument ran, developed countries have accumulated a larger carbon footprint.
photo credit: Vlastula