China

China Leads Renewable Investments

- Adam Clare
A graph showing increasing investment in renewables with China outpacing other countries.
The country has nearly tripled spending on renewables since 2015

China is clearly winning the global race to renewable energy, with a near trebling of investment into the sector over the last decade. China’s manufacturing industry is primed to produce solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, and so on for the rest of the world. There’s a lot of profit to be made as the globe gets fully electrified and moves away from fossil fuels. The Republicans in the USA have guaranteed victory to China in their recent budget. Of course, other nations can all vie for second and ought to as the future is green power and whichever nation can produce renewable energy in the most economical way will dominate the later half of the century.

China is on an absolute tear installing wind and solar power. The country reached nearly 900 gigawatts of installed capacity for solar at the end of 2024, and the rapid pace of building has continued into this year. An additional 198 GW was installed between January and May, with 93 GW coming in May alone.

For context, those additions over the first five months of the year account for more than double the capacity of the grid in California. Not the renewables capacity of that state—the entire grid.

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Big Box Stores Remove Products Used to Violate Human Rights

- Adam Clare
safe texting

Two of the largest retail chains in the United States have stopped the sale of Chinese-made surveillance products used by the Chinese government to violate human rights. This move to ban the sale of particular Chinese surveillance goods is a direct reaction to those companies benefiting from the ongoing Uyghur genocide happening in China. Indeed, Chinese companies are both using forced labour to produce products and using those products to further suppress the Uyghurs.

The pressure from human rights groups seems to have worked to convince Best Buy and Home Depot to stop selling these goods made to oppress people.

The U.S. government says Beijing relies heavily on Hikvision, Dahua and other technology companies to supply the surveillance equipment to surveil the Uighur population. The Biden administration called the human rights abuses in Xinjiang a “genocide,” and blamed Chinese video surveillance manufacturers of having “been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.”

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Dolkun Isa, the president of the World Uyghur Congress, welcomed the “meaningful actions” by the U.S. government with bans on forced labor and sanctions for Chinese companies, but said that it’s “unacceptable that there are still American companies directly helping further the repression.”

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China’s Efforts to Fight Pollution are Working

- Adam Clare


Back in 2014 China decided it was sick of producing so much pollution and decided to do something about it. China started to close coal plants, spent $120 billion cleaning air in cities and launched similar initiatives throughout the country. The results have been longer life spans for people in impacted areas and a more efficient economy. The rapid pace of change is impressive even for China as no other country has been so quick to reduce pollution, that being said China has a long way to go to reach WHO standards seen in the rest of the world.

Although most regions outpaced their targets, the most populated cities had some of the greatest declines. Beijing’s readings on concentrations of fine particulates declined by 35 percent; Hebei Province’s capital city, Shijiazhuang, cut its concentration by 39 percent; and Baoding, calledChina’s most polluted city in 2015, reduced its concentration by 38 percent.

To investigate the effects on people’s lives in China, I used two of my studies (more here and here) to convert the fine particulate concentrations into their effect on life spans. This is the same method that underlies the Air Quality-Life Index that can be explored here. These studies are based on data from China, so they don’t require extrapolation from the United States or some other country with relatively low concentrations of pollution.

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China Launches Major Effort to Clean Its Water

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Water

China’s amazing economic growth came at the expensive of the natural environment (amongst other pains) which the country is now trying to revitalize. The country is literally paying the price of not having good environmental protecting policies, let this be a lesson to other countries that good policy can prevent a lot of bad things.

China spent $100 billion in the first half of 2017 to clean its waterways and update policies. Indeed, stricter rules have been in place around water management and new equipment has been installed to clean water. There have been over 8,000 water clean up projects launched this year! This is a massive effort that is good to see in a country that for too long neglected the environment.

With China desperate to increase supplies to guarantee future food and energy security, it promised in 2015 to make significant improvements in its major waterways and curb untreated wastewater from highly polluting sectors like mining, steelmaking, textiles, printing and oil refining.
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In a bid to protect rural water supplies, China also identified 636,000 square kilometers (246,000 square miles) of land that would be made off limits to animal husbandry, and it shut 213,000 livestock and poultry farms in the first six months.

The ministry also said 809 new household sewage treatment facilities were built in the first half, but the regions of Tianjin, Jiangxi, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Xinjiang, Hubei and Guangdong were behind schedule, it said.

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Beijing Replacing Gas Taxi Fleet with Electric Taxis

- Adam Clare

small car

Smog and Beijing go hand in hand due to the explosive growth of car ownership and poor environmental management. That’s starting to change. China’s capital city has mandated that when any new taxi hits the street that it has to be electric. This follows their efforts to replace their buses with an all electric fleet, which included putting 100,000 electric busses on the roads. This electrification will make huge strides in better air quality and advancing the electric car market.

All newly added or replaced taxies in the city of Beijing will be converted from gasoline to electricity, according to a draft work program on air pollution control for Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and surrounding areas in 2017.

This is expected to create a market worth nine billion yuan (1.3 billion US dollars).

One expert says that such plan will not only make great contribution to environmental protection, but will drive the development of the new-energy vehicle industry.

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