The opposition's opening remarks
By the time one finishes reading the declaration at the heart of this debate—"This house believes that China is showing more leadership than America on climate change"—China will have built another 1,000-MW coal plant. That is an exaggeration, but just hardly. By most accounts China adds one or two massive coal-fired generating plants to its grid each week. It has the most voracious appetite for coal on earth, consuming more than the United States, Japan, and European Union combined. China has increased its coal consumption by 128% since 2000—it accounts for（对。。。负有责任，占了）， more than 40% of all coal burned on the planet—and is now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The Energy Information Administration figures that China's coal energy consumption will double again over the next 20 years. And yet there are some who argue that China provides a model for dealing with climate change that should be instructive（有教育意义的） to us in the United States. This argument studiously avoids【aw&i】故意避开了 the Middle Kingdom's gorging on coal, and points instead to a supposed large-scale investment in developing renewable energy technologies.【这段写的真好】 Curiously, as this typically plays out, it is never suggested that we should actually follow China's lead. Rather, China's shining example of investing in renewable energy should compel the United States to do something that China itself expressly refuses to do, namely, cap carbon. The impetus for a claim of Chinese leadership on climate change is either to frighten the United States, or make it feel guilty enough, to imposing restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. And while the goal seems rather clear, the facts upon which it is said to be based are quite a bit murkier. Peggy Liu, it is heartening to note, represents the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy. Collaboration and cooperation are wonderful things. But it should be noted that the JUCCCE represents the mainstream American green view on China no more than I do. Most prominent American greens don't talk of cooperation with China, but of competition. One of the more curious themes to emerge over the past year as proponents of carbon regulation have stated their case has been the notion of a clean energy race between the United States and China. President Obama says we are engaged in a competition to lead the global economy. A venture capitalist, John Doerr, and General Electric CEO, Jeff Immelt, made similar though even more urgent claims in an influential Washington Post op-ed. The Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, lamented in Congressional testimony that the United States has stumbled out of the blocks in this race. Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress has written that passing a cap-and-trade bill is key to winning the so-called clean energy race. Taking it even further, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, has suggested our clean-energy competition with China is the arms race军备竞赛 of the 21st century. If we don't catch up and surpass what China is doing, the thinking goes, we are doomed注定失败，注定不好用在I中. "China is fast emerging as one of our main rivals in the race to build the technology that can help us achieve energy independence," declared a New York Senator, Charles Schumer, recently. "We should not be giving China a head start in this race at our own country's expense." Therefore we have to adopt a regime that curbs our greenhouse gas emissions, even though Beijing is defiant about setting its own limits on emissions. It isn't just the Obamas, Kennedys and Immelts who warn of敬告 China's green efforts outstripping（strip跑道）
our own. The Chinese do as well, talking up their considerable efforts to combat climate change at the same time as demanding that the United States slash greenhouse gas emissions by 40% over the next decade. Don't be fooled by China's motives. They have nothing to do with saving the planet but everything to do with establishing a competitive economic advantage over the United States. Carbon regulation in the United States will hike energy costs and drive opportunity and economic growth to low-cost China. That will only increase China's greenhouse gas emissions further. Don't be fooled by China's "facts", either. Yes, China is investing heavily in green tech, but it is investing in every energy technology as it seeks to fuel给。。添加燃料 continued economic growth. "Wind energy is developing fast, but coal-fired power is developing even faster," conceded the Greenpeace China's climate director to the New York Times. China's renewable energy push(=development ) is minuscule compared to its fossil fuel binge海吃胡喝, and no amount of （a mount of一点）green veneer can cover up that coal hard fact真尖锐. Furthermore, much of China's renewable technology production is designed for export. Just 20 MW out of the 820 MW of solar photovoltaic generators produced in China in 2007 were for the domestic market. The majority was to be sold to customers in the west, where we are taking steps to saddle our economies with the considerably higher costs associated with renewable energy production. Beijing couldn't be more pleased with that arrangement. Until it accepts a cap on its own carbon emissions, its production of wind turbines and solar panels for export is merely the modern fulfilment of Lenin's dictum about the communists selling capitalists the rope with which to hang themselves. However little the left feels the United States is doing to combat climate change by limiting emissions (and I would agree, though thankfully, that it isn't very much), American efforts still are far more sincere and effective than anything under way in China with one exception: the expansion of nuclear power. But I am not bothered by China's carbon insincerity, except in so much as it cons the United States into adopting even more stringent climate policies than are already on our books. Instead, we should celebrate China's coal bingeing and the resultant economic growth. Improving the well-being of a billion people in the near term trumps wearing the carbon hair shirt to atone for a climate crisis that, if it does exists, is still a century away. | 
发表于 2010-2-6 22:15:53
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