Remember the clean technology race with China in those halcyon days of 2009 and early 2010, when Lindsey Graham (R-SC)warned the United States that it was at risk of losing the green jobs game to China and Tom Friedman pontificated on the need for a price on carbon to aid American competitiveness in the great game of world leadership?
Is it game over?
These days, I hunt environment and energy policy-oriented news stories to feed to Progressive Caucus staffers and anyone interested in @CPCEnvironment and @CPCEnergy. It's part of Progressive Congress News, which in turn is part of Progressive Congress. Suffice to say that I spend a lot of time gathering dots of hard news stories in hopes of connecting them into a picture.
The last three days have been filled with dots.
California's solar power increasingly Chinese made
GE Energy to announce clean coal venture with China's Shenhua group
General Electric, Duke Energy, and Babcock & Wilcox all announce deals with China
Massachusetts outrage: Evergreen Solar's exodus to China
China has the world's highest wind power capacity
China got over 1/4 of its electricity from clean energy in 2010
Connected yet?
Robert Reich describes the real economic lesson China can teach us: China has a strategy, while the US has surrendered to global corporations and its leadership doesn't have a clue.
Here’s the real story. China has a national economic strategy designed to make it, and its people, the economic powerhouse of the future. They’re intent on learning as much as they can from us and then going beyond us (as they already are in solar and electric-battery technologies). They’re pouring money into basic research and education at all levels. In the last 12 years they’ve built twenty universities, each designed to be the equivalent of MIT.
The United States doesn’t have a national economic strategy. Instead, we have global corporations that happen to be headquartered here. Their goal is to maximize profits, wherever they can make the most money. They’ll make things in America for export to China when that’s most profitable; they’ll make it in China and give the Chinese their know-how when that’s the best way to boost the bottom line. They’ll utilize research and development wherever around the world it will deliver the biggest bang for the dollar.
No contest.
SolveClimate has a slightly different version of Military vs climate security in the United States and China:
...an October report titled “Military vs. Climate Security: The 2011 Budgets Compared,” reveal that the U.S. climate change budget has more than doubled—from $7 billion to $18 billion—since 2008. Military spending in that same time period has risen from $696 billion to $739 billion. For every dollar spent on climate in 2008, the U.S. spent $94 on the military. That will drop to a $41: $1 ratio this year.
...it isn’t enough to stay competitive. The Chinese are spending one-sixth as much as the United States on their military and investing twice as much on clean energy technology. For every dollar China spends on climate, between $2 and $3 goes toward its military.
Small wonder that Energy Secretary Steven Chu thinks that the United States needs to get its groove back. David Roberts is blunter: We can't beat China at cleantech as long as GOP keeps kissing fossil-fuel ass.
But Katie Fehrenbach's summary of early 2011 clean tech news wins points for being both terse and accurate: That giant sucking sound you hear in greentech? It's China.