I’ve seen a bunch of right wing fools prattling on about The Green Dragon. This is apparently a bunch of regulations that only exist in their paranoid fantasy world but they’re reaching out and strangling our economy.
Here in the land of objective reality we’ve got a genuine Green Dragon - the People’s Republic of China is simply going to grind us into the dirt on renewable energy and conservation. We’re politically powerless to compete due to the delusions fostered by our rotten corporate media.
How many miles of high speed rail did America install last year? Zero. We’ve got exactly 456 miles of what we call high speed rail - the Acela averages a smoking 68 miles per hour and qualifies for high speed because it exceeds 120 miles per hour in some places.
China? They decided they needed high speed rail in 2007 and they install the equivalent of the Acela’s miles every three months. They’ve got over 6,000 miles now and they’ll have 16,000 when the system is complete. Rail doesn’t qualify as high speed in China until it averages 120 miles per hour. One six hundred mile run has an average speed of 190 miles per hour. They’ve got the world’s first operating maglev train, too - with a 270 mile per hour top speed.
Wind turbines? I compare China’s progress to ours and I want to cry. They’ve got an Advanced Renewable Tariff - if you generate a watt in China using wind someone is going to pay for it. Here in America wind farms sometimes have to pay to dispose off the excess electricity they generate.
Our economy is larger than theirs, at least for the moment, but China installed three times the utility scale wind turbines we did last year. I also see links that indicate they put up 80,000 smaller units in rural areas. We’re getting stomped.
Solar? They’re whipping our butts there, too. Engineers make just $7,000 a year according to this New York Times article. I don’t know what new engineers make here these days, but you can’t afford a cardboard box under a bridge in America on that kind of money. Global wage arbitrage laid waste to our manufacturing jobs and now it’s doing the same to our white collars positions, too.
They’ve got half of the world’s solar photovoltaic production and they’ve got the pedal to the metal. They also use solar water heating where ever possible. Not us - we wreck aquifers producing shale gas.
China acts strategically. America can’t even manage to behave rationally. Even a child can see where this is headed …