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China Is Winning Global Race To Make Clean Energy
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world's largest maker of wind turbines, has leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels, and is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants. These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China."
The OP is comparing a natural ressource only present in specific places with something that is easily manufactured anywhere. So, dependence on chinese wind turbines - hardly.
You cannot compare our need for oil to our "need" for manufactured goods. The former is a finite resource, you can only get it from a handful of places around the world, the latter will be sourced from literally whoever is cheapest. If China suddenly cut the west's supply of goods off I'm sure one of their cheapest competitors would happily step in to fill the void. Or if it got too expensive then they would be produced in the west.
I'm surprised that we can ignore all the toxic byproducts created by manufacturing solar panels and still call them "green".
Because there are no toxic byproducts created when fossil fuels are burned, or fossil fuel burning equipment is manufactured?
I've had this argument before. Nothing is really "green", unless you eradicate the human race completely. And then there will still be animal farts to deal with. But honestly when you tell me that a solar panel has a life expectancy of 25 years, well, spread out the manufacturing "damage" over 25 years. It's not so bad after all, compared to burning oil/coal for 25 years, is it?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Ok, if that upsets you just call them green-ER.
We consider CFL bulbs to be "green" by the same reasoning - they still have an impact on the environment, but it's much lower than that of normal bulbs.
When the US attacks Iran...
That will never happen. For all that the Iranian government has not exactly made friends in the West, I doubt that the Chinese would stay quiet. AND I doubt that the Russians would be happy with so much American presence on their southern flank. They stayed quiet about Afghanistan because the whole world was shocked by 9-11 and expected American retaliation. The Russians protested the Iraq war and Putin at the time (2003) called it an "error". Going into Iran, hmm, I think the Russians would side with China and take action.
Laugh if you must. Perhaps you don't feel threatened by those two very large countries. I'm sure the British scoffed at the American Militia in the late 1700's too. Remember that Iran is a lot closer to Russia and China than it is to the US. Technology alone doesn't win wars. Ask Napoleon. Ask Hitler. Ask the Romans. The strategic outlook for going into Iran is bad bad bad, which is probably why it hasn't happened yet.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They stayed quiet about Afghanistan because the whole world was shocked by 9-11 and expected American retaliation.
No, more than likely they stayed quiet because they expected America to end up in a long, protracted, bloody and costly war much like the Russians did 2 decades earlier.....
Monstar L
This will be a somewhat general statement, but I'm an American and the endless flood of stories like this is quite disheartening. I've left the USA now, because it seems to be in decline, but more importantly because no one seems to give a damn. Just today I read the article about China (where I currently live) leapfrogging the West in renewable energy products (which is clearly happening, despite the West's complaints), as well as an article on Cringely's blog about upcoming cuts to NASA (which is probably the single most important government agency for the future of humanity).
Then, I go over to facebook, and all I see are status messages from politically-minded friends, essentially acting like children watching a football game "Go Democrats! Fuck Republicans!" "Go Republicans! Fuck Democrats!", and no one seems to give a flying fuck about actually making changes that position the country for the future.
Take China as an example. Like every other country, they injected a huge financial stimulus into their economy, but they are doing it with purpose. They're building new highways to serve parts of the country presently unserved; they're building bullet trains faster than those in Japan, Korea and France; they're upgrading their power grid to technologies surpassing that of any other country. When all is said and done, they will have used the downturn as an opportunity to improve their country's efficiency.
Meanwhile, in the USA, they bailed out the oligarchy that runs the banking system, and then gave money to a bunch of aimless projects that just put band-aids on current infrastructure. There was no national call to action (for example..."we're going to put unemployed auto workers to work building an all-new high-speed rail system to link our urban areas" or "we're going to use this opportunity to completely replace our power grid, because we lose such a high percentage of power to inefficiency of the lines") that would have solidly improved the country for the long-term, improve its ability to transact business.
Anyone to this site ought to understand that networks are important. The Internet, power grid, airports, train system, highway system...all networks, that allow society to function. In the USA, only the Internet and highways actually work well (the power grid is antiquated and incredibly inefficient, the air traffic control system is a dinosaur and most U.S. airports are shitholes comparatively speaking to the many other countries, and although highways work well, they depend on a resource that is finite and running out). When will Americans wake up and start pushing the country to actually upgrade the country's networked infrastructure; prepare the country for the future?
I know this seems to be out of place here, but the fact that the USA is doing essentially nothing on the renewable energy front is just another example. After a while, it gets pretty disheartening.
gameDB
Maybe not. China has all the money to invest in research, and they're copying the "brain drain" that made the US pre-eminent in research by making a very cushy life for people that head to China to perform research.
What could so very easily happen is that China leverages its huge resources, targets them at research into energy, and gets "first past the post" on fusion. Then patents it. As the US has been very into all its legalities and IP agreements on a worldwide basis, it'd find that the only way to obtain Fusion would be to contract the Chinese companies to do the work. Or license it at a huge fee.
I'm an American and a few years ago, I went to Vietnam to visit with family (someone married Vietnamese in the family). While I was there, I saw something really interesting in terms of a cultural bias. The Vietnamese have a very strong tendency to favor cooperation over competition. That's the duopoly. The last I heard, their economy was growing at 8% a year.
The Japanese also demonstrated this with their desire to build one of the fastest, if not *the* fastest internet infrastructures in the world. The goal became a matter of national pride more than how a few executives could figure out how to line their pockets and still deliver lousy service while derailing every other effort to improve matters for consumers.
The Vietnamese and the Japanese are essentially descendants of the Chinese so they would share the same cultural value of favoring cooperation over competition. They have demonstrated this value over and over again with their resilience through wars, economic strife and growing pains.
In America, the profit motive seems to have priority over all other concerns in business. The profit motive overrules the desire to cooperate hands down, every time, at the firm level, and often within the firm. This behavior stems primarily from the desire to avoid shareholder lawsuits over share value in publicly held companies. Another motivating factor, in my opinion, is that executives who have so much money that they never have to work again start to see economics as a game of monopoly. Instead of being satisfied, they strive to get more and more. The result is that there is less and less for the rest of us to earn. Which brings "the rest of us" to the point that we can't even buy the stuff we make here, and we're getting to the point where we can't even buy the stuff "the captains of industry" want us to import from China.
Competition is not a sin. It's a part of life. But competition taken to it's logical conclusion is the decline of America. Until we get it that we're a team together and that there are bigger problems to solve than how to dominate a market, we're going to face a serious decline in our standard of living relative to other nations.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
If you can dump the effluent from your factories into the rivers and if you don't need to give you workers protective gear, its amazing how financially compelling your argument to build in China becomes. Obviously China will outstrip the workers paradises in Europe, and nobody, least of all the Europeans, are going to complain about polluted rivers and skies in China.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.