PodcastChina's Surprising Green Transformation
Here’s what he said:
If we want our society to prosper, [we need] openness to the best ideas. This is what we need to learn.
China has this very concerted effort, from the top down and from the bottom up, to create what they call an ecological civilization.
One of the big problems in the transitions that we’re talking about, energy, agriculture, are the vested interests who want to keep things the way they always were.
China brought down the cost of renewables to a remarkable degree. […] That’s because they invested in it so heavily. This is one of the things that gives great hope to the world.
You can combine regulation with the sponsoring of the new, and then let capitalism take over. That’s a model that Europe could do more of if we were more open.
Being an autocracy in itself doesn’t guarantee a good climate policy […] I hope it’s an experiment in which we will see liberal democracies and China in a virtuous competition to see who can do it better.
