I never thought that green accounting lends itself to sensational journalism, but here it is: A couple years ago, China announced plans to come up with measures of "Green GDP." Today, the Financial Times reports that China is scrapping these plans. The National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing declares them to be "virtually impossible" to implement.
So far, bad news all around. Hidden behind FT.com's subscription wall comes the second part of the story: Instead of working on "green GDP", NBS will focus on "green accounting." They will still crunch the numbers, but then report them next to GDP, not instead of it. That should have been done all along.
The real news is hidden in the very last paragraph:
Beijing is pushing a number of measures to improve environmental protection and energy efficiency. The government's chief economic planning agency has launched a programme mandating cuts in energy use by 1,000 enterprises that account for 47 per cent of industrial energy consumption.
It doesn't say how deep these cuts are, but not bad for a start.
