The Center for American Progress says China is kicking the U.S. a$$ in the great coal race:
The result is a report — authored by Melanie Hart, Luke Bassett, and Blaine Johnson — that offers the clearest picture yet of the big picture on coal in China. And a closer look, it turns out, utterly destroys the conservative argument. Far from sitting back and coasting while the US acts, China is waging an aggressive, multi-front campaign to clean up coal before eventually phasing it out — reducing emissions from existing plants, mothballing older plants, and raising standards for new plants. Unlike the US, it is on track to exceed its Paris carbon reduction commitments.
In short, while the US dithers along in a cosmically stupid dispute over whether science is real, China is tackling climate change with all guns blazing. The US, not China, is the laggard in this relationship.
...and the conclusion is stark:
The conservative argument that the US risks acting alone on climate change is the inverse of the truth. China is acting far more intentionally and aggressively than the US — investing more, building more, testing and experimenting more. If the US remains on its current path, by 2030 China will be the uncontested technological and economic leader on climate change.
And of course climate investments are only a small part of China’s sweeping plan to remake the global economy. Meanwhile, the US looks more and more like another powerful empire that got too bloated and stupid to see the future coming.
