“China Pledges to Use More Alternatives to Oil and Coal,” by Mark Landler, New York Times, 5 June, p. B1.
When we did the NewRuleSets.Project workshop on “Asian Energy Futures,” we had our experts, way back in May 2000, pick a number for the percentage of energy China would generate from alternative sources in the year 2020. They picked 9 percent, or roughly double what the Department of Energy said in their spring 2002 International Energy Outlook publication (5 percent).
Why did my Wall Street experts say this? They said China and the rest of Asia would simply choke on all that coal-generated pollution if they did not push alternative fuels as much as possible as their economies continued their dramatic growth in coming years.
I wrote the first edition of the Asian Energy Futures report in late 2000.
Then DOE put out their 2001 report. In that report, DOE basically doubled its projected share of alternative fuels in China’s energy profile for the year 2020 from 5 percent to 10 percent. It was such a profound shift in just one year’s time. Why? DOE’s estimates of the current percentage of alternative fuels in China’s mix jumped from about 5 percent to 8 percent. Most experts felt that number was soft, meaning inflated by the Chinese government (not directly so much, but because China was claiming to be using so much less coal in generating its total energy over the late 1990s—shutting down mine after mine).
So I came out with a revised Asian Energy Futures report in mid 2001. Why did I feel the need? China was growing so dramatically and the profile of its energy usage was altering quite rapidly year to year. When DOE then projected that recent Chinese data into 20-year projections, the swing on the far end of that calculation was simply enormous. My report felt very out of date in just a year, and China was the problem.
So I updated it the report. Check it out if you want on the NewRuleSets.Project site.
Why do I recount all this? The article I cite from the NYT today announces with great exclamation that China is now declaring its alternative fuels share of total energy will reach 10 percent by 2010!
Will China make it happen by then? Possibly. The bigger point is that they realize they need to do more to reduce their use of coal and oil and—in the process—reduce both pollution emitted and dependency on foreign sources (which is skyrocketing right now and will in the future almost no matter what China does—but it has to do all it can anyway).
Was this foreseeable? Absolutely. Just thinking systematically about developing Asia and its rising energy requirements, as we did in the project with the help of our Wall Street partners, meant you could easily imagine such moves well in advance of their appearance. Understanding such macro-driving factors in international relations is how you imagine where countries’ strategic interests are heading over time. When you see a confluence of such interests, you see the utility of strategic partnerships and alliances.
This is why I see China and the United States as strategic allies in the future. Not just in Asia, but in the Middle East as well. Hell, after the U.S., I can’t think of a country more interested in shrinking the Gap than China. In some ways, it’s very survival may depend on it.
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