Will This End the "What About China?" Whining?

I seriously doubt it. But this article from the NYT points out that China has been far more proactive in developing non-carbon, renewable energy sources than has the US.

While the House of Representatives approved a requirement last week that American utilities generate more of their power from renewable sources of energy, and the Senate will consider similar proposals over the summer, China imposed such a requirement almost two years ago.

This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up all over the country.

(...)

And now, just 15 months later, with construction of coal-fired plants having slowed to one a week and still falling, it appears that China will have 30,000 megawatts of wind energy by the end of next year — which was previously the target for 2020, Mr. Li said.

Now in fairness, there are some doubts as to the effectiveness about many of the projects, and as things sit now, AltEn constitutes only a small proportion of the total. But this enormous push has created enough of an energy base that instead of completing two coal-fired plants per week (just think about that number for a moment), China is now only completing one per week.

And that's not trivial.

Meanwhile back home, conservatives continue to whimper, whine and throw tantrums over the fact that any binding legislation we pass with respect to our own carbon emissions will destroy the economy, and turn us all in into socioislamacommunofacsits.

I figured it'd be a cold day in hell before it started to look like China was "the good guys" and we were "the bad guys."

I was wrong. It's going to be a hot day on Earth.