Greening China

You can tell when a politician isn't serious about climate change, let alone social justice. They blame China for climate change; the American administration does this a lot. And China does stick out a lot of carbon.

However, what's actually happened, clearly, is that we no longer make very much in the West, and the Chinese export to us instead, so we get cheap goods made with non-unionised labour and low environmental standards, and our CO2 emissions go down as China's go up. Oh, and they lay waste to their local environment through projects like the 3 Gorges Dam (at left) more or less on our behalf.

As an eternal optimist, therefore, this cheers me up. There are apparently now around 2000 environmental NGOs in China, doing a wide range of good works. Brave people. I wish them luck.