The Political Economy of Greening China
And small salvo on the war on the war on cars
After now literally years of writing and thinking about China and climate change, I finally delivered a proper lecture on the subject. The venue was Cornell’s amazing Climate Change Seminar (it seems that on the engineering side of campus, 100 people in a lecture hall counts as a seminar — I guess because they can ask questions at the end?). You can watch it here.
The lecture had two parts. The first riffed on some competing narratives of China and climate, essentially of China as a eco-villain and as an eco-savior. The second gave a preview of my carbon triangle argument — connecting the drama in China’s real estate sector with carbon emissions — that should be coming out in an essay for Phenomenal World sometime soon and which I’ll have more to say about once it’s all out there.
If you can’t wait for good China and real estate takes, then this one by Meg Rithmire or this one by Adam Tooze should hold you over for another week or so. Here’s probably my favorite image from the talk, from 2016 in Lanzhou New Area taken by the incomparable Gilles Sabrié (who also has an amazing set of images about a new skyscraper for pigs).
Ok, and a tiny salvo about auto electrification. The Climate and Community Project released a new report, Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining, to some fanfare (here’s Thea Riofrancos talking with David Roberts of Volts.wtf) and some critique (here’s Seaver Wang from Breakthrough).
I am a cities person and deeply appreciate the goals and work that went into the report. Denser construction and more transit is central to my sense of how our cities will look in 20 years if we’ve made progress on decarbonizing. Electrification of our car-cult-culture is insufficient without broader changes to the built environment.
(Amusingly, electric automakers Polestar and Rivian just released their own report that The Verge titled “EVs are Not Enough,” but that report isn’t about moving away from cars or auto-centric living but instead greening the supply chain for automakers.)
But, and it was clear that there would be a but, I do wonder about the order of operations here, or you could say the prioritization of enemies. And I’m of the opinion that Big Oil needs to be kneecapped ahead of Big Car.
Kate Aronoff recently wrote about oil major CEOs admitting that they never intend to shift away from the money-making opportunities of oil towards clean energy at a moment where they’re setting all-time profit records in her characteristically blazing style. What seems the most likely to defang these institutions in the next five years is a combination of massive buildout of renewable electricity generation (with storage) and electrification of autos. I’m worried that until automakers fully commit to EVs and scrap their ICE production lines, it is politically dangerous to direct too much of our focus on the harms of the mining that powers electrification.
Getting these balances perfect is impossible. How do we trade off the concerns of communities nearby potential mines with the harms of continued fossil extraction and the climate crisis that they have created? When do rules for local feedback (around mines or urban areas trying to densify) become anti-democratic capture by NIMBYs? At what point do specific permitting rules and regulations stymying us from constructing communities with more mobility become so burdensome that they outweigh their environmental benefits? These are hard questions, and I think transparently deliberating through them is the best way forward.