So rather unsurprisingly, Chinese officials are furiously denying that their country could possibly be the number one energy user on the planet. Why, that would be the same thing as being responsible.
If you subscribe to a realist mindset, it's hard to see why China has much interest in slow-but-sustainable development. China's economy is so large and so much of the rest of the world depends on it, that very little but either internal pressure from its citizens or global economics can have an effect on its decision-making processes, and currently green energy is still relatively more expensive than building a ton of cheapo coal-fired electric plants - leaving out long term environmental costs, of course. Now I don't know much about the state of domestic Chinese environmentalism, but I do know that brownouts due to a rocketing middle-class and industrial sectors would cause a lot more damage to the Chinese government than the ongoing pollution seems to be doing for them. I can't see for the life of me how China changes it's energy policy without further steep drops in the price of renewable energy.
The irony here, of course, is that while China is now the world's dirtiest, largest energy hog, they are also speeding ahead with green power development at the same time. I suppose that's one of the few benefits of the centralized state-capitalism model.
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