Robert Collier is Global Warming
Policy Fellow at the University
of California (Berkley) Goldman
Institute of Public Policy. For over 15 years he was a foreign affairs reporter
at the San Francisco Chronicle, most recently covering energy issues in South America and Asia. He won the National Press Foundation’s 2006 Thomas Stokes Award for energy reporting.
China’s
unending economic boom is turning the country into the world’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. Its annual
growth in global warming emissions, about 500 million metric tons, is more than three times greater than the annual increase
of the rest of the industrialized world combined. Collier’s environmental reporting in China
has taken him from Changchun in the northeast rust belt to the snowy forests of Sichuan province to the industrial maw of Guangdong province in the southeast. He has talked to upwardly striving, wannabe suburbanites at Beijing auto dealerships and interviewed Shanghai
government officials who talk resolutely of their plans to tame the new auto culture with an energy-efficient, green central planning.
Plenty of green (and pseudo-green) China-bashing is already being used to excuse
American inaction. Nonetheless, all sides on the global warming debate will have
to answer the question: What should we do about China? Collier is writing this book because “this is a debate that needs to happen
sooner rather than later, for the sake of the planet.”
Foreign language translation rights
available.
