China's National Energy Administration proposed plan to spend more than $360 billion through 2020 on renewable power sources like solar and wind. This will allow to create more than 13 million new jobs in the renewable energy sector, curb the growth of greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming and reduce the amount of soot that creates strong smog in Beijing and other Chinese cities.
Thanks in part to Chinese manufacturing, costs in the wind and solar industries are decreasing fast, making them competitive with power generation from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. According to Greenpeace, in 2015 China installed an average of more than one wind turbine every hour of every day, and covered the equivalent of one soccer field every hour with solar panels. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that China has invested $102bn in domestic renewable energy in 2015.
China surpassed the United States a decade ago as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses, and now its GHG emissions are twice as big as in the U.S. Read more at https://www.nytimes.com
